Parachute Perspective
Photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash
January 05, 2024
At the end of 2023 my local newspaper, The Washington Post, published as the lead editorial a piece titled “No, 2023 wasn’t all that bad, and here are 23 reasons why not.” As I skimmed through the list, what caught my eye was No. 22: “A 104-year-old woman went skydiving.” The news of this “daring” feat on Oct. 1 had gone viral but I missed it, maybe because I was preparing to travel a few days later, besides dealing with the usual, mostly mundane things that claim my attention.
Reading some of the reports of that event confirmed for me that ThePost’s opinion that the skydive was “daring” wasn’t entirely accurate, at least not from the point of view of Dorothy Hoffman, the 104-year-old Chicago woman who did it. Hoffner went skydiving because she wanted to. She wasn’t looking to get attention, nor to set a world record (though she did). She had first skydived when she was 100, and she wanted to do it again.
Her friend Joe Conant, 62, drove her from her home at Brookdale Senior Living to Skydive Chicago, in Ottowa, Ill., where she left her walker behind as she boarded the small plane. She jumped off the plane strapped to instructor Derek Baxter for her tandem dive, floating over a winding river and square fields before touching down. She told reporters, “There was nothing scary about it” and described the experience as “nice, peaceful.”
One week later, on Oct. 9, Dorothy Hoffman died in her sleep.
Here are some things I love about this story, and reasons why Hoffner is the latest addition to my team of mentors in aging.
She lived an ordinary life, entirely in Chicago. Unable to afford college, she worked for Illinois Bell Telephone Co., which later became part of AT&T. Her starting pay was 25 cents an hour. She was unmarried and childless, a situation she took full advantage of, traveling to Mexico and Europe, taking weekend road trips, and making lots of friends.
She didn’t think there was anything extraordinary about her skydiving or her age. In a New York Times story on Oct. 3, reporter Eduardo Medina wrote, “Ms. Hoffner does not seem eager to impart life lessons and does not exactly give off daredevil vibes in conversation. She is afraid of snakes. She loves watching reruns of ‘M*A*S*H.’ Asked if she had been a thrill-seeker growing up, she responded ‘not really.’” About the skydive, she pointed out that she had been strapped to an expert, who did all the work.
Hoffner didn’t set out to stare down any fear. “There was nothing scary about it,” she told a Chicago Sun-Times reporter. She challenged the ageist attention she was getting: “What has age got to do with what you’re doing? I’m 104 years old, so what?”
She was interested in people. She had met Joe Conant, a nurse, in 2017 when he became a caregiver for another resident. Hoffner invited Conant and his patient to join her for brunch in the dining room, and soon she was calling him her grandson. Although she didn’t much like the news media frenzy around her skydive, she grew more tolerant as she made friends with the reporters, inviting each of them to dinner.
She lived until she died. She took daily walks around her neighborhood and to the grocery store four blocks away. She regularly played trivia games at meals, which were group affairs because she was always inviting people to join her table. It was at one of those dinners, about five years ago, that Conant told her he was going skydiving and she asked to come along. She didn’t mean just to watch.
Conant told the Chicago Sun-Times, “I explained to her what it all entails, and she said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great. I want to try it.’” Last spring, she told Conant she wanted to do it again.
“I had no question in my mind that she could handle it,” Conant told The Washington Post. “If she could do it when she was 100, she could do it when she was 104, because she seemed like the exact same person.”
I want to learn Dorothy Hoffner’s perspective of time, which I believe is like her view of the Chicago area as she circled through the air toward the land 10,000 feet down. She viewed the years through a wide lens. I suspect her unconcern about her age was rooted in her understanding that each of us is given certain amounts of time and capacity, and our influence over those is limited. Yet we have the power to choose, moment by moment, how we live and use our gifts.
