I am very pleased to be chosen as a Creativity Longevity and Wisdom Fellow for 2005. My area of study concerns creative response to physical loss as one ages and the meaning this contributes to the lived experience.The interest I bring to this topic stems from my professional career in the field of acute care nursing over the past twenty years. Many of the acutely ill individuals I have served were over the age of 60 and responded to physical losses in varied ways.

It was during one of my volunteer experiences that I came in contact with an elderly (85-year-old) woman running the Portland Marathon. This encounter altered my view of aging in a paradigm shifting way. Training in the medical model’s acute management of chronic illness, with its focus on disease and dependency for “health,” my views biased aging as a disease process. Mavis Lindgrend’s different interpretation of aging forced me to rethink my fundamental assumptions and adjust my theory to the available evidence this single encounter started by educational odyssey into “critical gerontology” and became a portal to new thinking.

Inspired by this woman’s “successful aging” I made aging and human development a formal study. After completing a master’s degree in adult development and a graduate certificate in gerontology, I supplemented my nursing with a speaking career. Informed by adult development theorists Erik Erikson, Daniel Levinson, David Kolb, as well as Malcolm Knowles and Alan Knox, I designed curriculum supported by andragogical principles. Further, incorporating new scientific research findings from medical researchers Marion Diamond of UCLA, David Snowdon of the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, and MacArthur Foundation Researchers, John Rowe and Robert Kahn, I established the legitimate language and informed augments supported by fresh research.

To strengthen my position of describing a different view of aging, I turned next to the sociological-cultural perspectives of critical gerontology. Contributions from Betty Friedan, Fountain of Age, George Vaillant, Aging Well, Theodore Roszak, America the Wise, and Ken Dychtwald, Age Wave and Age Power, all spoke in terms opposing the historical peak-and-decline models of past gerontological perspectives.

After years of following the tracks of analysis, moving back and forth from the theoretical to the empirical, in the course of pursuing different leads in the research literature, I developed conceptual frameworks supporting past theoretical claims. Adjusting the theories to the newly available evidence, the theoretical gap began to close. With the established legitimate language, systematic evidence and an action agenda, I presented Evidence Based programs on a new view of aging.

In 2001 I entered Fielding University to study aging and human development. That same year I was offered a grant from the Kaiser Center for Health Research sponsored by the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company. The grant spanned three summer sessions from 2001 to 2004. Traveling the Pacific Northwest I delivered a three-part series titled “Possibility Aging” to Kaiser Permanente’s over-65 exercise groups known as “Silver Sneakers.”

This work was designed to inform seniors of emerging issues related to health and well-being for older adults. These workshops were applied for KA Requirements. During follow-up knowledge area studies I interviewed in depth, two other extraordinary examples of aging creatively: Frances Gabe, an 86-year-old inventor of the self-cleaning house who gained worldwide attention for her futuristic vision of housework in the 1950s. Continually refining the concept throughout her life she, at an advanced age, began to envision for seniors like herself with growing physical challenges, a solution to burdensome home cleaning. Today, at 90 years of age she gives tours of her self-cleaning house encouraging others to question what is possible.

During these interviews over the many months and years, I began to formulate theories about creativity and aging. Each subject integrated into his or her daily lives an aesthetic response to physical loss. For Mrs. Lindgren four bouts of pneumonia in three years stimulated a marathon career launched at age 72; for Frances Gabe loss of mobility brought refinements to the self-cleaning house; and for Jim McCulley from macular degeneration emerged new styles and techniques for drawing, painting, and thinking.

Each in his or her unique way countered loss with an aesthetic response designed to create meaning in later life. Rollo May, in The Courage to Create, describes creativity in this way: “The process of bringing something new into being.” Discussions of creativity tend to focus more on attempting to explain its nature and origins than on elaborating its meaning to us. It is this theme of meaning I wish to understand by embarking on this inquiry.