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Tips to Make Life's Senior Years Simply Golden

(Baltimore Sun) -- Erica Jong, the writer who schooled a generation about women's desires and the pleasures of commitment-free sex, has some new bits of knowledge to impart as she pours her passions into grandmotherhood.

The secrets to staying young, she told a full ballroom at the Sheraton Columbia Hotel on Tuesday, are laughter, cardio, yoga and teaching the next generation. The other recipe -- aside from sex -- is grandchildren, she said.

"Generativity" is the stage of life where one invests more in the next generation than in oneself, she said, adding, "I want to point out that very few people get to that."

Jong, the author of Fear of Flying in 1973, was the keynote speaker at a Maryland Summit on Health and Aging that brought together 300 guests, including elected officials, business executives, academics and other leaders to discuss public health, long-term care and an array of health care problems and solutions.

The event kicked off a campaign for concerted action at the state level, said Richard Kreig, the president and CEO of the Columbia-based Horizon Foundation, which sponsored the conference with Howard County government.

Panelists spoke about the impact of technology on health care, from telemedicine -- such as video-based health care services and remote monitoring -- to a possible future with nurse robots, robotic walkers and "smart homes" that track patients' behaviors.

Others discussed grass-roots organizing, improving the lives of people with chronic illnesses, tapping into seniors' talents and public policy.

In Maryland, eligibility for Medicaid health care benefits for adults is set at 46 percent of the federal poverty level, said Del. Peter A. Hammen of Baltimore, a speaker.

"We should be ashamed of ourselves," he said.

Jong, who has written about aging, spoke during lunch, covering caring for her ailing, 96-year-old mother, ("I'm desolate that her talents have come to this"), the delights of having a grandson ("all boy and proud of it"), the death of her father, relationships ("I was only married four times"), and her resistance to orthodoxy ("dogma of any kind always made me itch").

She threw in a few extras: "Not to have children seems to me not to join the human race," she said. And: "Sex is about the whole body."

She admitted that when choosing between a visit with her ailing mother and her 3-year-old grandson, the grandson always wins. The crowd tittered.

"Society tells us we should be guilty about that," said the Rev. Carletta Allen, pastor of Locust United Methodist Church in Columbia, about Jong's choice on whom to visit. "I appreciated her honesty."

As she left the conference, Allen said she wondered: "How can we really live in an authentic community and learn how to take care of each other?"

What Jong called generativity, Allen said, is a fancy, 21st-century word for what used to be called the village. "It also takes a village to nurture our elders," she said. "We can't throw up our arms and say we don't know what to do."