Estelle Getty

Estelle Getty passed away July 22, 2008.

There are certain accessories that define a woman’s power. A good pair of comfortable shoes that don’t pinch your toes after standing at the stove for three hours, a tube of lipstick that survives a three-course meal and a bout of worrying, and, if you are Sophia Petrillo, a wicker handbag heavy enough to concuss a burglar at fifty paces.

When Estelle Getty passed away, a little piece of every woman who ever weaponized a purse or told an unvarnished family truth went with her.

We live in a culture that treats aging like a typographical error—something to be corrected, hidden, or whispered about behind a hand at the beauty parlor while waiting for the hairspray to dry. Youth is marketed to us in glowing neon, while middle age and beyond are tucked away in the back pages of the catalog next to orthopedic sandals, wrinkle creams that promise miracles in a jar, and adult undergarments. But Estelle Getty, wrapped in sensible cardigans, perched behind oversized spectacles, and sporting a silver wig that looked like it had survived a category-four windstorm in Brooklyn, looked old age dead in the eye and laughed until milk came out of its nose.

Picture it: television, 1985. Four women sharing a modest-looking house in Miami, navigating the uncharted, shark-infested waters of the golden years. Society at the time didn't know what to do with older women on television unless they were baking cookies in a rocking chair, losing their glasses, or needing someone to rescue them from a well. But The Golden Girls didn’t rock. They rolled, they shouted, they ate cheesecake at midnight like dietary laws didn't apply to them, and they had a social life that made modern teenagers look like medieval monks.

And right at the center of that hurricane of sarcasm, quick wit, and dairy products was Estelle, playing a woman three decades her senior. Think about that for a second, especially for modern readers scrolling through history on a smartphone. Estelle Getty was actually younger than Bea Arthur, who played her television daughter, Dorothy. She spent hours in a makeup chair every single morning being aged into an octogenarian, donning layers of artificial wrinkles and adopting a posture that looked like a permanent question mark, only to deliver lines with the speed and precision of a fast-pitch softball hurler. She wore age not as a burden, but as a brilliant, glittering suit of armor.

Every family has a Sophia. She’s the woman at the Thanksgiving table who looks at your new hairstyle, takes a slow sip of iced tea, and asks if you're planning on leaving the house looking like a stray poodle that got caught in a lawnmower. She doesn't do it to be mean; she does it because she loves you too much to let you walk out the front door looking foolish. Sophia Petrillo was the patron saint of brutally honest mothers. She gave voice to every single thought that polite society told women of a certain age to swallow along with their daily multivitamins and calcium chews.

When Sophia started a sentence with, "Picture it, Sicily, 1922," you didn't check your watch or look at your text messages. You sat down and shut up because you knew you were about to hear a parable involving rogue goats, star-crossed lovers, eccentric relatives, and a moral lesson involving garlic or stubbornness. It was domestic folklore mixed with pure, unadulterated Borscht Belt timing—a reminder that no matter how chaotic our modern lives get, our ancestors dealt with the exact same nonsense, just without indoor plumbing.

Estelle herself wasn't a wisecracking Sicilian spitfire in real life; by all accounts, she was a remarkably sweet, gentle, and notoriously shy woman who struggled with severe stage fright. She was a master craftsperson who took a two-dimensional character sketch and breathed a fiery, stubborn soul into it. She showed generations of women that you don’t have to fade into the wallpaper just because your calendar has more years behind it than ahead of it.

For modern readers today—people juggling remote work, endless notifications, mortgage rates, and the general vertigo of the twenty-first century—Estelle Getty and The Golden Girls offer a sanctuary. Today’s audiences stream those episodes on laptops while eating microwave dinners, finding profound comfort in a Miami kitchen where problems are solved over a shared cheesecake before the credits roll. It’s an antidote to the manic speed of the modern world. Estelle and her castmates remind us to slow down, pull up a chair, and laugh at the inescapable absurdity of the human condition. They remind us that aging is not a tragic decline; it’s an audience with someone who has seen enough nonsense not to take any more of it from anybody.

When Estelle left us in July of 2008, the world lost a comedic giant, but the sisterhood of women who refuse to apologize for taking up space lost a dear friend. She proved that the golden years don't have to be quiet or dignified in that boring, sepia-toned way advertisers try to sell us in commercials for insurance. They can be loud, messy, laced with sugar, and armed with a handbag that means business.

So here’s to Estelle Getty. May your cheesecake always be rich, your cardigans cozy, and your purse heavy enough to keep the world in line. Rest in peace, Sophia. You taught us how to grow old with style, sass, and a punchline ready to go.