My grandmother folded into a living room chair and shut her eyes.

`` You're a martyr,'' said my mother.

`` I hated every minute of it,'' my grandmother fired back.

This was my first encounter with what can be any number of trying repercussions of extraordinary longevity. Bristling weariness, for instance -- for caretakers.

I was 4 and the youngest member of a four-generation household in Holyoke that had just been reduced to three. My great-grandmother had died upstairs, at 102, months after breaking her hip. But that seemed to be her only fragility. She remained imperious, her flowing white hair bundled into a bun, eyes and brain sharp, her skeletal frame hoisted for frequent cleaning on a sling rigged with pulleys.

I adored her.

My grandmother, widowed young by an accident, was her prime caretaker, day-in, day-out, while other family members toddled off to paid work in paper mills, in clothing shops and at newspapers.

I suppose I, too, was Edna's charge much of the time in that boiling mass of aunts and uncles and cousins. It's said that I nearly drowned in the bathtub. I imagine it was incidental to the hum of loosely assigned authority. Weren't you watching her?

My great-grandmother was 102, but I nearly bought the farm in three inches of water.

With her death arrived my first lesson that advanced age is a complex blessing which is why, now, it is so feared by so many people. Just 25 percent of Americans die at home surrounded by friends and family, reports the American Health Care Association, though 70 percent would prefer to do so.

I thought of this last week in reading results of the new study on longevity produced by Harvard University researchers. They know that some people in some places live longer than other people in other places. They're not sure why. Tobacco? Obesity? Something in the air? Genes? Poverty is one factor being examined. But poverty was rife back in the 1940s. And my great-grandmother lasted and lasted. Was that because she was in the arms of family?

It's almost unheard of now for multiple generations to live under one roof, especially until death, although more are prophesied with the aging of the Boomers. Some of you will say `` That would ensure a shorter life for everyone!'' But I wonder.

My memories of those childhood days are not mythology: There was conversation around a big round dinner table, there were homemade cinnamon cookies in a tin on a shelf and it was my job to pluck Japanese beetles off the bean vine and drop them into a can of kerosene.

We all had parts in maintaining what would now be called a wacky household. We humans are, despite evidence to the contrary in divorce rates, geographic transience and mansions abandoned for the workplace and soccer practice, born to be herd animals.

`` I hated every minute of it,'' my grandmother said the evening her mother died.

But it was not the parent whom she hated. It was her responsibility of witness and watchdog and support -- all those roles now deftly handed off to strangers. She was one tired lady. Did it hurt her own chances for survival?

You decide.

She died at the same address at age 93.

rdrtrdrsrdrw15rsp160 BETSY SHEA-TAYLOR is associate Opinion Page editor. She can be reached at 508-236-0439 or at prosewing(at)(at)aol.com.