“I want to live in a world where we aren’t focused on what aging takes away from us, but rather what it gives to us,” Helen Hames, founder of Age Ambassador and a regular contributor to What’s Up Newp, told a standing-room-only, multi-generational audience last week.
“As I began listening more deeply to the older adults I met, I started to see something important,” she continued. “The gifts we carry are not defined by physical capacity, job titles, or accomplishments alone. They are found in our lived experiences, the lessons we’ve learned, the challenges we’ve overcome, and the courage it takes to keep showing up through all of life’s seasons.”
I have long admired Helen and her passion for her work, but her opening remarks immediately drew me into her newest mission. Judging by the audience response around me, I wasn’t alone.
Helen was inspired to launch her storytelling series, “Lived Experiences: What Connects Us Across Generations,” during an early morning power walk with the indefatigably positive Gail Lowney Alofsin — speaker, teacher, philanthropist, and community leader.
Helen has enjoyed a diverse career in senior marketing roles and later specialized in older-adult and generational care. A mother, grandmother, cancer survivor, and nonprofit leader, she is now pursuing a new career calling through Age Ambassador, a consultancy dedicated to helping older adults and their families maintain greater control over decisions that affect their lives.
Before that walk was over, an idea that feels more like a movement was born. Gail immediately offered her support and enlisted her 90-year-old father, Dr. Jeremiah Lowney, as the first storyteller in the series.
The Lived Experiences of Newly Minted Nonagenarians
Dr. Jeremiah Lowney
Born June 27, 1936, Dr. Jeremiah Lowney grew up as the oldest of 12 children in Fall River, Massachusetts. At age 11, he was diagnosed with what was later identified as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leaving him bedridden for much of his adolescence and shuttled between hospitals and relatives’ homes.
He persevered through those difficult years and, inspired by a respected dentist he admired, enrolled at Tufts University with the goal of becoming an orthodontist.
Speaking softly and with characteristic humility, Dr. Lowney shared stories of marriage, family, and building a successful orthodontic practice in Connecticut. Yet in midlife, after a second cancer diagnosis, he felt called to something more.
In 1982, he traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where severe poverty and limited access to healthcare were widespread. Although he had not pulled a tooth in years, which was the immediate need, he borrowed tools and got to work.
For the next three decades, he returned regularly to Haiti, helping wherever he was needed. While in the United States, he became a communications link between Haiti’s local Sisters of Charity and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Eventually, Mother Teresa asked Dr. Lowney to relocate his small dental clinic to the rural city of Jérémie, where healthcare needs were even greater. [The coincidence of the coastal commune’s name being Dr. Lowney’s name in French, was not lost on him, and he felt he could not say no.]
In Jérémie, Dr. Lowney found conditions so dire that he began raising funds back in the United States for a comprehensive health clinic. A few years later, the resulting facility was a full-service clinic offering medical and dental care, maternity services, and a children’s ward.
To date, the Haitian Health Foundation (HHF) that Dr. Lowney founded delivers primary health care, child and maternal health, family planning, infectious and chronic disease prevention, assessment and treatment, mental health, and dental health services through a network of health clinics and mobile clinics in remote mountainous areas. HHF employs more than 250 full-time staff and serves more than 250,000 Haitians annually since its founding in 1985.
Dr. Lowney summed up his philosophy and his life’s purpose with this powerful statement:
“True poverty is the inability to imagine a better tomorrow. It is grounded in hopelessness. The best gift you can give is to give hope.”
To donate to the HHF, click here.
Sr. Alice Bowman
Passion and purpose were a common theme among both storytellers, though their paths have been quite different.
Sr. Alice Bowman, née Anna Johanna Nancy Jean Frances Alice Bowman, nicknamed Nancy by her family, was born on S. Baptist Street in Newport on October 31, 1935. She grew up with her three sisters running between her extended family’s houses in the Fifth Ward, while after-school activities included baton twirling, singing, and taking dance lessons at the historic The Gladding School of Dance, which was founded in 1917 and is still operating today.
In 1954, at the age of 19, Nancy felt a profound religious calling and joined the Daughters of the Holy Spirit order (a.k.a. as the “White Sisters” for their distinctive white tunics and veils). Upon taking her vows, she chose the name Sister Alice. Alice spent much of her life teaching and ultimately settled in Williston, Vermont for more than four decades. At the age of 89, after the passing of two dear convent friends, she decided to move back home to Aquidneck Island to be closer to her family.
While living at Atria Aquidneck Place in Portsmouth, she met Helen Hames and a deep friendship was quickly established.
Last week, Sr. Alice charmed the audience with her youthful spirit, love of life, artistic creativity, and compassion for others – especially those who are less visible.
“I have a tendency to see the people who fall through the cracks,” she shared. “When I find myself in a new setting, I say ‘I’m here and I’m here for a reason. I simply open the door and I show up.”
When faced with challenges, she reminds herself,
“I’m molded from clay that is soft and pliable and flexible. I am in this situation now, so what am I going to do about it?”
Reflecting on the loss of her dear friends, she quotes the song “For Good” from Wicked:
“Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”
When she wonders whether she has done enough, she returns to a simple personal mantra,
“Everything I could, I did. And all the love I had, I gave.”
As a parting gift to her audience, Sister Alice stood up and read closing remarks she had prepared. Then, with a feisty baton-twirling jig, she encouraged everyone to look in the mirror each morning and declare, “I’m going to spend the rest of the day M.A.D.: Making a difference.”
Helen, Gail, Dr. Jeremiah and Sister Alice all exemplify a message worth remembering daily, whatever your age:
“We are visible. The wisdom you have is never extinguished.” Amen to that, Sister!
Michele Gallagher is an advocate of local businesses, community leaders, and non-profits and is the founder of City-by-the-Sea Communications.
