“I’ve made it to 99 in no small part because I have stubbornly refused to give into the bad stuff in life: failures and defeats, personal losses, loneliness and bitterness, the physical and emotional pains of aging,” he explained.

“That stuff is real but I have not let it define me. Instead, for the vast majority of my years, I have been in what I can only describe as a full-on bear hug with the experience of living. Being alive has been doing life — not like a job but rather like a giant playground.”

Van Dyke — who still sings with an a cappella group — also credited his 54-year-old wife, Arlene Silver, with keeping him from “wither[ing] away into a hermetic grouch.”