The facts first, because you will not believe them otherwise. Betty Bromage is 97 years old. She lives in Cheltenham, England. And she was recently strapped to the top wing of an airplane, in flight, on purpose.
This is called wing walking. You stand on a rig above the upper wing of a biplane — an old-style plane with two sets of wings. A pilot flies it around the sky while the wind spends the whole flight disagreeing with you.
Most people who try it do it once, around a milestone birthday, and then dine out on the story for a decade.
Betty has now done it six times.
For perspective: your correspondent gets vertigo adjusting a ladder.
She took the hobby up at 87. Sit with that number for a moment. Eighty-seven is the age when most new hobbies are chosen for you, and most of them involve a chair. Betty chose the top of an airplane.
The stroke, overruled
Here is the part that turns the story from charming into something closer to glorious. A year ago, Betty had a stroke.
A stroke in your late nineties is the kind of event that ends chapters. It is when the family gathers in a hallway and starts using words like “realistic.”
Betty recovered. Then she booked another flight. Then she climbed back onto the wing and became the oldest female wing-walker on record.
Sixth flight. Ninety-seven years old. One year past the thing that was supposed to be the ending.
The record-keepers call it a record. It reads more like a policy statement: age is a number that would like to be consulted, not obeyed.
The money part
We should say something about money here, because that is nominally our job. We will keep it brief, because it is not the point of Betty.
Our industry talks about “longevity risk” — the technical term for the chance that you live longer than your money does. Notice what that phrase does: it turns the best possible outcome of your life into a problem to be managed.
Betty suggests a correction. Living long is not the risk. Living long is the point. The only risk is that the money quits before you do.
Nobody sits in a planning meeting at 60 and announces, “I intend to become a wing-walker at 87.” Nobody plans to fall in love with watercolors at 80, or Portugal at 84, or a biplane at 87.
That is exactly the argument for planning. The future version of you has ideas you have not had yet. She will need funding.
Some of her ideas will be small. A garden that finally gets serious. A long trip taken slowly. A grandchild's tuition bill, quietly handled.
The industry sells retirement as an ending — the finish line, the gold watch. Betty treats it as a launch window.
And some of those unplanned ideas — if you are lucky, and a little bit magnificent — will involve standing on an airplane over the English countryside while your tenth decade minds its own business below.
So here's to Betty Bromage of Cheltenham. Six flights. Ninety-seven years. One stroke, overruled.
May we all be so poorly behaved at 97.