YOUR SPACE: Lordy, Lordy! Mary Lee is 102

OK, so Mary Lee is 102.

And she had a big birthday party Sunday. And everybody came thinking that, well, it could be her last ... even though she can see and hear better than her kids.

Lee doesn’t see herself as some story about a spry old lady who somehow beats the odds and doesn’t die at a normal age like the rest of us will.

“I didn’t inherit longevity. I’m just here,” says the bejeweled woman with makeup just so and lipstick that matches her magenta sweater.

Lee is older than 99-percent of the population on the planet, but on the inside she’s the same person as when she took the Palmer Lake wagon train to school, married a mechanic, raised five children, survived polio, worked, laughed, cried.

She buried a husband and a son. Immediate family members died young, many from cancer. She got colon cancer in her 90s, but kept on breathing, walking, eating candy, rooting for the Colorado Rockies and making herself look pretty.

“I like modern things, like television,” she says lucidly, despite reedy roughness that comes with age. “I like jewelry. If I can’t wear it or eat it, I don’t want it.”

She wouldn’t be caught dead without a stylish white wig from her collection.

“It makes her look 81,” her daughter, Bonnie Brooks, 74, says.

The wig company Lee orders from sent her a new wig for her birthday. She talks to wig merchants more than her doctor, who recently told her, “Come back in six months.”

She takes three Tylenols a day. That’s it. She prefers popping butterscotch candies from the dish on the glass coffee table in her assisted-living room at Residence at Skyway Park.

In April, after a menacing bout of pneumonia, she reluctantly gave up her condo, where she cooked, played cards and drove a car until her late 90s.

“Here they do it all but breathe for you. You just push a button. The food is good, I’ve gained weight,” says Lee, who uses a walker to navigate the hallways.

She took up bingo, where she wins the candy bars prizes more often than not at what is an all-female dorm at the moment.

“There are no men,” Lee says. “I wish a couple would move in.”

Sometimes, the place reminds her of her own mortality.

“There’s a woman next door and she’s just been dying for about two weeks,” says Lee, who took over a funny card to cheer her up.

“That I don’t want. I want to go in my sleep.”

She knows that all good things must come to an end.

“‘America’s Got Talent’ is over,” she says sadly, yet pleased to have another season under her belt.

Write to Mary Lee at 886 Arcturus Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80905

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Contact the writer at 636-0253
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