The Supercentenarians Archivist

She loved her job. What began as an administrative position applied for as an escape more than a calling had evolved during the past fourteen years into an overriding passion. No inquisitive neighbor hearing the details for the first time failed to remark on how the gratifying the work must be and how singular its duties. If anything, they underappreciated its value. Even mundane, incidental tasks, like telephoning nursing homes or scanning the obituaries, induced a rare, though admittedly at times morbid, frisson.

Dillion worked for the Gerontology Project, a nonprofit whose professed mission was “to diminish age-related decline and register the achievements of the exceptionally mature.” Many of its staff were scientists, but her background, to the extent that she had one, was in journalism. Her accommodating manner opened unique opportunities. One of the founders recruited her for the division charged with archiving the nation’s and the world’s fluctuating catalogue of supercentenarians—people who have lived 110 years or longer. Her initial role of maintaining the website shortly expanded to include speechwriting, drafting press releases, and summarizing, in print and in person, to reporters, medical professionals, or the community at large, the activities of the entire organization. Later she became part of the team responsible for authenticating documents, by contacting records departments and communicating with the institution’s overseas researchers and correspondents. Ultimately her role consisted primarily of interviewing the most senior among us, the winnowing of her duties a consequence of the natural way she had of putting people at ease.

We have all read newspaper articles announcing the death of the oldest person in the world that include who the successor is to that crown and, if the latter is still coherent, her (or his, although it is more often than not a woman) secret to longevity. These “secrets” frequently boil down to a single aphorism, either in the interest of column space or as a wink to their unscientific nature, as if the infinite variables that contribute to long life can be reduced to warm baths or the consumption of carrots. Don’t take any baloney, advised Chie Kimura from her faded recliner. Eunice Bearse credited staying away from men, they’re more trouble than they’re worth. Genes and good luck, the true most likely forces at work, are rarely cited.

Dillon loved the interviews best. Like road trips or desert nights, they awakened her faith in possibilities. Polina Belyaev, a Muscovite 113 years young, had married a soldier on the eve of World War II. It was her second marriage, his third. He survived the war thanks to a string of divine interventions before they raised six children together, the fraught early stages under the dark specter of Stalin. He lived long enough to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall, but at the time of their interview, via Zoom from St. Petersburg, Mrs. Belyaev had been a widow for almost 30 years. Another subject, a small toothless man in Sardinia, had, prior to his retirement nearly a half-century before, spent four decades as a juggler with a traveling circus.   

Whenever she informed new friends about her job, they invariably leaned in when she passed on one of the recommendations for long life she’d been given, no matter how pat or off the cuff or how senile its original donor. Listeners would behave as if the delusional Sébastien Toussaint of Clermont-Ferrand or the one-time spitfire Edris Madigan Bowers of Wooster, Ohio, had somewhere in their prolonged journeys uncovered blueprints to the fountain of youth. As if bourbon, water, and Cheetos had been etched into Mosaic law.

Her family showed no such fascination. At six and eight when she first took the job, her children were attuned to the mechanics of play not the suspension of mortality. She may as well have engineered semiconductors for all they cared, and people, for all they knew, lived to be 200 or 10,000 and died only on screen, more often than not at the whim of dragons. What stuck with them was that their father put them to bed more often and they more frequently had pizza for dinner.

Her husband was not nearly as indifferent. He made plain his displeasure from the outset—notably, but by no means exclusively, by the promiscuous rattling of dishes when it was his turn to clean. The arguments were the same as when previously she’d taken a position with a real estate broker. It would monopolize her time, force them to entrust the kids to strangers. What he really meant was that he would have to do more work. Selling real estate, it turned out, required a measure of slipperiness she was incapable of sustaining. The day she quit she broke into a half-hour crying jag in the driveway of a roof-damaged Colonial. Her husband would use the experience against her. “You want to work where? OK, do you remember what happened with the real estate? Two months on that damn test for a job that lasted what, two weeks?” Nevertheless she continued to search, in secret.

Even before her duties evolved, the Gerontology Project inspired her. From the moment she spotted the low-key advertisement in the newspaper she sensed the potential for a transformational journey, one similar in effect to the first phases of romance or the departure from one’s childhood home. She interviewed without telling her husband. The details conformed perfectly with her long-ago training. The opening allowed for quick advancement for the right candidate, one with a background in journalism (her major in college), some technical expertise (software and web design courses when she first thought about reentering the workforce), and comfort around the elderly (when she was a teenager, her ailing grandmother spent the last years of her life in her family’s home). The idea that a team of researchers and gerontologists around the world would come together to preserve and chronicle the dignity of life at its most extreme made her own indignities feel that much less consequential. Once in her third year when the Project was in danger of losing its funding, she endured a weeks-long series of panic attacks. One of them, while she was alone, culminated with her grabbing the first item within reach, a ceramic vase, and hurling it against the front door, a previously unimaginable impulse. Another left her on the floor of the master bathroom weeping uncontrollably in child’s pose, with her husband standing over her, arms akimbo, asking what the hell was the matter now. During the first year after the danger had passed, she would still spring up in bed from time to time aware of the contours of a recurring dream, in which an impossibly old woman was rolling away downhill in a wheelchair, waving casually goodbye.

* * *

The past year was one of her best, and her first working at the Project full-time. Both kids were in college, two years after the divorce became final. Her husband would have been struck dumb at how capable she proved at survival.

At the time of their wedding, she had a job as a writer with a health magazine. It wasn’t long before she got pregnant, and together they decided she would stay at home, at least for the first couple years. When one child became two, their agreement—a mingling of half-formed commitments made between laundry switch-overs and diaper changes—morphed into this: at some indeterminate point in the not-distant future she would return to the labor market, and either he would take a leave of absence from his job, as a lawyer, or they would hire a nanny. Whenever the time came—and that was part of the problem, when exactly was the time?—he would demur. Let’s wait a little and see became his mantra. Their bills left no room for uncertainty, he argued, and always a bonus or a promotion or a raise seemed just over the horizon.  

They had met while she was in college and he was just out of law school. His portrayal of what their life would be like dazzled her, presented as it was with a young man’s unwavering faith in his own potential. But once the realities of their daily grind became clear, and once their kids made manifest their need for uninterrupted attention, those promises were remembered more as the manipulations of an ambitious salesman. In shooting for the moon her husband neglected to stay grounded. And she could never communicate in a way that made sense to him how critical her need was for a means of independent expression.

Her assignments at the Gerontology Project addressed that need. The interviews, in particular, reminded her that lives play out in chapters. Where others might see in her subjects only frailty and decline, she found their histories revitalizing. They took her back to rosier days, when whatever could be imagined seemed ultimately attainable.   

At home she began to incorporate the lessons she was learning. One night her husband arrived home to a minimalist meal of vegan soufflé served in ramekins. A month later, coming down for breakfast, he discovered his increasingly remote wife by the fireplace standing on her head, a partially consumed glass of raw eggs on the coffee table. By turns she became obsessed with dark chocolate, red wine, and long naps. In retrospect these trials seemed comparable to their quest early in the marriage to check items off the bucket list that her husband kept concealed in some recess of his mind, as if even at a young age he was seeking a temporary restraining order against the Angel of Death. She thought because of her husband’s previous fixation on racking up experiences that he would welcome what she viewed as analogous behavior. She was wrong. His bucket list was his, not theirs. Her attempts to delay death struck him less as an extension of life than a rebuke of his needs, which maybe they were. She recognized that each trendy experiment in anti-aging came with its own built-in half-life. Like relationships, they would be sacrificed over time on the altar of self-deceit.

It wasn’t fear that the measures were ill-considered or unsupported by science: of course they were. What frightened her most was the prospect of a supercentenarian who offered no secrets at all, not even frivolous or invented ones. Who in answer to the question What is the secret to longevity? confesses to having no idea—or worse, that it’s beyond your control. She would rather hear that jogging backward helped, or daily cigars.

She likely would not have taken the job in the first place if she hadn’t been persuaded by Callan, her lover at the time. From the beginning he seemed uniquely able to identify her needs. He’d been the architect in charge of building her family’s dream home: a prodigy. At thirty, freakishly young to have started his own firm. Every suggestion about the design—double exposure, post-and-beam ceilings, a library with walnut shelves—seemed to anticipate her desires. During their ten months together, he regularly encouraged her to be true to herself, not only in matters of love. Finding the nut, he called it. When she got offered the job and told him that her husband would shit if she accepted, he declared with an almost irresistible innocence that what another person says or wants doesn’t matter in the long run, even one’s spouse. How could anyone be so naive? She had a family to think of, after all. It was not his only statement that if universally applied would result in an end to civilized society. Religion is the frame we use to contain our fears, he’d once volunteered as they passed a church she admired on one of their stolen outings, dropping the line as casually as if he’d said Pass the butter. In some ways he was just a child, and in fact was three years younger than she.

We don’t live forever, you know. It was his final hopeless platitude meant to chisel away at her marble will. When in the end he broke it off, saying he could not be in the same city with her anymore, not even the same country, it hurt too much to think of her near, she laughed, underestimating his quixotic resolve. One day he just disappeared. She learned that he had shuttered his firm and begun traveling. A year later she read on Facebook that he was living in Copenhagen and engaged to be married. She followed his life: the wedding, his return to the States when his mother became ill, the resurrection of his old firm with his Danish wife, a designer, in the same neighborhood as the original, where periodically thereafter Dillon would walk by herself with the intention of . . . what? No intention. At some point she stopped looking at social media before canceling her accounts altogether. So it wasn’t there but in the newspaper that she read about his death at age 42.

We don’t live forever, he’d repeated, grasping her shoulders (compelled, perhaps, by some hazy presentiment), as serious as cancer. Yes . . . well. He was right.

For Gabriela Moreno Contreras, the prescription included sleeping for days on end and never getting married.Erna Pruitt championed God, respect for your parents, and eating coconut sauce. All the supercentenarians distilled with their pithiness the limits of the human condition while somehow simultaneously honoring it. Their tips reassured her up to a point. Don't worry about the little things if you can't do anything about them, counseled Jo Wylie at 111, having perked up for the first time in years at the thrill of just being asked. Sage advice. Who wouldn’t agree with that? But it begs the question, tantalizing and eternal: What about the big things, Jo?