“You Don’t Age Alone”: GPNYC’s Ron Roel on Many Voices, One Community
Most families don’t plan for aging, they react to it. A parent falls and breaks a hip, and suddenly the question isn’t whether Mom can stay in the home she’s lived in for decades. It’s what happens next week.
Gray Panthers NYC board member Ron Roel has spent years trying to break that pattern. On a recent episode of Many Voices, One Community on hmTv, he sat down with host Gaitley Stephenson Matthews, a longtime friend from the Glen Cove community, to talk about aging in place, caregiving, loneliness, and why the generations need each other more than we admit.
From the newsroom to Act Two
Ron’s path into aging advocacy started at Newsday, where he covered business and the workplace. During one event he was covering, a financial planner’s talk really made him think. The planner asked his audience how long they expected to live, and how long their children might. The answer, possibly past 100, reframed everything. Longer lives meant midlife was no longer the start of a slow decline. It was the halfway point of a life that could stay vital with the right skills and tools.
That insight became “Act Two,” the Newsday section for readers 50 and older that Ron helped found and ran for years. Then he launched his own second act, going out on his own while keeping his focus on older adults, a population he saw as overlooked and too often pushed to the margins by ageism. Today he works with the Glen Cove Senior Center, AARP, and Gray Panthers to help people live well and purposefully at every age.
A navigator for the hardest road
Ron’s book, The Caregiving Navigator, grew from that reporter’s instinct and from his own family’s story. When his father died suddenly in the 1990s, his mother was left on her own in the family home, and her children faced the question every caregiver eventually asks: now what? His mother later died of Alzheimer’s.
The book follows caregiving as it actually unfolds. First, helping a parent age in place safely, down to grab bars in the bathroom and loose rugs on the floor. Then keeping social ties alive once a spouse is gone. Then deciding what kind of in-home help is needed, when it’s time to consider assisted living or supportive housing, and how to make the final chapter as meaningful as possible. Even with dementia, Ron reminds us, “they're still alive,” and family can still show up for that life.
Each section comes with checklists: questions to ask home care providers, what to ask an elder law attorney. Ron calls it a starter kit, a template families adapt to their own journey. The first edition focused on Long Island resources, and he keeps them current on his website.
When people tell him families only plan in crisis, his answer is simple: he knows. That’s the point. “I want you to plan for crises.”
Loneliness is a health crisis
Ron points to the Surgeon General’s warning of an epidemic of loneliness, one that falls hardest on older adults as spouses die, families scatter, and the social structures that once held people together fall away. Connection isn’t a luxury. Mental and physical health are bound together, and isolation erodes both.
That’s why community anchors matter. Gaitley credits the Glen Cove Senior Center, which welcomes people from beyond Glen Cove, as a driving force in keeping older adults active, engaged, and seen.
Ageism cuts both ways
Growing older has made Ron more curious about younger generations, not less. “You don't age alone,” he says. Ageism isn’t only about disparaging older people. Stereotypes run in every direction, and the remedy is putting generations in the same room.
Ron grew up with his grandparents under the same roof, in a two-family house in Brooklyn, until his parents moved to Long Island to his grandfather’s dismay. Today’s families scatter much farther. The answer, he argues, is intentionality: protecting time together, and building low-pressure ways for students and older adults to simply sit down and swap stories, like the connections Glen Cove has been fostering between its schools, senior center, and youth bureau. Gaitley shared two moments that capture it: a Vietnam veteran pulling aside a young man headed into military service at a Locust Valley American Legion event, and a local senior prom where high school seniors and older adults share the same dance floor.
Intergenerational solidarity has been at the heart of the Gray Panthers since 1970. Ron is carrying it forward one conversation at a time.
Plan for 100
Ron is about to turn 75, and he says plainly that we need to get over our discomfort with saying our age. His YouTube show, 45 Forward, is named on purpose: he chose 45 instead of 50 so people start thinking about the second half of life before they arrive there. When Gaitley joked that meant he’d be living to 90, Ron corrected her. We plan for 100.
Watch the full episode of Many Voices, One Community on hmTv, find out more about The Caregiving Navigator here, and catch 45 Forward on YouTube.
