Carried in the Hands of Elders

There was a time in my life when I was sprinting toward ambition, toward healing, toward peace. My calendar overflowed. My smile never slipped. On paper, I was thriving. But underneath, I felt the hairline fractures, spreading like cracks in old porcelain. Years of unspoken grief and carefully folded vulnerability had settled into my bones, like dust in corners you forget to sweep.

I wore joy like a badge, but I was coming apart thread by thread. I boarded flights, worked out, journaled, and stayed busy enough to avoid silence. I wandered into unfamiliar cities, telling myself I was chasing wonder, when really, I was running from stillness. And then, like a whispered answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked, I kept finding calm in the presence of elders.

There’s something arresting about people who have lived through eras, not just years, but seismic cultural shifts, war, political change, rebirth, and have learned not just to survive, but to hold grace in their palms. Their wisdom doesn’t shout. It waits. Their silences are layered. Their joy feels earned.

That’s why I write so many centenarian stories.Why my heart lights up at work when the phone rings and someone says, “My grandmother’s turning 100 next week. Can you feature her in the paper?”Absolutely. Always. These moments aren’t just assignments. They’re acts of preservation, and quiet reverence.

I remember a man I met in a dusty little bookshop tucked into a narrow street in coastal Maine. The air inside smelled like old leather and ocean wind. He moved slowly, with a gentle stoop, but when we spoke, his voice carried the lightness of someone deeply rooted in memory and stillness. He told me about the first time he saw Eleanor Roosevelt.“I must’ve been nine,” he said, eyes brightening as though the memory had just returned from a long walk. “Her carriage came down the dirt road behind our house. I remember the horses slowing. The dust. The way she raised her gloved hand and looked right at me.” He paused then, with a reverence that made the whole room go still. That single memory had lived with him for over 80 years, as vivid as yesterday. And in sharing it, he passed it on to me and gifted me one of her memoirs.

There’s the woman in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, who keeps her wedding dress folded in a cedar chest and whispers to it every anniversary, a devotion that didn’t end when he died, only softened. The 90-year-old man who buried three of his children, and still told me, “Every day above ground is grace” a resilience that humbled me into silence. There’s the seamstress in Spanish Town who oils her hands every night before bed, “just in case somebody comes knocking,” she told me. A readiness born of purpose. And the old fisherman from St. Elizabeth who says the sea still calls his name, even though his knees can no longer answer. That, to me, is love refusing to retire.

These people don’t just tell stories. They carry time. They wear it, hum with it. They offer it to the rest of us like an inheritance we’re often too hurried to receive.

Just when I thought I'd heard it all, there is a man who farms on his rooftop in Kingston. He tends pineapples above his auto shop, a garden in the sky. As he peeled back the shade cloth and showed me the young fruit, he said softly, “Ashanti, you don’t know how much taking care of these plants healed me.” But I did know. Stillness does that. Because I’ve heard healing echo in a hundred forms, in rainwater barrels, in handwritten letters, in soft hands and unspoken rituals. Elders don’t just live in the past. They make meaning of it, then offer it up like grace.

I could talk about it all day. About the woman who showed me her husband's old toolbox and said she still talks to it when she misses him. About the man who fought for union rights in the '60s and now spends his afternoons teaching chess to neighbourhood children, because, as he told me, “Strategy is what kept me alive.” About the elder in Clarendon who showed me a mango tree she planted the year Jamaica gained independence and told me, “That tree grow wid mi freedom.” I think of the woman in Mandeville who still sweeps her front yard barefoot before sunrise, humming old revival songs beneath her breath. “Mi cyaah start mi day widout tidy mi spirit,” she said.

If you take anything from this, let it be this:

The elders I meet don’t just tell me their stories. They hand me fragments of history, softened by time and steeped in perspective. They remind me that not all strength roars, not all healing looks like movement, and not all purpose arrives with clarity. Sometimes it comes in stillness. Sometimes, it comes in listening.

And that, more than anything, is a joy I carry, gently, reverently, like something handed down. Always with both hands.