Gray Area: Cast of characters

Read the entire "Gray Area: Utah as it ages" series of reports here.

Mary Jane Lyons reinvented her old age, after her husband, Joseph, died. She movedfrom their home into a senior apartment in 2000, then lived with her son and his wife for five years, until they retired. In March, 2007, she went to assisted living at Christus St. Joseph Villa.

After his death, she trained to be a home health aide, but found it was just too soon, his memory too fresh for that kind of work. Instead, she got a job at a bakery in a grocery store. She's a doer, always busy, and says she is saved from boredom by crossword puzzles and the hoop hats she makes. One of her sons takes them downtown and distributes them to homeless men.

Jack Aoyagi grew up in West Hiawatha in Carbon County, and has lived in the same house in West Valley City for more than half a century, raising three children by himself. He retired from the Tooele Army Depot, where he worked as a foreman for four decades, then spent his days cycling, skiing, golfing, gardening and inventing. He once built a bicycle built for two with side-by-side seats. As a teenager, his youngest daughter Cindi remembers her dad jitterbugging with her and her friends, and he loved to dance at SaltAir. Now 84, he danced again last week at his granddaughter's wedding in Deer Valley.

Ellie Pasimeni

Ellie Pasimeni has always had an independent streak a mile wide, says her daughter, Jane Pasimeni Willie.

She will turn 88 in December and has only recently begun slowing down, challenged by advancing Parkinson's disease. "She keeps the bubble wrap fairies busy," Jane says.

Jane is one of three children born to Ellie and Thomas Pasimeni, who moved to Utah from New Jersey in later life to be near their grandchildren. He died in 1994.

The Pasimenis were adventurers with a heavy dose of wanderlust thrown in. After their children were grown, they sold their house and traveled the nation in a mini motorhome, the countryside their front porch.

Her room in assisted living at Christus St. Joseph Villa has hints of what she has always loved, including a bird clock that she had to mute because the tone sounds too much like the clock that chimes when it's time to take her medicine. She's always been an avid birdwatcher, she says. "As kids, we'd take a lunch and go up the hill to the only closed area you could go to and be in trees and hike in." She'd watch the birds.