The bad news is physical decline is inevitable. The good news is that creatively and spiritually we can continue to flourish until the end of our lives. From artists to ballet dancers and Wall of Death bike riders, be inspired by the amazing old people collected here. It's a small selection - there are many more out there!

Compiled by Vida Adamoli

Louise Bourgeois is one of the world’s greatest contemporary sculptors. Her themes are femininity, sexuality and isolation. Aged 88 she became the first artist to fill London’s Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. She reached the pinnacle of her career eight years later when the Tate Modern held a major retrospective of her work. To this day she continues to defy convention.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris on Christmas Day, 1911. She enrolled at the Sorbonne to study mathematics but soon switched to art. At the age of 27 she married the American art historian, Robert Goldwater, and moved to New York. Throughout her long career she has worked in many different mediums, including rubber, wood, stone, metal and, appropriately for someone who came from a family of tapestry makers, fabric. Her earliest exhibition, in 1947, consisted of tunnel sculptures and wooden figures, one of which was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. It wasn’t until after the deaths of her husband and father in the 1970s, however, that she finally achieved the recognition and success she deserved.

To this day Louise Bourgeois is a uniquely individual, avante-garde artist. Her inspiration comes from the turmoil of emotion engendered by her father’s affair with her governess when she was a child. This life-long obsession has fuelled her work with a powerful and subversive anger. In the late 1960s, exploring the relationship between men and women, her imagery became explicitly sexual. ‘My sculpture allows me to live again my fear and give her a body so I can stand away from her’, she has said. ‘Fear becomes a reality easy to handle. She goes on, ‘ I appreciate the mechanisms of seduction. I tell myself, "Louise, how will you seduce this stone and change it into an art work?" I am talking in terms of seduction because the resistance of the marble is almost total. Resistance attracts me. For me the sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.’

Jerry De Roye, born Gerald Jones in the USA, was still performing gravity-defying motorcycle stunts as a Wall of Death Rider at the age of eighty. Jerry was 11-years-old when he first saw a Wall of Death stunt and he knew immediately that was what he wanted to do in life. The moment he was old enough he sought out riders asking for training~. But competition in the business was fierce and nobody was willing to help a potential rival. Eventually he met Eddie Monte, a.k.a. his boyhood idol Speedy Williams, who took him on. He made his debut ride in 1956 and has never looked back. He continues to present his Trick’n’Stunt shows riding a 1927 V-Twin Indian Type 101 ‘Scout’ motorcycle. In all the years the most serious accident he’s had is a broken thumb. Asked how long he planned to keep going he replied, 'I'll never stop, it's in my blood’,

Stanley Kunitz, the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who died in 2006 aged 100, was twice U.S. poet laureate producing works of far-ranging style and influence. He was still at full power into his 90's, continuing to write and give readings. He was a passionate gardener, spending every summer for fifty years in Provincetown tending his lush garden. His last book, ‘The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden,’ produced in collaboration with his literary assistant, Genine Lentine, offers an eclectic assortment of prose, poetry, philosophy, photography, as well as more than a dollop of gardening advice. He once told a reporter that the secret to his longevity was ‘I’m curious .I’m active. I garden and I write and I drink martinis.’ He also said of his work, ‘The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that self-dialogue. He shunned shallow confession in his art. ‘Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul,’ he wrote. ‘The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.’

The Long Boat
by Stanley Kunitz
When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

Harry Lieberman, a painter known for his portrayal of Jewish folk life, immigrated from Poland to the United States as a young man. Until the age of seventy six he ran a sweet shop with his wife, Sophie. He found retirement deeply boring, however, so he took up painting, an activity he claimed brought him ‘back to life’. For the next twenty seven years, until his death in 1983 at the age of 103, he worked prolifically. In 1994 the Museum of American Folk Art in New York held a major retrospective of his work. His paintings are also in the permanent collection of many museums, including the, the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum of Art and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

Grandma Moses, as Anna Mary Robertson was known, was born in 1860 in Greenwich New York. She married a farmer's wife and had five children. Her hobby was embroidering colourful scenes of rural life. In her mid-seventies, however, arthritis made working with a needle too painful. Reluctantly she switched to painting. Her first picture was painted with house paint. In 1938 when she was almost eighty, Louis J. Caldor, an art collector noticed her work in a drugstore window. He was so impressed he went in and bought it. The following year an art dealer gave her a one-woman show in his Gallerie Saint-Etienne in New York. It was a huge success and brought her national recognition.
Among the awards she received was the Women's National Press Club Award for outstanding accomplishment in art presented by President Harry S. Truman. And in 1955 she was filmed sitting at a table painting on masonite, a thin hard board, for Ed. Murrow ‘s TV show, See It Now. People. ‘I like to paint old-timey things,’ she told viewers.
Grandma Moses’ simple, clear style is defined as Primitive Art. She created scenes of rural and family life from memory. Aged a hundred she  illustrated an edition of The Night Before Christmas by Clement Moore. She lived to be 101 and in the last year of her life painted twenty-five pictures.

Oscar Niemeyer is a modernist Brazilian architect born in 1907. He collaborated with Corbusier and together with his partner built Brasilia, Brazil’s entirely new capital city, in just four years in the 1950s. In 1996, at the age of 89, he created what many consider his greatest work, the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum. The building has been described as ‘flying from a rock’, Some people complain that it’s so exotic it upstages the works of art it houses.
In 2003 Niemeyer was called to design the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion in Hyde Park London, a temporary structure built in aluminium, concrete and class with a ruby-red ramp. In 2004 he designed a tombstone for Carlos Marighella and in 2005 one of his projects got the go-ahead for contruction in Joao Pessoa. In 2006, aged 98, he wed his longtime aide, Vera Lucia Cabrira, a woman forty years his junior.
In 2007, aged 100, Niemeyer was still involved in diverse projects, mainly sculptures and readjustments of old works that only he can modify. He is currently designing a statue of a man holding the Cuban flag and wrestling a tiger. It commemorates Cuban peoples’ resistance to the US blockade of their country. One of his biggest European projects started in Spain in April 2008.

Gong Duruo, from China, is 105. He has PhDs from West China Union University and New York State University. He is also an expert on traditional medicine therapies. Gong is still treating patients in a local community clinic, and practices qigong everyday. He attracted attention when he advertised for a wife. ‘I cannot live without love any more and I want someone to spend the rest of my life with,’ the thrice-divorced Gong wrote in his blog. He also said he wanted a woman with some knowledge of medicine who could help him edit his medical book. And if she was aged around fifty it would be a plus.
Of the ten applications he received over the next two days, he picked out 52-year-old Zhang, who comes from a long line of doctors. ‘I'm not doing this for his money. I want to help him fulfill his dream of publishing the book and to learn from his profound knowledge of traditional medicine therapies," Zhang said.’My father is 20 years older than my mother and an instant warm feeling ran through me when I saw Gong’s online pictures.’
Gong Duruo said being happy is his key to 'long life'

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Leila Denmark, aged 100 - a pediatrician who learned medicine when Calvin Coolidge was president, and whooping cough was a childhood scourge - has been recognized as America’s oldest practicing doctor. For more than seventy years she has been taking care of babies (her ‘angels’, as she calls them) dispensing the same advice to mothers as she did when she started her career: Don't pick them up every time they cry, don't feed them on demand and don't raise your voice. Some of her beliefs are outdated - no milk after seven months, no tubes for chronic ear infections, and lay babies on their stomachs instead of their backs. Parents love her homespun approach to child care, however, and many travel long distances for her advice.

Charin Yuthasastrkosol, born in Thailand in 1930 but resident in the USA, began ballet lessons at the age of 47. She now performs regularly at galas, most recently for Sakthip Krairikish, Thailand's Ambassador to the USA at Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, in 2002. She was then seventy-one-years old. If you want to know more go to her websitehttp://www.charinsdream.com/main.htm

Lorna Page, a 93-year-old English woman, published A Dangerous Weakness, her first novel described as a feminist thriller, in 2008. Its success has allowed her to move from a small flat in Surrey to a large house in Devon. She intends to share it with a number of elderly friends who would otherwise be forced to live in nursing homes.