Halfway through graduate school, I was lucky to win a National Science Foundation fellowship to live in Japan for a semester. My goal was to investigate how people aged and thought differently about aging in Japan. I knew that Japanese people had the longest life spans in the world.

Although many researchers chalked this up to a healthy diet or genetic differences, I wondered if there might also be a psychological dimension that gave them an advantage.

Before uprooting myself to Japan for six months, I visited my grandma Horty in Florida. As soon as I stepped off the plane, she took one look at me and said, “You need vitamins.” She was convinced that graduate school and the dreary Boston weather had run me down, so off we went to buy her version of vitamins—all the oranges and grapefruits that we could carry out of the grocery store. Grandma Horty was a competitive golfer and, as a former New Yorker, an avid walker, so it was no small feat to keep up with her as she walked with purposeful strides through the store—until she tumbled to the floor. Rushing over, I helped her up and was horrified to spot a bloody gash in her leg.

“Doesn’t hurt,” she reassured me, between clamped teeth. She even forced a smile, ever the stoic. “You should see the other guy,” she joked.

The “other guy” was down at our feet: a wooden crate with reinforced corners of sharp, jagged metal; one corner was now dripping blood. We left our baskets and I helped my grandmother gather up the contents of her handbag, which had scattered across the floor.

On the way out, she confronted the owner, who glanced up for a second when he heard her fall, before returning to the tabloid he’d been leafing through at the counter.

“You shouldn’t leave crates in the middle of your store,” my grandmother told him, much more politely than he deserved. “I could have hurt myself.” Blood was dripping down her calf. The owner looked her over and then peered at the crate in the middle of the aisle. “Well, maybe you shouldn’t be walking around,” he said icily. “It’s not my fault old people fall down all the time. So don’t go around blaming me.”

Horty’s jaw practically dropped to the floor. As for me, I felt like swiping his tabloid off the counter, but I just glared at him and ushered my grandmother into the car. Over Horty’s objections, I took her straight to the doctor. Her leg turned out to be fine—a dramatic-looking but superficial cut, the doctor said. He added that she seemed in fact quite healthy.

I thought that would be the end of it, but some profound change had taken place that afternoon. That night, Horty asked me to water her avocado tree, which she normally loved doing herself. The following day, she told me she didn’t trust herself to drive and asked me to take her to a hair appointment. I’d never heard her say anything like that before. She seemed to be reliving the grocery owner’s words and questioning her competency as an older person in a way she never had before.

Fortunately, by the time I flew to Japan, Horty had pulled out of her ageism-induced funk. The morning before my departure, she insisted on taking me for a brisk, long walk, to stretch my legs before the long plane ride. When we returned, she handed me a handwritten list of restaurant recommendations, from a visit to Japan with my grandfather, two decades earlier.

But as I waved goodbye to Horty and headed off to Tokyo, I couldn’t help but wonder: If a few negative words could affect someone as strong and spunky as Horty, what were negative age stereotypes doing to us as a country? What power did they have to actually change the way we age? And what power could  have if we changed the way we thought and talked about aging?

Dr. Becca Levy, the leading authority on how beliefs about aging influence aging health, is Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and Professor of Psychology at Yale University. Her pathfinding studies have changed the way we think about aging and have received awards from the American Psychological Association, the Gerontological Society of America, and the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics. Dr. Levy has given invited testimony before the US Senate on the adverse effects of ageism and has contributed to US Supreme Court briefs to fight age-discrimination. She serves as a scientific advisor to the World Health Organization’s Campaign to Combat Ageism.

For more about this book, see becca-levy.com 

BREAKING THE AGE CODE: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live by Becca Levy PhD, published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2022 by Becca Levy. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.