arly may, 2010. Henry,* eighty-six, sits in his hot pink living room, dressed in his usual, immaculate checked shirt and tie. Piles of books cover almost every surface, and the art on the walls ranges from a fragile thirteenth-century Persian bowl to a nail “painting” by the late David Partridge. A charcoal portrait of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein broods over the dining table, across from a pine cupboard full of Greek and Roman bowls and other ancient ceramics.

The nineteenth-century workman’s cottage in Toronto’s Cabbagetown is full to bursting with the habits and enthusiasms of two long lives, but next to the couch a wheelchair stands empty. It belongs to Henry’s wife, Anne,* who is also eighty-six. A distinguished biographer, she is paralyzed on the left side from a stroke she suffered nine years ago, and relies on Henry for everything from picking up her dropped reading glasses to help using the bathroom. Because he needs some respite, he has arranged for her to stay in a nearby long-term care centre for two weeks.

Today, after his first night alone, Henry feels ambivalent. “It certainly concentrates the mind, to do this separation thing,” he muses, thinking about all the interruptions he faces in his normal day. “On the other hand, I miss her terribly. It just feels wrong to be in this empty house without hearing ‘Henry! Henry!’”

A year ago, at eighty-five, Henry retired, reluctantly, as executive director of Abbeyfield Canada, an organization that maintains group homes for old people. Since his wife’s stroke, he has also been engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to continue living in their house. Henry fought the good fight on two separate battlefields, working to provide homelike environments for people who can no longer live independently while labouring to keep Anne in the place she loves more than almost anything. He continues to serve as a volunteer for the local Abbeyfield chapter, and today he’s thinking aloud about a scheme that would combine elder care centres with daycares for children. “I wonder,” he says in his plummy English accent, “who could do something about that…”

Twenty minutes’ walk from their house, Anne lies in her bed in the Rekai Centre, wearing a flowered silk nightgown with a deep V-neck and a matching bed jacket. She’s spending her two weeks here reading, watching television, and receiving visitors, with a sharp ear out for spicy gossip and an eye for stylish clothes. Of a recent guest’s attire, she says, “I really lusted after that little white leather jacket she wore yesterday.” The same woman brought her a welcome gift, a sub-rosa pickle jar filled with brandy.

One of the words that describes Anne is “indomitable.” When Henry left her in this bare-walled beige space — a sad contrast with the intensely coloured rooms of her house — she told him, with her characteristic drama, “I’ll never forgive you.” But within a day of her admission, he reported, “she really was marvellous, really was lovely today,” happy for him that he was taking advantage of her absence to embark on an epic bus trip to visit his family on Long Island.

Another word for Anne is “avid.” She knows exactly what she wants from life: “Interest. I still have enormous curiosity. I still want to meet new, interesting people and see interesting places and read interesting books.” Her most pressing desire these days is to visit the Prado museum in Madrid: it contains some of her favourite paintings, and she’s never been there. As she sees it, money is the main impediment to travelling as much as she wants. “Money’s so important,” she says. “I think back on my life and think, how could I have managed my finances better? It’s nice to have money when you’re young, but boy, you need it when you’re old.” She still receives royalties, she adds (the most recent from Serbia, for The Secret Ring, her book about Freud and his circle), and she claims the cheques could partially finance a trip to Madrid.

She’s so intent on what she wants that she assumes others have enlisted themselves in her current campaign. When I visit, she asks me, “Are you making any progress?” With what? I ask, wondering if she is referring to my work. “With getting Henry to see that we can do the trip to Madrid,” she answers, as if this is self-evident.

Henry and Anne are two of the faces of old age, a stage of life that was once rare but is becoming more common. In 1900, a Canadian man could expect to live forty-seven years, and a woman fifty. By 2005, the average life expectancy for a man was seventy-eight, and that of a woman 82.7. Not only are senior citizens living longer; they make up an increasingly large segment of the population. By 2021, Canadians over sixty-five will outnumber children. In 2041, one in every four Canadians — 9.2 million — will be a senior citizen. A growing number will live to be what gerontologists call the old-old (they class people aged sixty-five to seventy-four as young-old, those aged seventy-five to eighty-four as medium-old, and those eighty-five and up as old-old).

This burgeoning population is something new under the sun. The relatively few doctors interested in them are still learning how to care for their aged bodies. Psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers are still trying to understand their emotional and social needs. And, no doubt because old age is unwelcome and even threatening in our youth-obsessed, quick-fix culture, the not-yet-old are still averting their eyes, denying it will ever happen to them. Old age is a largely unexplored and unmapped country, obscured by prejudice and myth.

But not to those who are making their way through it. Perhaps partly because Henry devoted the past quarter century of his working life to senior citizens’ housing, and partly because he remains an old-school Brit, his attitude to age is brisk and un-euphemistic. As with most people who are successfully negotiating this last stage, old age snuck up on him when he was busy doing other things, and he realized quickly that the graceful thing to do was accept it. “I’m not a different person because I’m old,” he says. Ten or fifteen years ago, if someone offered him a seat on the streetcar, “I would have bridled, because it made me realize I looked older than I thought I was, but now I say thank you.”

Anne, too, has been in many ways unfazed by the simple fact of aging. Beginning with her two strong-willed grandmothers, she has always been drawn to old people. During the years she lived in England, she had several older women friends who impressed her as models for a thriving old age. Like her, they were blessed with an unflagging interest in life; unlike her, they had the use of their arms and legs into their nineties. After refusing for several years to accept that her paralysis was permanent, she seems to have made peace with that on some level. And although she complains that old age is tough — “I mourn for my lost energy, because I had gorgeous energy” — she can’t stop herself from noting good subjects for future biographies. Reading about the American writer Elizabeth Hardwick recently, she thought, “Oh my goodness, that would be an interesting person to write about. Then I said to myself, don’t even think about it. You’re too old to start a book.”

Not every octogenarian has as many projects on the go as Henry does, nor regularly asks family to bring the book featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, as Anne does, but Dr. Benoit Mulsant would see them as typical of the “old-old” in several ways. Mulsant is the physician-in-chief at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and clinical director of its geriatric mental health program. Octogenarians, he says, are physiological and psychological survivors. They’ve combined good genes with sensible habits of self-preservation. They aren’t substance abusers, who may die from lung cancer and liver disease in their fifties and sixties; nor did they die from stroke, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or other serious conditions that can fell people in their sixties and seventies. They tend to have married, had children, and been fairly sociable — all indicators for a long and contented life. Many have some disposable income, because, unlike the boomers, they were savers.

One of the myths about old age is that the old are particularly subject to depression, a misconception Mulsant credits to the ageism of our society: we project onto the old our own conviction that old age must be miserable. On the contrary, he contends, his research shows that the old actually have lower rates of depression than the middle-aged. Those over eighty-five probably have an even lower rate than do senior citizens in general. It’s true that misfortunes (like the death of a spouse, a stroke, or a broken hip) can cause a depressive episode in 10 to 20 percent of those affected, but depression in the old is just as treatable, if not more so, than in the middle-aged.

Anxiety and panic disorders, social phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and schizophrenia all tend to decrease with age. “Life is a therapy in itself,” Mulsant says. “If you have been waiting for the sky to fall on your head for fifty years, at some point you realize that it isn’t happening.” He doesn’t claim that all old people are happy and busy. With their siblings, spouses, and friends failing or dead, even those in relatively good circumstances often experience what he calls an existential loneliness. Perhaps above all, he says, the old have a remarkable capacity to adapt. They tend to be stoic, because they were raised in an era that valued a stiff upper lip and a shoulder to the grindstone.