Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan's Second Wave's On the Ground Kalamazoo series.

KALAMAZOO, MI —  A Life Well Lived, a series of community meetings and learning opportunities that concludes March 15, and the documentary "Lives Well Lived," by guest speaker Sky Bergman, seem from their titles to promise The Great Answer.

"The secret to life is...." Dr. Sandra Borden jokes, with a dramatic pause. 

Sadly, Borden, Western Michigan University's Ethics Center director and series co-organizer, doesn't know the all-encompassing secret. The series didn't discover the "secret sauce" needed for living a life well lived, she says.

What they discovered is pretty obvious methods of navigating life well: That we need to talk and listen face-to-face. We need to listen to our elders and to our youth. That an obsession over having material wealth, a successful career, or high-ranking status, doesn't matter as much as having connections with the people around you. That Mom was right.

The final A Life Well Lived event is March 15, 2 p.m., at WMU's Dunbar hall, room 1303. It will feature a talk from "Lives Well Lived" filmmaker Sky Bergman, and gallery exhibits created by Osher Lifelong Learning participants of the series. The event is free, RSVP here.

Positive, resilient survivors

Borden, the Kalamazoo Lyceum's Matthew Miller, and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at WMU director Dr. Toni Woolfork-Barnes, collaborated on the series. 

They were inspired in part to do the series by Bergman's 2018 documentary "Lives Well Lived." 

Before she thought about doing any filming, Bergman was talking with her grandmother Evelyn Ricciuti, who was 99. She marveled at how, not only was her grandmother not slowing down, endlessly cooking and baking like an Italian grandmother does, but Evelyn also did regular workouts at the gym. 

Bergman was about to turn 50 at the time, she says from her home in San Luis Obispo, California, where she's a professor of photography and video at Cal Poly State. Facing that milestone 50th decade, she wondered what aging could be like for her. 

Many of the Life Well Lived events were intergenerational, including students and participants in WMU's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.She realized, "I have this great role model of what it's like to age positively. And that set me on a quest of interviewing 40 people over four years, of a collective life experience of 3,000 years, to put together the film," Bergman says.

"I had no idea I was going to make a film when I started doing this. It was a very personal project, really much more about trying to figure out what the rest of my life was going to look like and what role models I could have of the people who had been aging and were still positive."

The film ends with her grandmother's 103rd birthday party. She didn't live much longer, but she stayed positive to the end, blowing out the candles and wishing for another year to spend with everyone.

Bergman still stays in touch with her remaining interview subjects. "I like to say that my grandmother left me the greatest gift, which is 40 new grandparents. I mean, it's just lovely."

Her new grandparents all seemed to have a positive mentality, and have proved to be survivors of tough times.

Like Dr. Lou "Lucky Louie" Tedone. In the film he's 92, retired from medicine but still making mozzarella for his daughter's deli. He calls himself Lucky because he was "very lucky in love, had a fantastic wife," and a large family. He says, "The reason I have nine kids is because I had an over-sexed Italian wife who couldn't keep her hands off me." 

His wife passed away 22 years ago. "The grieving never really stops." But he stays positive. "You can be happy with what you have, or miserable with what you don't have," is his motto.

Susy Eto Bauman, 95, says her friends complain that "they can't do this, they can't do that." She tells them, "Oh, phooey with that!... Just go out and do it!" 

Bauman's Japanese-American family was forced into U.S. internment camps in WWII. She saw people discouraged and inactive, rarely leaving their barracks. "You just rot if you don't do anything," she learned.

Bergman found that many of her subjects had gone through historically bad times. 

The Kalamazoo Lyceum's Life Well Lived event at the Kalamazoo Public Library was well attended.Emmy Cleaves, 86, was born in Latvia. Her childhood is one of chaos caused by the armies of the U.S.S.R and Nazi Germany. She managed to journey to Los Angeles, have a happy marriage, and become a yogini — in the film she bends her limbs in yoga poses that most flexible youth couldn't achieve. "Never become a victim," is her philosophy.

Blanch Brown, 78, still a dancer despite a pacemaker and a titanium knee. She fought in the Civil Rights movement. Brown learned to work for what she wanted, to walk through "doors opening for me." She's not stopping — "I'm 78 and I still feel like I'm in my 30s."  

Spouses Marion and Paul Wolff, both 84, escaped Nazi Germany. Marion still has her number tag that was put on her while boarding the "Kindertransport" train, a 1939 effort to help Jewish children escape Nazi territory to Great Britain.

Bergman tells us that she recently had dinner with Paul, but Marion has passed away. 

She remembers interviewing Marion, "and she still had the number that she was wearing around her neck at the age of eight years old," Bergman says. "That so struck me... I thought, I've got to make this a feature film, and I've got to get these stories out about what these people went through, because it's not just about their wisdom, but also about their resilience."

These stories of turbulent times need to be preserved, Bergman feels. She thinks of Bauman — still going out and doing it at 103, she says — whose first husband wanted to show that Japanese-Americans are loyal, so he volunteered for the Army. He was killed in action, leaving Bauman to raise two sons, still in the camp until war's end.

"I often think, how did these people who were in these horrific situations, how did they remain so positive? And I think that that was a really important lesson, as well in this idea of resilience," Bergman says.

She thinks of Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," Bergman says. "He was a concentration camp survivor and he realized that, you know, he couldn't tell who was going to survive based on their physical strength. It was much more about their emotional strength than their physical strength."

Purpose, community, resilience, positivity

Bergman wrote "Lives Well Lived -- GENERATIONS" in 2024, a further study of people who've done a lot of living. 

She covered four important aspects to aging well in her book:

1. "Having a sense of purpose no matter what your age. I think that when many people retire, they lose that sense of purpose and they lose their bearing."

2. "Having a community, feeling like you have a good support group, whether it's family or friends."

3. Having a "sense of resilience of getting through these really troubling times."

4. "The fourth thing is that sense of positivity, of looking at the glass as half full rather than half empty and being able to get through those tough times and still look at the positive side of things."

Bergman also takes a look at the need to connect generations in her book. For the past ten years, she's worked on a project, part of a Psychology of Aging class, that connects older adults with students. "And I realized how important it was to connect those generations, to break down those barriers, to bring people together of different generations."

She was lucky, Bergman says. "I grew up in a four-generational household." Not many families are as close.

There are efforts to connect generations through intergenerational housing, she’s found. For her book, "I interviewed 40 people around the globe who are doing really interesting work connecting generations, whether it's through an intergenerational symphony or co-generational housing or a bicycle ride — there's a guy that started something in Denmark called Cycling Without Age," she says.

"I do feel like we live in such an age-segregated and siloed world. I think that the world would be a better place if we could come together in many ways — I mean, we're so separate in political ways, but also in age. And I think the more that we can find our common ground, the better off we will be."

For her, Bergman feels like the secret to a good life came from her grandmother. "And her motto of life was, really, just to be kind. And I think the world would be a better place if we were all a little kinder to each other. So for me, a life well lived is being kind."

Generations of wisdom

Sandra Borden says, in an interview with co-creator of Kalamazoo's A Life Well Lived Matthew Miller, " I would not describe the film ("Well Lived Lives") as giving some kind of secret recipe for the good life." 

There are all sorts of lives in Bergman's film. "I think the diversity of the stories is part of the message," Borden says. "That a life well lived is not a cookie cutter kind of thing. It's not like it's just one kind of life. There's lots of different ways to flourish. And I like that message from the film."

That and "taking some notes from elders," are valuable messages. "They've had a long time to think about these things, and they've had a range of experiences that you're not going to have when you're younger, that at least gives you some insights that younger people can learn from," Borden says.

"Aristotle (someone who had opinions on how to live life well) didn't think we could decide whether somebody lived a good life until the very end of it," she adds.

But wisdom is not a monopoly owned by people at the end of life, she says. "I think as part of our series we've tried really hard also to tap into the wisdom of young people. So it's not like an exclusive possession of elders."

Mark WedelMatthew Milles, founder of the Kalamazoo Lyceum, introduces the guests.Miller says "it's tough" to see if the Kalamazoo series reached any consensus about living well. The events, attended by an estimated 300 people, included a screening of "Lives Well Lived,” a community photovoice course from OLLI at WMU, book club readings, and a Kalamazoo Lyceum multi-generational conversation.

"I think through all of that, a lot of people have generally shared what they have enjoyed most is just being able to come together in community," Miller says.

Themes that came up included the pressure that especially younger people feel, to make an impact on the world. "And through these conversations, through the film, through the book club, through our young folks — how do you make that impact in the most proximate way that you can in the world," he says.

"And for a lot of people that is through their family and through their loved ones... how do you show up for the people that love you and you love them? So how do you love and be loved?"

That leads to thoughts of reaching beyond loved ones, to neighbors. "How do you just be, you know, a member of your community?... And so through these conversations, trying to illuminate, what are the ways that we can have agency in the most local context as well... your neighborhood or your city?"

Borden says she learned "there's a real thirst for having these conversations and people express that frequently, I think, at our events."

Isolation is real in our society, "So they were just glad for the opportunity to have time and space to talk with other people in the community about things that they cared about. So just even just having the conversation itself was seen as a good thing," Borden says.

There were "big themes" that arose in these conversations, Borden says, on how "hardship is part of the human condition," and what "sources of strength" people drew on, "whether it be their communities or their relationships or their faith tradition, or, you know, a passion they had for a particular issue or a craft or whatever it might be."

People try to communicate through social media, Borden adds. "But without a doubt, I think the in-person-ness of our events has been a significant factor in why I think they register with people."

Do good like your mom taught you

Miller says "a sense of spirituality" and the need to perform community service came out of some of the discussions.

He thinks of two youths, WMU student Genesis Griffin and Kalamazoo Central High student Michael Scott Jr. Griffin is working at KydNet advocating for youth, and is involved in gun violence prevention in Kalamazoo. Scott is working at a local food pantry, helping the hungry, as well as doing other activities that won him a 2025 Social Justice Youth Award from the City of Kalamazoo.

It stuck out to Miller that "these kids are just being so involved, but not in any way that's, you know, performative. It was just literally organic."

Many of the Life Well Lived events were intergenerational, including students and participants in WMU's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.For Borden, what stood out was that there was no "secret sauce" to living life, but there was a lot of  "down to earth" advice. For example, to think of "what it is to be a good person," she says.

Participants had goals like, "I want to be like my mom, I want to remember the lessons that my mom taught me," she says.

"Well, to be a good person is to be decent, right? To show up in your relationships, to remember the stuff your mom taught you."