ANN/THE STAR – “I don’t feel old,” said 82-year-old Thavamoney Pillai.
“I am a retired teacher who used to teach physical education. I used to participate in a variety of sports, including canoeing, swimming, and dancing. I am still quite active, albeit I may not participate in as many different sports as I did when I was younger. But I still teach line dancing, so my mind and body remain busy,” said Thavamoney, one of eight superagers included in a Universiti Malaya (UM) study of seniors who have aged exceptionally well.
At a recent event to celebrate the superageing seniors at UM’s Medical Faculty, she showed just how fit and agile she is when she led her peers and others through three line dancing routines.
Titled “Exploring the construct of superageing/superagers in the Malaysian Elders Longitudinal Research (MELoR) cohort”, the study hopes to find the “secret sauce” to ageing well.
The researchers are Prof Dr Tan Maw Pin, professor in geriatrics and consultant geriatrician at Universiti Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC), neurogeneticist Dr Azlina Ahmad Annuar and doctoral student Moses Raj Muraly.
Apart from Thavamoney, the other superagers are Santhamma Rajan, Tan Leok Teok, Lee Ah Ku, Tong Chau Wa, MP Haridas, Ng Sze Ke and Datuk Joseph Rajahratnam. “I don’t know exactly what it means to be a superager but I do believe that it is our responsibility to keep ourselves healthy. Doctors can keep us alive, but they can’t make us healthy. It’s our responsibility to keep good habits that determine what kind of life we have,” said MP Haridas, 86.
The former hockey player and former general manager of the Olympic Council of Malaysia said that he keeps himself active and performs strengthening exercises daily.
“It isn’t anything too complicated, just functional exercises,” said Haridas. “It is hard to drum this into young people because at their age, they can bounce back easily. But you will pay the price when you are older.”
For Tan Leok Teok, 81, even more important than exercise and a good diet is being joyful.
“We need to have love and forgiveness in our hearts. We need to be joyful,” she said. “Not that I don’t get angry at all. But if we hold on to our anger, and cannot forgive, we can never be happy,” she said.
Although they don’t really think of themselves as superagers – Tan kept asking the researchers if they were sure she fit into the category of superager – the eight participants are happy to be growing old well.
“It isn’t our chronological age that matters but our biological age. I may be in my 81 but my biological age, according to my medical tests, is about 58. I make sure I do my blood tests every year, said Tong Chau Wa, who told the crowd that he is sometimes called Tom Cruise.
“The thing about ageing is that we have to learn to be okay with ourselves. I met a friend the other day who was very sad. When I asked why, he explained that all 10 of his friends from his makan group have now passed on. He is the only one left. Even for me, many of my friends have passed away. I lost my best friend five years ago. But this is a fact of life that we have to accept. We need to learn to be okay on our own, with ourselves,” concluded Tong. – S Indramalar
