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Shining the Way
Remembering the Late Gene Cohen
By Janice Blanchard, MSPH
Editor's note: Janice Blanchard is a nationally recognized writer, speaker, and consultant on aging issues. For over 15 years she has worked on the cutting edge of public policy and programs promoting a new vision of elders as valuable, contributing members of
their communities and of elderhood as a distinct phase of the human life cycle. Blanchard serves as a consultant and an advisory board member for the National Center for Creative Aging
and the American Society on Aging. She consults with government, non-profit, and private organizations to develop innovative housing and community-based solutions that strengthen the fabric of communities
and can be reached at
janicecsa@comcast.net.
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Denver, Colorado
on November 7, 2009 |
Winter,
bone-chilling cold and brittle as ice, came early to
Colorado this year with two feet of snow falling before
Halloween. Pumpkins froze on doorsteps, as did the last of
the produce in lingering summer gardens. The golden leaf
aspen trees and colorful fall foliage turned brown
overnight.
Autumn
gives us time for transition and to prepare for winter – to
harvest and store food, put away summer tools, and get out
the winter gear. We prepare our days, according to what we
predict to be the natural cycle of the seasons. I was caught
off guard and was ill prepared for such an early winter this
year – so many things left undone.
Winter
came too fast and too soon for our friend, colleague, and
mentor, Gene Cohen MD, PhD, who died from prostate cancer at
age 65, on November 6, 2009.
We will
miss the bountiful harvest of his autumn years. We grieve
the loss of his brilliance and leadership in the field of
aging and creativity; and his warm friendship, impish sense
of humor, and wise guidance on the Board of the National
Center for Creative Aging.
We will
miss you greatly, Gene. Shine on!
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I
first met Gene D. Cohen, Ph.D., M.D., in the early
1990s as a graduate student at the annual meeting
of the Gerontological Society of America. We were
sitting in a side hall nook of the conference hotel,
each looking over the phonebook-thick program to map
out our next session. At a large conference, full of
serious academics with rather dour looks in dark
suits, his cheerful and kind countenance,
accentuated by an old-fashioned bow tie and tousle
of curly hair, made it easy to strike up a
conversation. We exchanged some pleasantries and
went our separate ways.
 Imagine my surprise when later that evening at a
reception, a new acquaintance (no doubt, wanting to
make an impression with the young graduate student)
formally introduced me to the man I had bantered
with earlier that day as Dr. Gene Cohen, the
Director of the National Institute on Aging! Quickly
assessing the situation and without missing a beat,
he said with twinkling eyes, “Well, hello Janice, so
nice to see you again! How was your afternoon
session?”
Hence forward, I always made it a point to attend
Dr. Cohen’s presentations at national conferences
and to try and keep up with his prolific research,
articles, and books. Like his personality, I found
Gene’s writing and presentation style down-to-earth,
with generous amounts of insight and good humor
sprinkled throughout.
It
has truly been one of the highlights of my career to
work together with Gene and other colleagues on the
Board of the National Center for Creative Aging (NCCA)
to promote the vital relationship between creativity
and healthy aging. Gene’s research and wise counsel
have been critical to this effort, both in promoting
best practices and advocating for policies and
programs that promote creative expression in later
life.
The Accessible Academic
I
doubt that I was the first graduate student (and
undoubtedly, there have been a few academics!) who
met Dr. Gene Cohen and had no clue that they were
meeting one of the luminaries in the field of aging.
Gene had the rare and wonderful gift of being one of
the smartest people on the planet but not allowing
that to keep him in an Ivory Tower or to lose his
sense of humor, playfulness, or ability to connect
easily with others. Gene was an accessible academic,
although his education and professional career were
anything but ordinary.
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The Power of Older
Minds
An excerpt from The
Mature Mind
by Gene D. Cohen
My in-laws, Howard and
Gisele Miller, both in their seventies, were stuck.
They had just emerged from the Washington, D.C.,
subway system into a driving snowstorm. They were
coming to our house for dinner and needed to catch a
cab because it was too far to walk — but it was rush
hour, and no cabs stopped. Howard tried calling us
to get a lift, but my wife and I were both tied up
in traffic and weren’t home yet.
 As his fingers began to turn numb
from the cold, Howard noticed the steamy windows of
a pizza shop across the street. He and Gisele
marched through the slush, entered the shop, stepped
up to the counter, and ordered a large pizza for
delivery. When the cashier asked where to deliver
it, Howard gave him our address, and added, “Oh,
there’s one more thing.”
‘What’s that?” the
cashier asked.
“We want you to deliver
us with it,” Howard said.
And that’s how they
arrived — pizza in hand — for dinner that night. |
Gene graduated from Harvard College and Georgetown
University School of Medicine before setting out to
pioneer the field of geriatric psychiatry. In 1975,
barely into his early thirties, Dr. Cohen was the first
chief of the Center on Aging at the National
Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In fact, in one
of life’s little ironies, it was because of his
youthful appearance that he grew a beard and began
to sport his trademark bowtie, in an effort to look
older than he was. From 1988 to 1993, Dr. Cohen was
director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA).
From 1994 until his passing, Gene was founding
director of the Center on Aging, Health and
Humanities at George Washington University, where he
was also professor both of health care sciences and
of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
Throughout his illustrious career Dr. Cohen was a
prolific author, researcher, and trailblazer in the
fields of gerontology, geriatric medicine, mental
health, biology, neuroscience, and most recently,
creativity. He authored over 150 publications
including several edited text books, as well as
individually authored books for general audiences,
including, The Creative Age: Awakening the Human
Potential in the Second Half of Life (2000) and
most recently, The Mature Mind: The Positive
Power of the Aging Brain (2006). The former is
widely considered the groundbreaking book on
creativity and aging – effectively the book that
launched this new field of study.
His professional interests
influenced his personal life in profound and
beautiful ways. In his early fifties, Gene tapped into
his own creativity and began to invent
board games for his aging father,
who had difficulty seeing and holding game board
pieces. His re-invention of a family favorite,
Cribbage, is not only functional for people with
visual and physical challenges, it is also a work of
art. The Essential Cribbage Board was
selected in a nationally juried art contest and
featured at the Smithsonian Institution as part of
an exhibit highlighting intergenerational games as
works of art. His most recent game, Making
Memories Together, was inspired by both of his
parents’ difficulty in accessing all of their many
years of memories. The game inspires people with
memory loss and their families to continue to find
ways to enjoy playing games and connect in
meaningful ways.
For the majority of his career at NIMH and NIA, the
focus of aging research was on understanding the
problems of aging, and therefore, on the study of
unhealthy people. It was not until the late 1980s
and 1990s that the shift began to occur from
focusing on the problems of aging, to normal and
healthy aging. For Gene, this shift was an
earthquake; it ignited within him a new passion to
fully explore and understand the possibility and
potential of aging, not despite it, but
because of it. He understood the key to unlock
this treasure trove of possibilities is creativity.
It was along this road to discover the human
potential in later life through creative expression
that destiny would have my path cross again with Dr.
Gene Cohen.
Getting on Board with the Art of Aging Campaign
I
am not sure of the year that I first attended a
National Center for Creative Aging Network Meeting
at the American Society on Aging, or how even I
ended up there. Perhaps it was my own interest
in the arts that guided me. For several years
between high school and my career in gerontology I
was a working artist – at various times a leathersmith, woodworker, jewelry designer, and
dabbler in textiles.
I
do remember the excitement and energy of the group
when we began talking about creating a public
awareness campaign that could lead up to the 2005
White House on Conference on Aging (WHCOA). Susan Perlstein,
the founder and at the time director of the NCCA,
cajoled me into helping out, eventually asking me to
be on the NCCA Board and Director of Outreach for
the 2005 WHCOA. This was about the time of the
release of Gene’s groundbreaking book, The
Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the
Second Half of Life.
My
gift to the revolution was in helping design the
campaign so that the art created by local artists
through NCCA networks could be used to create large
dynamic panels that would showcase the artist and
their work. These panels would than be used as a
backdrop to hold town hall meetings with local
artists, politicians, and shakers and movers to raise
local awareness about the importance of art and
creative expression and drive a petition to sponsor
more creative arts programs for older adults.
Ultimately, we planned to use the panels in some
fashion to tour around the country, at aging and
arts conferences, and ultimately to the 2005 White
House Conference on Aging.
In
May 2005 my path officially crossed with Dr. Gene
Cohen again. Along with 42 esteemed
colleagues, we attended the Mini-Conference on
Creativity and Aging in America in Washington, DC.
Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts,
National Center for Creative Aging, AARP, and other
national organizations, we gathered to present,
discuss, and formulate recommendations on three
issues important to older Americans: lifelong
learning and building community through the arts;
designing the physical environment for the lifespan;
and the arts in healthcare. The goal of this blue
ribbon panel was to develop policy recommendations
for the 2005 White House Conference on Aging
that related to these three major categories.
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Participants at the 2005 Mini Conference on Creativity and Aging. Photo courtesy of Paula Terry, National Endowment for the Arts. |
Gene was a featured presenter and, for the first
time, he unveiled his preliminary findings from his
landmark research, informally referred to as the
“Creativity and Aging Study.” This
evidenced-based research, the first study of its
kind, was the crucial linchpin needed to provide the
grounds for a policy recommendation to support the
arts and creativity in later life. This point is
worth underscoring. During the historically
conservative years of the Bush administration, even
stalwart programs such as Medicare and Social
Security were under scrutiny for overhaul and cuts,
not to mention the culture wars that were clamoring
to dismantle national programs that support the arts
such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and
the National Endowment for the Arts.
In
a highly competitive bid for a limited number of
resolutions to be adopted, getting a policy
recommendation through as one of the final 73
official WHCOA resolutions was no small potatoes.
Gene’s outstanding professional reputation as a
researcher and scholar, not to mention the positive
health outcomes of the older adults who participated
in the intervention group of the study, gave us a
powerful tool to lobby the WHCOA Policy Committee to
consider including a recommendation that would
support the arts. We could show that this positive
intervention not only improved quality of life and
health outcomes for older adults, but it could also
save health and long-term-care dollars!
In
the end, we were honored and delighted to have our
recommendations forged into a WHCOA resolution:
Resolution #58: Increase Awareness of the
Positive Physical and Psychological Impact that Arts
Participation Can Have on Older Americans.
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Jan Hively,
founder of the Vital Aging Network, at the Creativity and Aging Reception at the
White House Conference on Aging |
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The highlight (indeed, the climax of three years of
work!) for many of us attending the 2005 WHCOA was
a wonderful evening reception hosted by the NCCA.
Curated by Gene’s wife Wendy Miller, a beautiful
exhibit, better even than we had originally
envisioned, was laid out like a quilt representing
artwork from more than 80 older-adult artists from
12 states. The six-foot art panels were comprised of
an older adult’s original art work, photo, and
statement of what artistic expression meant to them.
These panels represented a diversity of artwork done
at local senior centers and featured at town hall
meetings held around the country. The culmination of
a three-year collaboration between the NCCA
Networks, the National Institute of Senior Centers,
and the National Association of State Arts Agencies,
this public awareness campaign accomplished a great
deal at the grassroots level to inform seniors and
local politicians about the important linkage
between creative expression and healthy aging.
The relationships we built and the partnerships we
strengthened throughout our 5-year adventure
getting to the White House Conference on Aging were
instrumental in taking NCCA around the bend, with
Dr. Gene Cohen shining his brilliant light to lead
the way.
Of Blue Skies and Blue Oceans
Gene’s groundbreaking research study, and on its
heels a new book, The Mature Mind: The Positive
Power of the Aging Brain, resulted in a
whirlwind of lectures, conference sessions, articles,
and publicity for the field of creativity and aging
– and big gusts of wind into the sails of the NCCA.
In
November 2006,
NCAA and
the New Jersey Performing Arts Center collaborated
to host a National Conference on Arts and Aging:
Creativity Matters. The first national
conference on aging and creativity, it provided over
200 participants with the opportunity to explore
in-depth the intersections among research, policy,
and practice in the field of creative aging. Gene
was a featured presenter and his research findings
a major highlight of the conference.
 In early 2007, Gene officially joined the NCCA Board. Aware that we
were looking to relocate to Washington, DC, he
graciously facilitated a working partnership between
George Washington University’s School of
Medicine and Health Sciences and NCCA. Gene was
generous beyond words in sharing office space, staff,
and his valuable time to help us settle into our new
location. We were also blessed to find an
experienced, skilled, and marvelous new Executive
Director, Gay Hanna, PhD, MA, in the Washington, DC
area to help us make the NCCA a stronger and more
effective national organization.
At
our first board meeting with Gene and Gay in fall
2007, we had a fantastically productive strategic
planning session that laid out concrete steps to
short-term and long-term goals for the organization.
Gene suggested we all read an article in the Harvard
Business Review, called Blue Ocean Strategy
by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. An energized
discussion inspired by this article helped us to
realize the opportunity we had to create a new
market of opportunity, by building and expanding on
the concept that aging is a time of new potential
and possibilities, rather than deficits and decline.
In doing so, we create together a wide blue
ocean of new opportunities.
Over the past two years, Gene has been instrumental
in helping to grow NCCA, as well as the field of
creativity and aging. He served as the faculty
liaison between GWU and NCCA that provided full
university privileges for research and the
development of distance learning programs. Gene was
always ready to go to meetings, make a phone call,
or give talks, including his last series of lectures
as a Webinar, all to support NCCA.
Gene’s enthusiasm for the
potential in aging and creativity was contagious.
For example, the former Chair of the National
Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, was so impressed
by Gene
at a meeting with
him that he gave NCCA a
special non-competitive leadership grant to support
NCCA efforts.
Gene's legacy
continues to support NCCA. In November, a mere two
weeks after his passing, NCCA partnered with the
Gerontological Society of America at their annual
meeting to launch a new, first of its kind, research
grant in the field of creativity and aging. For
years to come, Gene’s trail will be followed by
other pioneers in the field of creativity and aging,
expanding our knowledge of the potential in the
second half of life.
Many other projects
that Gene began
are also in the works, and the NCCA hopes to continue
these in his
honor. Organizations like NCCA will continue to grow
and flourish because of the wisdom, generosity, and
kindness of Dr. Gene Cohen. Even in his absence,
Gene is still shining for us the way. |
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