Beyond the enigma of happiness (live long and die short)
Before retirement age the internal glow of happiness can be independent of external circumstances. Despite the gloom and doom during the great 2007-09 economic recession, a Time Magazine survey found that 90% of Americans considered themselves optimistic about their health, finances and relationships.
In one of my favorite stage dramas, according to conventional wisdom, forty-two-year old Shirley Valentine was happy. She is healthy, her children are on their own, she has a stable marriage and a husband with a steady job.
But she was miserable. Fixing dinner and sipping a glass of wine, she was talking to the walls that seemed to be asking why she didn’t just leave. She couldn’t do that, she replied, she wouldn’t know where to go or what to do. A friend calls and invites her on a two week vacation. Free. Leaving dinner on the stove and a note for Joe saying she’d be back, she leaves for Greece.
Sailing with the wind in her hair, surf on her hands and a horizon stretching out forever, she falls hopelessly in love with the idea of feeling alive again. She decides she’s through fulfilling prescribed roles and pretending she’s happy.
Joe comes to rescue her from her insanity. As the play ends she tells him he’s welcome to stay with her in Greece, but she’s not returning to the walking dead wearing masks and sterilely greeting each other.
Reflecting on the play, I wondered how happy my father felt when I was growing up. The oldest of 10 in a desperately poor and often malnourished family, he got his barber’s license while in high school to help feed the family.
We had what I considered a happy, stable middle class life. We felt loved, were comfortable and without want. We lived over Dad’s downtown barbershop in a farming village. He was articulate, had perfect grammar, did crossword puzzles during work-day lulls, and was treasurer of the school board. His hobbies were occasional rounds of golf, Thursday night choir practice and church choir on Sunday.
Daily, he’d trudge downstairs to work at 8 and return after 6. Fridays and Saturdays he stayed open until 8, but it was often much later before he was done. He spent many Sunday afternoons lying on the couch with a headache.
In his 90s, he told me about visiting my mother in Ypsilanti when she was in college. Walking past a barbershop with an open chair, he paused to wonder if he might be able to work there and go to college. “I wonder what could have happened …,” his voice trailed off. There might have been time as my mother’s mother wouldn’t allow her to marry until she obtained her life-teaching certificate.
For over a decade after retiring they had an active social life in Michigan in the summer and in their small Florida mobile home park in the winter. They walked for exercise. He sang in a church choir, continued doing crossword puzzles, played golf regularly and joined a shuffleboard league. He continued playing golf and doing puzzles until developing stroke-related dementia a few months before dying at 95.
Unfortunately, my mother’s story is very different. Retiring a little early, she missed teaching second graders and her Richmond book-study club. Saying she was retired, she stopped driving. Her mind gradually withered and descended into Alzheimer’s. She died strapped to a bed while being tube fed so she wouldn’t suffer the supposed pain of starvation in a Florida nursing home. If she could have seen herself, she would have been mortified. We were horrified.
I believe she began dying not long after retiring. There were few opportunities available then to continue the level of intellectual engagement with life she’d been thriving on.
Masterpiece Living, a nonprofit corporation spawned from Live Long, Die Short, written by Roger Landry, based on research sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, is facilitating communities dedicated to enhancing opportunities for retirees’ lifelong personal growth and development.
Four Pointes, in Grand Haven, Michigan, is a national pilot community-based Masterpiece Living program. The four points are social, physical, intellectual and spiritual wellbeing. With 1700 members and forty-five monthly programs, it promotes the vitality and well being of older adults. Many program ideas come from members.
With aging, the enigma of happiness gives way to the need for continuing satisfaction and contentment from living. In other words, living long and dying short.
My father did that. It’s too bad my mother couldn’t.
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