Imagine living 100 years. Dorothy J. Macaione lived 100 years and when she turned 50 in 1970 she still had another 50 years ahead of her at a time when 71 was the average life expectancy for Americans.
When she celebrated her birthday a month ago with women who were mostly half her age, the first words out of her mouth when her friends surprised her with cards, a birthday poster and cake was, “I am happy.”
Does happiness become habit by the time you hit 100 years or do you finally learn that happiness is an acquired skill perfected with practice?
Frequently given over to smiling and quick with a laugh, Macaione (pronounced “mackeeown”) had a one-line answer when asked the secret to longevity.
“I’ve had a lot of luck,” she replied.
Imagine living through the Depression with its deprivations and World War II with its deaths and dismemberments claiming the lives of friends, neighbors and loved ones.
Imagine outliving family members and friends even as you see the world change around you. Imagine living the first 50 years — certainly the first 20 or 30 years of your life — without air conditioning.
Dorothy Macaione’s life story read like a history of Lynn. One of nine children (she outlived seven siblings), she graduated from St. Mary’s Girls High School in 1937. She worked at T.W. Rogers and the River Works.
Her mother disapproved of Macaione joining the Girl Scouts of America. But Macaione talked her into becoming a scout leader and the rest, as they say, is history.
Macaione dedicated a good share of her long life and her energy and time to scouting. She earned the organization’s highest honors and logged volunteer hours even during the last year of her life at the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts Museum at Cedar Hill in Waltham.
Kal Ricker of Lynn frequently drove Macaione to the museum and back home to St. Theresa House. Their conversations turned more than once to problems in Ricker’s life and Macaione’s suggestions for solving them.
“She would tell me to ‘let go,'” Ricker recalled.
It’s fascinating and a little frightening to delve into the life of someone who has lived so long. Two of my friend’s mothers were children in the early 20th century at a time when the decision to send them off to live with someone else for economic or health reasons was not uncommon.
I remembered being told how my father’s mother lived as a girl in North Dakota at a time when life in that barren place meant keeping a stove glowing on winter nights and walking from the house to the barn with a rope tied around your waist in a snowstorm to ensure you did not get lost and freeze to death.
My friend Barbara in Vermont has flourished as an artist in her 90s. Along with her friend, Sally, she treated a sudden move from Louisiana to Washington D.C. necessitated by Hurricane Katrina as more of a lark than a trauma to be endured and bemoaned.
If you have lived to be 100 you grew up in an America where biases and prejudices were more pronounced but where most people rarely traveled more than a few miles from where they lived.
You grew up in an America where social services were rare, maybe non existent. Disabled, mentally ill and alcoholic family members lived with you because there was nowhere else to send them unless it was an institution. Phrases like “poor farm” existed in America when Dorothy and Barbara were children and ailments like the flu and polio slaughtered or deformed people with a merciless frequency medicine was incapable of fighting.
In the America of Dorothy’s youth, Imogene, Hazel and Gertrude were names for girls and Homer and Cyrus were male names. Electricity and telephones were relatively new inventions and interstate highways, vacations, chain stores and jet travel were nonexistent.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans they had “nothing to fear but fear itself,” he was talking about the great vast gulf of unknowns beyond the small circumference that defined every American’s life. But he was also, perhaps in more eloquent words, referencing one of Dorothy Macaione’s beliefs.
“I just feel we should all work to make things better for each other,” her obituary quotes her as saying.
Dorothy J. Macaione died on Feb. 7. Her smile lives on in hearts too many to count and her spirit of perseverance is a lesson for the rest of us to relearn every day.