Read The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier for Free Online

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    Just as they looked after their parents, adults in the community expect that as they become frail, they too will be cared for. But there is also the sense that a person who has reached the age of ninety or a hundred deserves respect and is entitled to be listened to. Both kinds of support are freely offered. Even though he is an academic of international renown, Gianni still lives within a hundred kilometers of his birthplace and found time to visit and discuss politics with his 105-year-old uncle. For him, such ongoing social contact is obvious. No matter how well-educated or far-flung, Sardinians treat close contact with aging family members as a moral imperative.
    Though there is a powerful “female effect”—women are more likely to look after their aging relatives in their own homes than men—I wondered how working people of either sex sustained this level of commitment. “Of course we have to balance our careers with family life,” Gianni told me when I asked. “But as a Sardinian, I never forget to visit my mother. She lives seventy kilometers from me, but every week, on Sunday, I go to visit her. She is eighty-seven now but is mentally fantastic. I talk to her about my work at the university and she always gives me a lot of interesting advice. Youknow, sometimes in the academic world there are conflicts. And I talk openly with her about these problems and she is able to tell me, for example, ‘You should be less conflictual with the people who criticize your work, or in the way you’re dealing with the university.’ I recognize her ability and her competence in dealing with these types of problems.” He clearly viewed a close relationship between adult children and their aging parents as a Sardinian trait. More interesting to me, though, was that he was describing true reciprocity. Caring for increasingly fragile seniors was more than a duty.
    EVERYBODY DOES IT
    The afternoon that I met Giovanni Corrias, a 102-year-old bachelor from Villagrande, he was sitting in a wooden rocking chair surrounded by younger women. Maria Corrias, the sixty-five-year-old niece who had lived with him for the past twenty-three years, was there. Also his twenty-five-year-old grandniece, Sarah, and the visitors: Eva, Delia (my interpreter), and me. We were drinking espresso from thimble-like cups in Maria and Giovanni’s immaculate living room when the doorbell rang. His sister-in-law had come to drop off some produce. That made six of us. If he thought all this female company unusual, he didn’t let on.
    Zio Giovanni’s white shirt and gray trousers were carefully pressed. Under a woolen cap, his black eyes were alert; his sober, slightly hostile manner put the lie to the notion that you need to think positive thoughts to live a long life. When I asked him why he thought he’d lived so long, he shot back, “Why would I die?”
    Maria: “He doesn’t like that question. Ask him a different one.”
    So what’s the secret of a long life, Zio? I asked. Is it a lifetime of hill walking? Family time? Playing the
sullitu
(the Sardinian flute) or drinking the local red wine?
    “Eh, beh. I like wine—maybe little too much,” he replied. Then a pause. He cast a dark look in my direction and tipped his chin up angrily, suddenly erupting: “Nobody has to know my secrets!”
    The real secret lies as much in his genes as in the culture of his village. Zio Giovanni was lucky to have been born in a place where female family members refer to him as
il tesoro
and find it a
gioia
to live with him and offer him love, companionship, and a large dose of respect. I asked Maria, his sixty-five-year-old niece, if it really is a joy to mind an irascible shut-in. To make sure he doesn’t fall. To prepare and purée his favorite foods. To bathe him every morning while he sits on a special waterproof chair in the shower. To carefully pat him dry and then soothe his easily abraded 102-year-old skin with expensive creams, a different one for