Wisdom of the Ages

With nearly a century behind her, Jean Owerbach makes age 99 look like the new 29

The global average lifespan for men and women is 73 years, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

That’s the equivalent of 26,645 days. ⌛

A housefly, by comparison, lives 28 days. That’s the month of February.

Considering how quickly time … flies … a fly has a full agenda, pollinating flowers and munching on garbage, or becoming lunch for a lizard or bird.

So the fly flitting around your windowsill isn’t living up to its full potential.

Fortunately, humans have more time to waste flitting around windowsills—an average of 876 months—to eat or be eaten.

But even that isn’t long in comparison to the earth’s 4.5 billion years. 🌎

This week’s issue of Chutzpah (Issue #2) features a woman who defies the average by turning 99 years young on Friday: My inspirational grandmother, Jean Owerbach.

Read on, enjoy and please consider passing Chutzpah along to a friend.

- Aleza Freeman

---

---

Partying like she’s 99

From fighting segregation to standing up for her friends, Jean Owerbach defies all odds

😁 Who: Jean Owerbach
🔢 Age: 99 (as of this week)
📌 Place: Henderson, Nevada
✅ Interests: Family, friends, Rachel Maddow, audiobooks

My grandmother, Jean Owerbach, celebrates her 99th birthday this week. She’s still as sharp as a tack and as busy as a bee.

Queen Bee, really. 👑🐝

“I’m feeling pretty good,” she told me on Saturday, while sitting on the balcony of her senior living facility apartment. “People say, for 99, I look good, but I don’t know how. I never planned on being this old.”

She’s not kidding.

“I never was a runner, I never did a lot of exercise, I never watched my diet,” she says. “I smoked for 14 years … I ate meat, I wasn’t a vegan or a vegetarian or anything. I drank the occasional glass of wine.”

The rest of us can only hope to age so gracefully.

A recent photo of Jean Owerbach, receiving a kiss from her granddog, Hershey, while hanging out in her apartment.

When I was a kid, Grandma Jean lived across the country in Rochester, New York, so I only saw her once or twice a year. Now she lives in the Las Vegas area, just a short drive from my house.

I learn something new about her every time I visit.

I knew she was an occupational therapist, for instance. I didn’t know she worked with veterans during World War II, while her boyfriend (my future grandfather, Daniel Owerbach) was serving in India.

Or that she traveled for work training to Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Kansas (to train with famous psychiatrists, the Menninger brothers).

“We could have gone into teaching … but our boyfriends were overseas having adventures and we wanted to have some kind of adventures too,” she says of herself and friend, Gloria Caparelli. “We never regretted it.”

Life in the South was a change, she admits, for two girls from the North.

“The veterans hospital was still segregated,” she explains of the Lake City, Florida, facility where she and Gloria were sent in 1946 to set up an occupational therapy department.

“The administrator of the hospital said, ‘You don’t have to go into the black room, you don’t have to work with the black patients,’ and I said, ‘But we will.’ We integrated the OT department and our patients got along beautifully.”

Jean Owerbach (formerly Joffe), pictured right, works with veterans at the Philadelphia School of Occupational Therapy in 1946. The school is now part of the University of Pennsylvania and the original building on 19th Street is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

My Grandpa Dan passed away just over a decade ago and Grandma Jean came to live at a senior living facility in Henderson, where she immediately continued to right all wrongs and fix injustices.

“I could see, some of the people who had dementia were being ostracized and I would make a point to help them, to be with them,” she says. “It felt natural to me.”

Family is my grandma’s greatest source of pride. She loves showing us off to her friends when we stop by and she’s delighted to have three children, seven grandchildren, four great grandchildren, plus nieces, nephews and cousins, who still keep in touch.

While the thought of death is inevitably on her mind at 99, she tries not to dwell on it. Instead my grandma, who is Jewish, thinks a lot about life after death.

She even asked a couple rabbis if reincarnation is part of Judaism. They told her it is.

“No one knows for sure,” she says, “but I’d sort of like to know if there’s an afterlife. That part fascinates me, if we go into another form of being. You can come back as anything.”

What would she like to come back as?

“A cat in the Owerbach family.” 😺

☝️👉 This is a short excerpt from my recent conversation with my 99-year-old grandma, Jean Owerbach, which she let me record for posterity. If you’d like to read more of her wisdom, send me a message or let me know in the comments below. 👇