What I Learned From My 102-Year-Old Friend

Before I’d even said hello, Audrey had already begun one of our recent calls with a question: “What am I living for, mahjong?”

Audrey often calls me with such looming existential questions, as longtime friends are wont to do. When we met at a hospital in Toronto’s west end in 2011, I was prepared to say goodbye—I understood Audrey was expected to die. I was a 34-year-old first-time hospice volunteer, and Audrey, to whom I’d been assigned by the care organization Hospice Toronto, was almost 90. (Audrey is not her real name; to protect her privacy, she’s chosen a pseudonym for this story, which was written with her permission.) 

Audrey, it turned out, still had a lot to live for: She’s now 102 years old. Since we met 13 years ago, she’s taught me about how beauty, defined broadly, can be an act of defiance, how an appreciation for travel, the arts and friendship—including an unexpected and enduring connection between two women 56 years apart in age—can create a life that sustains us.

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“They called me Glamour Girl when I lived in New York City,” Audrey told me during one of my first visits to the long-term critical-care facility in Toronto’s west end, where she was transferred to from the hospital once she’d stabilized following her brush with death. She loved to dance, she explained, as I helped her walk each week to the piano in the lobby. Before she’d become unwell, Audrey had been taking music lessons, and she still wanted practice. If she couldn’t move to the music as she once had, she could defy physical limitations by learning to create it.

In the rest between bars of Beethoven’s “Rondo in G Major,” Audrey would tell me stories. She told me of her many suitors, some of them successful businessmen or doctors, and how they wanted to marry her, one waiting years while she continued to refuse him. She told me of dancing with them in a Karachi mess hall, sneaking out after dark, or on the third-storey terrace at a foreign embassy, under the stars. “That’s all I cared for,” she repeated again and again, “whether they could dance.” 

Audrey stayed footloose and fancy free for most of her life—she lived in what was then known as British India, in Australia, in the U.S., in the U.K., and by the 1960s, in Canada. Single, child-free, her career in health care allowed her to work almost anywhere in the world, and she spoke often of the beauty of the places she lived and the people she met. 

The year we met, Audrey lived at the non-emergency medical centre she was transferred to from a west-end hospital: a year of declining to stay in her bed to go to visit others on her floor, to help them, to listen and be a friend; a year of shunning hospital food in favour of organic groceries, kale and peanut butter, kept in a small fridge in her room, after they were delivered by the manager of the local organic store where she’d shopped for decades.

Until I arrived one night, and she said: “They’re kicking me out.” She was too well to stay in the medical centre; it was time to find a new home again.

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As long as I’ve known Audrey, she has not settled for less than what makes her feel happy and whole and fulfilled, whether in a meal or in a friend. 

She also taught me the true meaning of hospice.

“In Canada, given the choice, most people with serious illness prefer to spend the end of their lives at home or in a home-like setting in their community,” begins Health Minister Mark Holland’s message in Health Canada’s 2023 Report on the State of Palliative Care in Canada. 

Hospice Toronto, the not-for-profit I volunteered with, meets patients and caregivers where they are, physically and philosophically. The organization helps those who wish to die at home, using a volunteer care-team model that integrates with local brick-and-mortar hospices, hospitals and community organizations—including the west-end hospital and the non-emergency medical centre where I spent time with Audrey for the first year we knew one another.

The not-for-profit also has expressive arts therapy, grief and bereavement, peer support for the homeless and young-carers programs, the latter for kids under 18 who are in a caregiving role. 

Canadian author and hospice activist June Callwood urged those who continue her work in palliative care not to get in a rut, says Hospice Toronto CEO Dena Maule. As needs change, societal or individual, we can be responsive.

Hospice care is most often associated with end-of-life, but chronic illness isn’t formulaic.

“Hospice means ‘a pause on the journey,’” says Maule. It can be a breath between beats rather than our last. 

“Not all journeys are the same,” she contines. “People stabilize or have improved health, [and] may go in and out of care depending on need. It’s a fluid process meant to support the choice to stay at home through all stages of progressive illness.” 

Audrey might say that sometimes the music isn’t what we expect—so we move with it, improvise a bit. 

Hospice volunteering doesn’t always look like we think it does, either. It didn’t look like I thought it would, even after I’d completed hours of training. I thought it would last only days or months. I thought it would focus on bedside care, practical and psycho-spiritual, end stages of critical illness through death, but that isn’t true either. 

“Our phrase is, ‘When you can't add days to life… add life to days,’ but for some the journey can be a different one, and they thrive,” Maule says. 

Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the hospice movement, made care for the total individual—the physical, social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the human being—central from the very beginning.

Audrey needed care finding a new home, after her exodus from the medical centre almost a year after she was admitted. We took cabs to tour potential retirement residences until she found one she thought would be her next address even before we got there. She had an intution, she told me in the car we took across the grey, winter city to a neighbourhood shimmering with Christmas lights. 

Audrey often shared her spiritual insights; it was her intuition, she told me—how she made her life meaningful, and why it must continue still, into a new year, another decade. 

In this new year, she needed new things for her new life: She’d given away or sold almost all her worldly possessions while she was in the hospital, so we went to Ikea and the Toronto institution Honest Ed’s, a discount store and a landmark she remembered from when she first set up house in the city. 

I told her how my Estonian grandmother had found Honest Ed’s helpful too, how she’d lined up for a free turkey during the holidays to feed her family, a new Canadian. Our friendship deepened, and our appreciation for shopping trips continued after Audrey settled in. 

Sometimes, we’d go to a big, organic grocery store just to snack on samples, Audrey resting on her walker halfway through and laughing. “Isn’t this fun,” she’d say again and again. 

She laughs about it now too, repeating: “Oh, we had so much fun, didn’t we?” 

Almost a decade and a half after I first met her, Audrey no longer needs formal hospice support, and I’m no longer a hospice volunteer (though I am now becoming a death doula, inspired by my experience). After two or three years without communication, honouring the boundaries of our client-volunteer relationship, we reconnected when the woman who delivered Audrey’s organic groceries to the medical centre told me Audrey still missed me. “Tell Audrey she can call me,” I agreed.

Hospice volunteerism wasn’t what I expected, nor is my friendship with the woman I now consider my wise elder. 

Now that she’s more than a century old, Audrey’s ability to find joy, to seek meaning in the everyday continues, despite the days when she calls with existential questions. She remains insistent that dance and music are more important than money (but you should still save—retirement is expensive, she reminds me when I visit). Travel and eating well should be kept up as long as possible, and time made for fun, for sharing our insights and wisdom—that can be how we help one another most of all, as volunteers or as friends, giving one another reasons to stay alive, moving to the rhythms of our hearts.