Shavuot and Pentecost

Last Sunday, we left Shavuot services early, just before the Torah reading was to begin, in order to arrive on time at our eldest grandson’s confirmation ceremony at St. Augustine R.C. church in Park Slope.   It was one of those years that Shavuot and Pentecost arrive on the same day, always, of course, a Sunday.  A gothic church, both inside and out, St. Augustine’s interior is beautiful, with numerous large stained glass windows, which filtered the bright noon light.  An organist was playing Bach when we entered, looking for our daughter and our son-in-law, who had preceded us.  We had almost decided they hadn’t yet arrived, when our son-in-law spotted us and guided us to our seats.  Our grandson was seated in a separate section along with his sponsor, a first cousin once removed, the daughter of his father’s aunt.

A screaming child sat directly behind us, which meant there was much I couldn’t hear, including the presiding priest’s explanation of the meaning of the Holy Spirit.  When it was time for parishioners to greet each other, with the expression “Peace be with you, “ I told the unfortunate mother, who was holding the child, quiet for the moment, “Peace be with you” with unusual sincerity.   In spite of my not hearing well, I thought that the ceremony was a beautiful one. 

Much as I would have wished my grandson to have grown up Jewish, I had to admit that there are many routes to spirituality, no matter how strange they might seem to an outsider, and that our grandson seems committed to the faith of his father and his father’s fathers.  I also had to admit to myself that when I only a little older than he is now, I felt an attraction to the Catholic church after having read Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. Of course, that was well before I learned anything at all about my own religious heritage.

An Orthodox Jewish family sits shiva when their child marries a non-Jew, treating their child as dead.  This was furthest from our minds when our daughter chose to marry a devout Catholic and promised, as a condition of being married by the Church, to raise their children as Catholics.  Consider our beloved daughter dead?  What could be more horrible?  Lose her? Lose our wonderful grandson?  Never.  Our son-in-law is a lovely man, a decent man, a good father and a good husband, and it’s not his fault that he’s not Jewish.   Nobody’s perfect, after all. 




2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

The Saddest Sound

It’s a Jewish practice for mourners to shovel some dirt onto the coffin of the departed, carrying the dirt on the back of the shovel to show reluctance for the task.   The sound of dirt striking a coffin is the saddest sound in the world.  It is also the most final.  It brings home to the mourners the unassailable fact that their loved one is gone.

I heard that sound Wednesday.  It was at the funeral of my first cousin, Malcolm Fritz, a year and a half younger than me.  As children we never lived more than a ten minute walk from each other’s homes and I used to play with him.  I remember our climbing a tree in his back yard.  For the past thirteen years he had been battling prostate cancer until at last he had no more strength to fight and the cancer killed him at last.

After the gravesite ceremony, I wandered over to my parents’ graves.  The first two American generations of my mother’s family are buried in this beautifully maintained cemetery in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a small town about twelve and half miles from downtown Boston.  There lie my grandparents, my parents, my two uncles, my three aunts, and my aunts’ and uncles’ spouses.  Malcolm was not the first of my maternal grandparents’ sixteen grandchildren to die – his older sister and a younger cousin preceded him, but neither is buried at this cemetery.  Malcolm is the first of the third generation, our generation, to be buried next to his parents.  You can read about it from another point of view, that of my niece, who kindly drove me up and back: lazygal.blogspot.com/2012/05/circle-of-life.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FNqJH+%28Killin%27+time+being+lazy%29

After the ceremony I wondered if my wife and I were doing the right thing to leave our bodies to a medical school.  I worried that that the death of the other would not seem as real as it would if the thud of dirt on the coffin were heard.  My wife assured me that nothing would make the death of the other seem real.  “Even if you’ve shoveled dirt on my coffin,” she said, “you will still look for me; you will see me walking down the street; you will find me everywhere and nowhere.  Only with time will you realize I’m gone for good, but even that won’t stop you from holding imaginary conversations with me.”  She convinced me that leaving our bodies to a medical school would not cause the other to suffer additional pain.

Once the medical students have learned what there is to be learned from our ancient cadavers, our instructions are that our remains be cremated.  My wife asked me if I’d like my ashes to buried in our family’s plot.  There’s room for several more corpses.  I asked her if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition for her, our children and grandchildren, my siblings and their children to travel all the way to Wakefield just to deposit  my ashes.  For  most of the people who would come to the burial, Wakefield is relatively inaccessible.  "We won’t visit your grave afterwards, no matter where it is," she said, "so after the burial it won’t matter. We’ll have plenty of time to arrange the funeral.”  She said she wouldn’t mind her ashes being placed there as well.  The idea of my being buried not only near my wife but also near my parents is pleasing to me.  Before we change our instructions I’ll have to check it out with our children and my siblings, but if they don’t object, we’ll probably be buried there. 

In the meantime, I remain the senior cousin, from the point of view of age, a position I hope to maintain for many more years.

2010-2012 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Palliative Care

Among my daughter’s many virtues is her alertness to articles that might stimulate a blogpost.  She’s done it yet again with an article in The Washington Post, by Amy Berman, who received a diagnosis two years ago of stage four breast cancer (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/terminal-breast-cancer-leads-woman-to-pick-palliative-care-not-aggressive-therapy/2012/04/30/gIQAY6rBsT_story.html).   Her breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer, is the most deadly kind, with only a 40% five-year survival rate. 

She decided to forego aggressive therapy – intensive chemotherapy, radiation, a mastectomy, and more chemotherapy – which might extend her life for a few months but would, as she knew from her experience as a registered nurse, make her miserable in the process.  “Because my progressing illness is incurable,” she wrote, “I’ve chosen a solely palliative approach, and my oncologist has embraced my choice.  Together the two of us chose a treatment regimen that would slow tumor growth while protecting what was precious to me, my quality of life.  Instead of waging war with a disease that can’t be cured, my doctors and I are focusing on treatment that optimizes how I function and addresses my symptoms,  This treatment will include, when I need it, comfort care for pain symptoms.”

At the beginning of my current treatment, four years after the initial diagnosis of prostate cancer, which had supposedly been cured by radiation and hormone therapy, my new medical oncologist told me that he would begin with hormone therapy and after that treatment failed, as it eventually does, he would proceed to other measures, including chemotherapy.   For the moment, the hormone treatment has slowed the progress of my illness to the extent that I have no symptoms.  I can carry on my normal activities without pain.  As for the next steps after the present regime fails, I don’t know what to ask for.  I don’t know what is more precious to me, a good quality of life or added months of life.  I’ll need to find out how miserable the next set of treatments will make me and how much time they are likely to buy me.   After reading the article my daughter sent me, I know that I must make that decision sooner rather than later.



2010-2012 - Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Fear of Driving

In last Monday’s post, I wrote that we struggle not to give unsolicited advice to our children but that they don’t return the favor, giving us more advice the older we become.  “They suspect, I fear, that whatever sense we might once have possessed has declined with age to the point that we’ve become innocents in a depraved world.”  In response, my niece wrote me that it’s not that our children think we’ve become simple-minded but that they see us acting as if we’re a lot younger and that such behavior could get us into trouble.  The example she gave is now faced by a friend of hers, the child of elderly parents who don’t realize that their driving skills have deteriorated. 

This is a problem for a lot of adult children - how to pry the driver’s keys away from their parents, when those parents’ driving has become dangerous to themselves and to others.   Understandably, many parents resist their children’s efforts to remove them from the driver’s seat because in many cases, giving up driving means loss of independence, especially if they live in a city with inadequate public transportation, such as Los Angeles, or if they live in the country.  But practical considerations are only one of the factors that motivate resistance.  Driving is an icon of adulthood, of mastery.  To remove it symbolizes a return to that earlier state when one was dependent on others, in this case a symbol not of youthfulness but of decay.

About five years ago I let my driver’s license lapse.   We were then living in the center of downtown Jerusalem, which offered splendid public transportation. Mainly I didn’t use it because I could walk to most of my destinations.  I drove so very seldom that I began to feel uneasy when I did get behind the wheel.  One day, I drove too near a bus that had stopped by the side of the road.  I drove so close to the bus that I clipped my right-hand side-view mirror, which flew into the passenger compartment.  This incident so unnerved me that I decided then and there that my driving days were over, even though at that time I was only 75.  A motoring career that had begun at age 16 and had seen me drive on three continents, including countries in which you drive on the wrong side of the road, a career in which I drove across America three times by myself, had come to an inglorious conclusion.   I knew I was right to stop driving, but I felt bad about it just the same.  I felt less of a man, which is absurd, I know, but there it is.

But I also felt relief.  For the fact is I was never a superb driver, not like my wife, who loves to drive.  I remember that the late Paul Reynolds, my college friend who had come home with me during one of our breaks from classes, criticized my driving, telling me I was straddling two lanes.  This happened more than 60 years ago but the memory of it is as clear as if it happened yesterday. The only time I saw my beloved father–in- law lose his temper was when he was a passenger in a car I was driving much too slowly to suit him.  He insisted I change places with him.  This hurt my feelings, and it took me a while to forgive him for it, but no doubt he was right.  My pokiness has a precedent in my mother, who was among the world’s worst drivers.  It was she who taught me to drive.  (“Now stay in the left-hand lane,” she would say, “and don’t pay any attention to the honking behind you,” as we proceeded at a stately 25 miles per hour.)  I felt relief when I stopped driving because for the almost 60 years after I started to drive, I never lost the fear that I would run someone over.  At long last that fear has gone.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Letting Go and Shutting Up

Our daughter, a palliative care social worker at a Brooklyn hospital, organizes an annual memorial for those patients who have died during the past year.  Held last week, this year’s memorial attracted about 100 mourners.  Among them was a woman in her seventies, who told the following anecdote about her mother, who lived with her and who died in her mid-nineties. 

A few months before her mother died, the two of them went to an evening party.  After awhile the mother went home but the daughter remained at the party for a few more hours.   When she came home, her mother gave her hell for staying out so late.  “I had to wait up for you until you came home, and all the time I was worried!”

If I manage to live to my mid-nineties, I hope I’ll be able to go home by myself from an evening party, but I also hope that I won’t be so far gone as to talk to my children like that.  

As parents we’re responsible for the care and nurturing of our children from infancy to their adulthood, but at some point we have to let go.  We have to let them make their own way along with their own mistakes, even as we grit our teeth to keep ourselves from giving them unsolicited advice.

That old lady was worried about her daughter, even though her daughter was an old lady too.  That’s only natural.  We worry about our children and then, to a lesser extent, about their children, as long as we live.   A mother once told me that she was only as happy as her least unhappy child, and a mother of five told me that she was glad she had so many children.  She figured that at any one time at least one of them was likely to be in good shape.

Before I became a parent, I thought that once my as yet unborn children turned 18, I could forget about them.  How absurd!  Your children are forever uppermost in your mind.

“Sorry is the hardest word,” according to an Elton John lyric, but even harder is to say nothing at all, when tempted to give your adult child unsolicited advice.  When a child marries, I once heard, you should open your wallet and shut your mouth.  I’m not sure about the first, but as for the second, it’s essential, no matter how worried you are about your child.

But your children are not obligated to act the same way towards you.  Both of ours offer unsolicited advice and the older we become the more frequent the advice.  They suspect, I fear, that whatever sense we might once have possessed has declined with age to the point that we’ve become innocents in a depraved world, in need of their protection.  I don’t mind.  Their concern is motivated by love.  Besides, they may be right.






2010-2012 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

"Freud's Last Session"

Last Sunday, Mothers’ Day, our houseguest, who is a German psychoanalyst, my wife, and I attended a matinee performance of “Freud’s Last Session,” an imaginary conversation in 1939 between C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud in the latter’s study.  Before the play began, a young woman announced that in honor of Mothers’ Day, all mothers in the audience would be invited one by one to mount the stage and have their picture taken on Freud’s analytic couch, with the actor who played Freud.  The photos would be sent to the mothers by e-mail.  I looked at my wife.  “She’ll never do that,” I thought to myself.

She was among the first to line up for a photo.   She is not,  thank whatever gods may be, like me.  Not only is she not like me, she was not like the other mothers, all of whom lay down on the couch, with the actor playing Freud sitting in Freud’s chair. Instead, my wife sat in his chair and asked him to lie on the  couch, which he smiling did.  “I’m tired,” he said.  So in the photo she seems to be analyzing Freud.

Why did I think she wouldn’t want to be photographed on stage?  Because I wouldn’t.  I recalled an incident when I was nine or ten years old.  The group of boys of which I was a member – I think it was a cub scout troop – was taken to the Boston Garden to watch a performance (a rodeo?) in which Gene Autry was the star.    Our counselor had arranged for us to meet the great man, who appeared in cowboy boots and chaps, ready to autograph our programs and shake our hands.  Shake our hands?  I was far too shy to shake his hand.  Instead, I kept to the back of the line and never did meet him.  I don’t remember a thing about the performance.  I only remember being too shy to shake Gene Autry’s hand.

Had it been Fathers' Day, I told my wife later, I wouldn’t have accepted an invitation to be photographed with the actor who played Freud.  “What if the actors were women?” asked my wife.  ‘‘Would you have accepted an invitation to be photographed with them?”  I told her I wasn’t sure.

In my last post, I recounted my conversation with our psychoanalyst friend about my surprise at being old.  The reason, he said, is that our emotions don’t change, don’t grow older.  So there I was, an 80-year-old man at “Freud’s Last Session," still ten years old.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

How Did I Get to be 80?

Yesterday was our guest’s last full day in New York before leaving for a conference in Tel Aviv, where he will spend a week before flying home to Germany.   A past president of his city’s psychoanalytic institute and instrumental in bringing psychoanalytic method to the former East Germany, he was a stimulating guest.

Although he had visited New York many times before, he had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge, so I took him to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, which offers a spectacular view of it.   On our way to Borough Hall, which was next on our morning’s tour, I pointed out Monroe Place, a few blocks away from the Promenade, where I had lived more than 50 years ago.   Fifty years ago!  How is it possible when most of the time I don’t feel as if I’m more than 40?

Most of the time, yes, but there are frequent reality checks.  Among them are climbing the subway stairs, when I have to stop half way up to rest my aching thigh muscles even though I’d been half pulling myself up by means of the railing.  And then there are the many times young people offer me their seat on the subway without my asking them, without my even first meeting their gaze. 

Just the other day, as my wife, our German friend, and I were walking to Shabbat services (he’s not Jewish but was accompanying us out of curiosity), as we waited for the light to change at the Grand Army Plaza, a young fellow, perhaps 20, called out to me, “You look sharp!”  This pleased me, of course, for I had done my best to dress well, but on the other hand I reflected that he would never have complimented me had I been even twenty years younger. 

When I discussed the interchange with our psychoanalyst friend, he said, “Do you remember when you were twenty or thirty and encountered a man in his 80s? Then you’ll know how you appear to others.”  Of course he’s right, but that reality check was a particularly bitter one.

I offered my theory that just as I feel free to address a baby, an utter stranger, so the young man felt free to address me.  And what’s in common between the baby and me?  It’s powerlessness, exclusion from the  role-relationships of everyday life, as least as perceived by the public at large.

“Why,” I asked our friend, “am I so surprised to find that I’m 80?”  He said he knew what I meant because he feels the same way at 75.  “Because,” he continued, “our emotions haven’t grown old. They’re the same as they always were.”  That explains a lot more than my surprise at having grown old.  



2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Righrs Reserved

The New Eden

The other day I accepted a tract from an old lady who was sitting on the low stone wall of the glass-fronted residential tower near our home.  "Life in a Peaceful New World" was its title, printed over a picture of an autumn landscape with a blue lake dotted with villas in the middle distance and snow-capped mountains at the horizon.  The scene is populated by smiling workers harvesting the fruits of the season, a couple whose daughter is petting a lion, while two deer walk by, a mother and daughter, who are both stroking the head of a brown bear, and a young couple walking hand in hand towards the lake. But then everyone is young in this picture, young and beautiful.  It ‘s the artist’s vision of a modern Garden of Eden, with not a serpent in sight.

“When you look at the scene on this tract,” the text begins…does not your heart yearn for the peace, happiness, and prosperity seen there?”  It’s not a dream, not a fantasy, the text continues, in spite of the realities of today’s world: “war, crime, sickness, aging – to mention a few.”  All can be banished if we “learn God’s will and then do it,“ when, according to Psalm 37:29 “the righteous themselves will possess the earth, and they will reside forever upon it.”

I was amused by the idea of God’s kingdom abolishing aging, since He has also commanded us to be fruitful and multiply.  As it is, the source of some of the world’s ills is overcrowding.  The prospect of never growing old, of one’s children catching up to us in age and then never changing, of living forever, with nothing to make us appreciate the gift of being alive, is not my idea of Heaven on Earth.

Perhaps it will be possible to banish hunger and not impossible if even less likely to eliminate war, but to erase crime, sickness, and aging is to alter the human condition, to make us like the angels, to make us, in other words, unreal.  

I’m reminded of a scene in Woody Allen’s "The Purple Rose of Cairo" when an actor steps out of the screen into the audience and talks to the character played by Mia Farrow.  "But you're not real," she tells him.  “But I can learn to be real,” he says.  I’m already real and glad of it.

Damn Fool

Last Saturday night, at the intersection of 42^nd Street and Eighth Avenue, as we were walking to the subway, we paused for a traffic light.  We had just come from the performance of a play to which my brother and double sister in law (she’s my brother’s wife and my wife’s sister) had treated us in honor of our 49^th anniversary, which fell on that day.  As the four of us waited for the light to change, we heard the sirens of an ambulance and a police car on Eighth Avenue just south of 42^nd Street.   The light did change, permitting us to walk across the avenue, but the cars which had stopped for the red light were blocking the ambulance and police car in front of them.   Most of the pedestrians who had been waiting to cross, now waited for the cars in front of the emergency vehicles to enter the intersection, against the light.

We then saw an astonishing sight.  An elderly man started to cross Eighth Avenue, in spite of the wailing sirens and the cars which had begun gingerly to drive uptown against their light.  What was he thinking?  Another old man ran after him and made him stop in the middle of the street to allow the cars and the emergency vehicles to pass.  When they gained the other side of the avenue, the other man hugged the old man who had so foolishly tempted fate.

People, that foolish old man was me.  And the old man who ran after him was my brother, who risked his life to save mine.

The traffic lights may be fool proof but they’re not damn-fool proof.  What was I thinking?  I thought I’d have enough time to cross before the blocked traffic began to move.  I was both stupid and wrong.   Too late I remembered a character in T. S. Eliot’s play, The Cocktail Party, saying “I’d rather get to Chicago a little late than to Hell on time.”

All day I’d been thinking that if seven is a lucky number, then 49, or seven times seven, must be doubly lucky.   It turns out I was right.

Bismarck remarked that God protects children, drunks, fools, and the United States of America.  It turns out he was right too.

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H. Paul Reynolds

H. Paul Reynolds lived at the end of the corridor on the fourth floor of Cascadilla Hall, a freshman dormitory at Cornell University, where I was also a freshman.  My room was on the other side of the corridor from Paul and his three suite mates, somewhat further down the corridor from them.   A member of the swimming team and one of the university’s premiere fraternities, Paul was tall, good looking, athletic, and charismatic, but he was also gentle, kind, and a good listener.  Of course I both liked him and admired him immensely.

Alas, my mother died towards the end of my sophomore year, I transferred to Harvard so that I could live at home and help my bereaved father with my younger brother and sister.  When I made a short trip to Ithaca in my junior year to visit my friends, Paul was one of the people I most wanted to see.  And when I received notices of class reunions, which up to now I’ve never managed to attend – partly because we were living in Israel for much of the time since I graduated college – I imagined meeting him again.  Whenever I opened the Cornell alumni magazine's class notes, I looked for his name, hoping to learn something of what happened to him.  I found his address in a class reunion booklet – he had moved to   California – but that’s all I knew about him.  Still, he was such an outstanding figure during my college years that he remained very much in my mind.

By now our class notes have migrated to the front of the class notes section – very few classes now precede us – and the obituary notices for our class continue to grow longer each year.  I now check the obituaries before I check the class notes and it was in the obituary column that I found Paul’s name. He had died in January. 

I found an obituary notice at http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sanluisobispo/obituary.aspx?n=h-paul-reynolds&pid=155645101 from the San Luis Obisbo Tribune, which included a photograph of him, white haired but still unusually handsome.  He had been a successful businessman, first as an executive for the Ford Motor Company, then as the proprietor of a Ford Motor distributorship, and finally as an investor and real estate developer.  He had been an observant Catholic when I knew him and I guess he remained one inasmuch as he became the father of ten children.  Besides his wife and children, he left 20 grandchildren and three great grandchildren.  Active in community affairs, an MG and sailing enthusiast, he seems to have led an exemplary life.  It was Parkinson’s Disease that killed him.

Why do I feel so sad at his loss?  Our friendship was brief, lasting no more than two years, and I have had no contact with him since, other than on that brief trip to Ithaca in my junior year, 60 years ago.  He seems to have lived his life well.  And at 80 it was a long life, if not long enough.  But the friendships of one’s youth have a special flavor, and the death of such friends is particularly poignant.  My sadness proceeds not especially from his death's reminding me of my own mortality, which is pretty central in my thoughts these days, but from the death of my youth.  As long as Paul was alive, my youth seemed to exist unimpaired in some parallel universe.   Now it’s finally gone.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

Romance at 80

Remember Helen Trent?  The heroine of a long-running soap opera, she proved "what so many women long to prove...that romance can begin at 35."  I thought of that program recently in connection with the MacBook Air, which proves that romance can begin not only at 35 but at 80.

I first saw it when our computer technician, who had come to help me install a new printer, pulled out his MacBook Air, and I fell in love.  I remembered then a similar sensation when I first saw the Jaguar XK120, a two-seater manufactured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  I was in the American army then, during the aftermath of the Korean War, stationed at Fort Totten, in Bayside, Queens.  Since I had to work staggered shifts, I often had my mornings and afternoons free, when I would travel into Manhattan.  It was there that I first saw that glorious machine, the most beautiful car, in my opinion, ever made.  It combined voluptuously feminine curves with great power (the 120 refers to its maximum speed), very much like the MacBook Air.

I had been toying with the idea of replacing my four or five-year-old PC, whose increasing slowness was beginning to annoy me and whose hard disk was continuing to fill beyond the point that I thought safe.  When I saw the technician's MacBook Air, felt its lightness and imagined the pleasure it would be to travel with it, I decided to buy one.  Our technician returned and installed and formatted it for me, transferring my files from the old computer to the new one.  I'm typing on it now for the first time.

The MacBook Air proved that romance is not dead at 80.  I'm hoping that it will also prove that an 80- has year man can learn a new system.  After all, I've been working on PCs since the 1980s, so its various shortcuts are automatic for me.  Now I hunt for keys that are not there ("page up" for example).  I don't yet know the most elementary commands, such as "print" or "move cursor to the end of the line." I don't yet know how to copy this essay and paste it onto my blog.  Perhaps my 13-year-old grandson will be kind enough to give me a tutorial.  In the meantime, I've learned, to paraphrase Johnson, that while romance has many virtues, it has also many pains.




2010-2012  Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Beth's Gift

The other day my wife and I talked about Beth, a good friend of ours, who died of lung cancer about two years ago when she was in her early sixties.  Like another of our friends who died of lung cancer, she had never smoked nor lived with a smoker, so her disease was one more instance of the lack of justice in the world.  After graduating from Barnard College, she went to Israel for what she thought would be a year. But in Israel she met her future husband, an Israeli, and in Israel they stayed.  They lived in Jerusalem, where they raised four children.

We knew her and her husband in several contexts.  We were members of the same congregation, her husband and I served in the same army reserve unit, he was my graduate student and he prepared me for my first public reading of the Haftarah.  She and my wife were members of the same “cooking group,” which met monthly for a three-course dinner, at which the recipes for the courses were exchanged.  Once a year, in June, the club invited the husbands to a grand dinner, featuring some of the most successful recipes. 

Beth was a lovely person in both form and character, gentle, equable, and sensible.  After learning of her diagnosis, she told my wife that her terminal disease was a gift.  My wife told me that at the time she didn’t know what Beth meant but now she understands that Beth’s diagnosis made her appreciate every minute of the time that was left to her, made her live intensely in the moment.  Beth made a last visit to her nonegenarian parents in America, she gave d’vrei Torah and read from the Torah at our synagogue, and she continued to work until her condition progressed to a point that made it impossible for her to do so.  During all this time, she appreciated as she had never done before the beauty of being alive.

My wife said that the reason she now understands Beth’s calling her disease a gift is that my cancer has pushed the reality of our mortality front and center.  My wife says that she now treasures our time together, which formerly she took for granted.  I too treasure it, which is why I’m now reluctant to part from her for any length of time.  My diagnosis has dramatically heightened my appreciation for being alive.  Even the most ordinary moments seem vivid to me when I think that some day I’ll no longer be able to experience them.  But until my wife told me, I hadn’t thought that my cancer might also have positive effects for her. 

When I walk outside and pass so many people who look sad or worried or angry, frowning and grim, I want to stop them and tell them to be happy they’re alive. I want to tell them to look about them and see the beauty of creation – yes, even in the middle of Seventh Avenue - and to remember how much better it is to be alive than dead.  But they’d look at me as if I were one more of the city’s innumerable crazies, so of course I never do.  What though is likely to shake them up and make them treasure the time they have left?  But why am I acting so superior?  I was just like them until my diagnosis.   But just as Beth was grateful for  hers, my wife and I are thankful for mine.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

"Don't Just Sit There"

That’s the title of an article in Sunday’s Times, which reports the baneful results of inactivity, particularly sitting (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/sunday-review/stand-up-for-fitness.html?_r=1.)  A National Cancer Institute study that followed almost a quarter million Americans over eight years was one of the studies that the article cited.  At the beginning of the study, none of the study’s respondents was suffering from diabetes, cancer, or heart disease.  After eight years, many were sick and many had died.  As might be expected, those who were most sedentary – defined as those who watched television for at least seven hours a day - had a higher risk of premature death than those who watched less often. 

What astounded me is that “people in the study who exercised for seven hours or more a week but spent at least seven hours a day in front of the television were more likely to die prematurely than the small group who worked out seven hours a week and watched less than an hour of TV a day.”  A new Australian study estimated that if an average man watched no television as an adult, his life span might be 1.8 years longer and a television-less woman would live another year and a half.  Watching television can be dangerous to your health. When the author of this article read these results she canceled her cable subscription.

My wife and I, who have just added seventy more channels, including two movie channels, to our cable subscription for a very small added fee, ought to follow suit except that we hardly ever watch television, cable or otherwise.  We like the idea, though, of being able to watch whatever and whenever we want.  It’s a bit like the feeling I had as a university teacher that, as my own boss, more or less, I could go to the movies in the afternoon whenever I wanted to, but in my entire career as an academic I never did it once.

But I digress.  The Times article also reported a study by researchers at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne that compared the effects of sitting completely still for seven hours and breaking up the sitting every twenty minutes by either walking or jogging for two minutes.  When the subjects sat without getting up, their blood sugar levels spiked and their insulin levels went haywire.  Blood sugar remained stable, however, when subjects broke up their sitting with walking or jogging.  Jogging didn’t improve blood sugar levels any more than standing.  “What was important, the scientists concluded, was simply breaking up the long, interminable hours of sitting.”

I’m probably like many of my readers in spending “long, interminable hours” at the computer.  I’ve long known that a sedentary life style is unhealthy, but I thought that my seven hours of exercise per week would shield me from its ill effects.  Now I know I was wrong.  So from now on I’ll try to rise from the computer every twenty minutes and walk or stand for two minutes.  I won't jog, however, since it would disturb the neighbors downstairs and besides I'm too lazy and old. 

My wife asked me what I’ll do with the extra minutes of life that breaking up my sitting might give me.  “I’ll do what I’m doing now,” I told her, “only I’ll be able to do it longer.”



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