Growing Older
A woman of sixty in the Known World has twenty good years in front of her, which Living Long describes and nobody has an explanation for. So she is not put aside. She runs her household until she chooses to hand it on, and then runs the parts she enjoys. She minds grandchildren, which is what lets her daughter or daughter-in-law work. If she holds a trade she is at her most valuable, because she has Skaella nobody can shortcut, and spends more time teaching than at the bench.
Publicly she is an Eldershore elder, a Clearhold examiner, a Stormharbor Skald holding a genealogy nobody else can recite, a neighborhood schoolmistress, or simply the woman on the street whose opinion settles things. The senpei of a large household is the same principle inside its walls: experience is what the position needs, and it cannot be got any faster than it can be got.
A man's last decades run the same way; he keeps his trade, his guild, and his table, and a master past the bench is a master who teaches.