At 77, I Thought I Knew All About Aging Well. Breast Cancer Taught Me Something Even More Important.
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Middle age hit me hard. Around 50 years old, I lost my partner and I gained almost 100 pounds while grieving. As a fashion designer I had dressed rock and roll stars in denim all through the 60s and 70s, and suddenly I didn’t like how I looked wearing jeans—I felt like I couldn’t be a “cool girl” anymore, and I was devastated.
I decided to use my skills as a designer to make jeans for aging women like me. I created a teleretail brand selling my designs on the Home Shopping Network, and it took off—which to me says all you need to know about my generation of women who feel invisible. My ethos is that fashion helps connect you to your younger self and allows you to feel like you again, albeit a much more mature you.
So, I thought I understood what it meant to age—that it meant finding new ways to feel confident and beautiful, and to reinvent yourself. That was until I was diagnosed with breast cancer at 71, and beat it three years later at 74.
“By the time I came out of my stage three diagnosis, I saw life differently.”
Cancer is a great leveler and a great revealer. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re wealthy, cancer doesn’t care if you’re beautiful, cancer doesn’t care if you live in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. And by the time I came out of my stage three diagnosis, I saw life differently—and I became much more grateful for it.
A truly pivotal moment happened inside the walls of the Dubin Breast Cancer Center in New York City while I was receiving treatment. About halfway through my protocol (which was, thank goodness, effective) I heard all of this commotion and chatter amongst the nurses. They were so thrilled, and I heard: “Shiela, yay, you’re here today!” “Girls, girls, Sheila’s here!” “Hey Sheila, we’ve got your favorite lunch today—we saved three of them for you.”
When finally a nurse came to my room to make sure I was okay, I said, “What do I look like, chopped liver to you guys? I mean, nobody asked me if I wanted lunch.” She replied, “Diane, you never eat lunch.” I said, “Well, but you could ask me—maybe I do this week. And by the way, who is this woman next door to me?”
Based on my outlook of the world at the time, I assumed she was a soap opera star, or a news anchor, or someone with a huge name in the corporate world or the world of beauty. I was wrong. She was a homeless woman. A homeless woman who had been abused and was living in a shelter with her child. And she had stage three breast cancer—just like me. The food was so horrific in the shelter that those sandwiches were going to be her one meal a day for the next three days once she left the treatment center.
That experience taught me everything I needed to know to handle the rest of my life. It taught me empathy, humility, and compassion, and helped me realize just how precious life is. It made my recovery that much more meaningful. Now, my life is so filled with gratitude, and I never pass up a moment to think to myself how lucky I am. Not just lucky to continue to live the wonderful life that I have, but to have learned that lesson in humility that I will carry with me forever.
“I decided I will forever be too young to be old.”
When I was younger I thought, I’m never gonna get old. But then I went through menopause early, around 40, and my skin and hair and everything else changed—and I panicked.
I harbored a lot of misconceptions about old age based on what I saw growing up as a baby boomer born to parents who lived through the Great Depression. I thought old age meant slowing down, losing your vibrancy, and having no goals or excitement in life. But I felt like things could be different, so I decided to migrate, rather than retire, from my jeans business in teleretail and began a podcast called Too Young to Be Old where my goal is to inspire and connect with women in the 50+ community. I took everything that frightened me about old age, which for the most part was becoming irrelevant (something society would like to convince us we are after a certain age), and decided to reverse it. I decided that I was going to be meaningful, relevant, active, and that I was going to do it my way.
Sometimes, part of old age and feeling old is feeling as though there’s no place left for you in society—and that is not a good feeling. So you must carve out space for yourself. For me, leaving my industry in teleretail was a little bit like the empty nest syndrome. I thought: Who am I now? What do I do now? How do I feel good about myself? I took chances and I’m learning something new every single day.
Surviving breast cancer helped me do that. When I came out of treatment in 2020, I made the deliberate decision to let my hair go white and saw that as a symbol for this new chapter. I took all that I learned along the way with me on the journey.
I thought about all the things I loved about myself when I was younger—I was very brave and hard working, I enjoyed setting goals and felt really good when I achieved them. Why wouldn’t I want to do that now, in my third act, in the years that are the most precious and most important? So I decided I will forever be too young to be old.
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