Can Old Age Be a New Beginning?
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I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Many of us decide to make changes in our life all the time. Sometimes they're small, like New Year's resolutions, to read more or eat less sugary sweets. But sometimes we make big changes, ones that are life-altering, like a career change. Today we're going to focus on those life-altering changes, specifically the ones we make late in life. One of the most notable people to make a big change in recent years is President Donald Trump, who will tomorrow be inaugurated as president for the second time. He famously turned from mogul to politician when he was 69. An age often considered retirement age.
But growing numbers of people are rejecting this idea that a productive life ends at a certain age. Instead, many are now seeing the part of life that comes after middle age not as an end, but as a beginning. The start of what some call the third act of life. Anthony Brooks is a former NPR reporter and longtime correspondent at member station WBUR in Boston. He's spent the last few years interviewing people about their decision to reimagine and reinvent themselves late in life. His series is called Third Act, and he joins us now to talk about what he's learned. Hi, Anthony.
Hey, Aisha. Nice to talk to you.
Yeah. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you.
So I'm intrigued by the origin story of this project. Did you decide to do this because you were feeling stuck or you wanted a change in your life?
I think there's always a bit of that going on with me. But I think where this really started for me was about 16 years ago. I had a bit of a health scare, which thankfully I recovered from. I was also mourning the loss of my dad. And I guess you could say that I was coming to terms with this idea that there's a lot more of my life behind me then ahead of me and I'm thinking for the first time, what do I really wanna do with the time that remains? And I became intrigued with stories of people who found ways to reinvent themselves late in life in interesting and inspirational ways. And just when I was dialing into this idea, Catherine Seeley of the New York Times reported a great story about a man who began this third act journey in a really fascinating way. And that story really helped launch this project.
Okay, so tell me about the man in that story that drew your attention.
Yeah, so his name is Tom Andrew, and he worked a full career as a doctor, including 20 years as the chief medical examiner for New Hampshire, which is where I live. Tom saw it all up close, Aisha. You know, the grim toll of car accidents, of gunshot wounds, poisonings, assaults, and suicides. You name it, he saw it. He said it was a job that gave him a particular appreciation for the fragility of life, And he remained committed to his work until the opioid crisis hit New Hampshire hard. And he told me that he watched too many kids, too many young people die, and that he didn't feel that the state was taking the epidemic seriously enough.
And I tried to raise the alarms about this, that at this rate, we will see more drug deaths in a given year in New Hampshire than traffic deaths. Well, sure enough, it came to pass. What was the actual number if it started out at like 50 a year? There were 500 drug deaths a year. There was this frustration with some folks who were perfectly content not to do anything. We live free or die here. I could not reconcile that with what I was seeing and what I was feeling.
And eventually, Tom just had enough. And in 2017, at the age of 61, he quit. He'd done the job for 20 years, so he retired.
But I'm guessing since we're talking about him, he didn't just stop and retire in a traditional sense.
No, not at all. You know, he could have followed that route. He could have retired, put his feet up, cruised into old age. But instead, he goes back to school. He's a man of faith. So he goes to seminary school to become a Methodist deacon because what he wants to do is work with his local Boy Scout troop. So here's a bit of what he told me about that.
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