Life Can be Lonely at 103

However, when you’ve outlived your parents, sisters, brothers, husband and two of your three children, life can get a little lonely. At least for Lola Hageman.

She recently celebrated her 103rd birthday at Dorothy Love Retirement Community, but living a long life hasn’t been easy for the Shelby County native.

“I’m lonesome. I’d shared secrets with my brothers and sisters,” said the matriarch of five generations, with soft white hair. “Now there’s no one to talk to. We were all close.”

Hageman is one of an estimated 34.1 million people – about one in every eight Americans – who are 65 or older, according to a 1997 study from the Bureau of the Census and the National Center for Health Statistics. According to the figures, most of those 85 or older are women.

Hageman is one of five women 100 or older in the retirement community at 3003 Cisco Road, Sidney. The others are Olive Fink, Virginia Bassham, Hazel Enyart and Clara Jacoby.

Having survived all five of her brothers and sisters and her husband, Alva, who died of natural causes in 1982 at age 86, Hageman believes God put here for a reason.

But she doesn’t dwell on it . “I don’t worry about it. My faith in God keeps me going.”

Hageman has survived several operations and illnesses such as a stroke . Despite arthritis in her legs and hands, a hearing aid in each ear and with poor vision, she still remains active.

“I work on (crossword) puzzles,” said Hageman, a four-year resident at Dorothy Love.

When she’s not working on crossword puzzles, Hageman assists activities director Sara Johnston in making the center’s monthly bulletin board.

“She’s a farmer’s wife. She likes to get things done right away,” Johnston said. “I’ll give her a project thinking it’ll take her three weeks to finish but she finishes it within an hour.”

“There was always something to do,” Hageman said. “If they needed me in the field, I would help out. I’d even drive a five-horse plow.”

As a wife and young mother, she loved to sew and read. “I sewed everything from a teddy bear to a wedding dress.” She continued to sew for her friends at Dorothy Love until last year when her arthritic hands and failing eyesight made sewing on buttons or mending trousers impossible.

Born in 1896, two years before the Spanish-American War, Hageman remembers growing up on her father’s farm, the fifth of six children in a family where picnics and school and the Methodist church were paramount. At age 16, she worked as a bagger for a general store in town during the summer. She also volunteered at church and community projects before meeting her husband through a mutual friend.

In 1916 – eight years after the Ford Model T automobile was introduced – Lola married Alva and moved to a farm just outside Pasco. It would be another five years until her husband purchased their first vehicle.

“I thought they were expensive. You had to have a good training to drive one,” Hageman said.

Hageman’s husband managed the farm of soybeans, beans and wheat, doing the books at night by oil lamps until electricity made its way to the country in 1937.

“We lived a simple life. We were no different than anyone else; just a good clean life in the country,” she said.