PROVINCETOWN — “What could be more radical than aging?” asks Mary DeRocco. Better yet, she adds, “What could be more radical than aging in Provincetown?”
By radical, what this Senior of the Year means is unafraid to confront the uncomfortable as well as able to start difficult conversations. Chris Hottle, director of Provincetown’s Council on Aging, would add that DeRocco also makes those conversations accessible. “She is a skilled facilitator,” Hottle says.
In 2017, DeRocco started the Women’s Radical Aging Group (WRAG). It began with about 15 senior women meeting regularly at the Council on Aging to talk about their experiences of growing old.
“Isolation, particularly for aging people, can become destructive and distorting,” DeRocco says. “We need community to talk about the things that nobody wants to hear.”
DeRocco, a licensed marriage and family therapist and mental health clinician who explored relationships for most of her professional life, works to create a safe space for the group. That includes having guidelines about confidentiality, mindful listening, respectful sharing of time, and open-mindedness. She also reminds people to breathe.
The group is open to all women and meets for two hours every month. There is a core that has participated regularly since the beginning, there are women who come and go, and there are always newcomers, she says.
DeRocco started doing research on aging in 2015. That’s when, after decades of co-owning Ruby’s Fine Jewelry in Provincetown, Mary and business partner Ruby Druss closed their shop’s doors. So commenced the next chapter of her life, which she likes to call her “refirement.”
She describes feeling at the time like a pioneer looking out onto an open frontier. It was a chance to work on what interested her most, she says. But of the research, she says, “Most of it was boring.” Until she encountered the concept of “radical aging.”
The radical aging movement is one that challenges ageism and encourages aging individuals to live their most fulfilling possible lives. It’s about “returning to your roots,” DeRocco says. “It is full of energy and change.”
DeRocco found her way to the Outer Cape in the mid-1980s. “I did what many people who come to Provincetown do,” she says. “I had a life, and then I took a right-hand turn and ended up here.” She was excited and inspired by the relationship to nature that she found here. And she was struck by the ways people stayed so connected to their creativity.
DeRocco has recently been finding her voice in some new ways, writing poetry and working on a fictionalized memoir that traces her family’s roots back to Sicily.
“I like to think of Provincetown as a small stage,” she says. “We might not know each other’s names, but we are watching each other grow and age.”
Even so, she says, “I am aging for who I am, not for who others think I should be.”
