Jonna Carter: True grit

A TIME Health newsletter arrived in my inbox featuring an article provocatively titled, “People who live to 100 share these traits.” Readers are aware that my mother, despite absurd odds, in March celebrated her 93rd birthday. When last I wrote of her it was with somber acceptance that, as had been relayed by her hospice nurse in June, she was “actively dying,” and had but weeks or possibly days to live.

Of course I bought it. I’m hardly an expert in the dying process, and certainly a hospice nurse is. But she doesn’t know my mother, and clearly hadn’t experienced this degree of stubbornness. Per TIME, “A study of people in remote Italian villages who lived past 90 found that they tended to have certain psychological traits in common, including stubbornness and resilience.”