AGING

Lost Stories in Time

A boy with hot potatoes in his pockets.

“Aging has a wonderful beauty and we should have respect for that.” — Eartha Kitt

We ate breakfast together in a room filled with many other eighty-year-olds. Some were in their nineties. A few were over a hundred.

I was the youngest in the room at fifty-eight. People greeted each other with good mornings, waves of acknowledgment, and gentle pats on the shoulder. As they gathered around tables, they leaned in to better hear the morning stories being shared.

I sat with a kind man with a warm laugh. Let’s call him Tom. We spoke of happenings in the news and usual friendly chit-chat. Then he sat back, smiled, and started:

“If it wasn’t for my grandma, I wouldn’t be here today.”

I was going down memory lane.

Births Gone Wrong

Tom was stillborn at birth in the early 1930s. The doctor placed his tiny, lifeless body on the gurney next to his mother. He wasn’t breathing and was turning blue.

The room was abuzz with nurses and doctors doing what they do. Tom’s mom was inconsolable.

Yet one person in the room was focused on the child.

His grandma came over to the child on the table and examined him. She then began CPR. His heart started beating, and his breath caught. Tom had come back to life.

I sat there shaking my head. His story and his life would be non-existent if not for her actions. He laughed at this and nodded. I can see he had told this story many times over the years.

His grandma gave him a life of stories.

Time for His Wife

Tom was a very successful orthodontist. Too successful according to him.

His schedule was packed with meetings, appointments, and speaking engagements. As he sat one day working through his calendar with his secretary, he declared that he was done. He canceled most everything except for his patient appointments and then spent the years ahead driving his kids to school.

We talked about priorities in life. I shared the story of Eugene O’Kelly, the former CEO of KPMG, who was diagnosed with brain cancer and given one year to live.

In his memoir, O’Kelly wrote about how he had spent so much time focused on people who weren’t priorities in his life. He lamented:

“Perhaps I could have found time, in the last decade, to have had a weekday lunch with my wife more than…twice?”

His words have always sat with me on the fragility of life and priorities.

Tom knew of O’Kelly’s story. He had the foresight to stop working too much and bring greater balance to his life.

It was clear he loved his family very much.

Humor in the End

Tom’s wife lay in hospice care.

As he sat with her in the final days, holding her, she whispered to him.

“Tom, I want you to know that Pat Murphy is available just in case you weren’t aware.” He chuckled at the humor from his wife. She continued.

“And I want to be cremated and have my ashes placed above yours once you pass away. I don’t want to be on the bottom, I want to be on top.”

We both started laughing so hard. I found this heartwarming that someone can still have this level of humor in their final days. These stories are bittersweet.

They are human.

A Grumpy Jack Nicklaus

He was a big golfer and played until he was eighty-six.

He was at The Masters in Augusta, GA as a spectator years ago with his son and grandkids. He had a chair right along the green on one of the holes. Jack Nicklaus was playing through, and his ball was just feet away from Tom. As Nicklaus came to look at the line for his ball, Tom quietly said to him that there was a big break on the green.

Nicklaus turned to him and said sharply, “You don’t need to tell me about the break on this hole.” Tom sat back quietly.

Nicklaus sank the put, retrieved the ball, and came back over to the lady sitting next to Tom who Nicklaus mistook for his wife. He handed her the ball, smiled, and said Thank you.

Tom wanted to get the ball but never had the courage to ask her.

Cold Little Hands and Warm Baked Potatoes

Tom grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and would attend the Cleveland Brown football games when he was younger.

He didn’t have a lot of money. But if people arrived early they could get an early entry into the stadium for twenty-five cents. But he never had enough money for food.

So he would cook two baked potatoes, cut them in half, layer on some butter, wrap them in tin foil, and stuff them into his pockets.

They not only gave him food through the game but they kept his little hands warm as well.

I love this image of a little boy with his hands curled in his pockets alongside hot potatoes. I wonder how many other kids stuffed their pockets with baked potatoes at those games.

Our breakfast came to an end.

I’ve sat with Tom a few times as I am here in this elderly residential community for a few weeks visiting my mom.

I notice that there aren’t many around to hear Tom’s and others’ stories. The community is very nice, much nicer than most. The place is full of kind people and joy. They are well-tended, the restaurant is open all day, and there is plenty of entertainment.

There are many friends. But there are limited visitors.

There is an obvious awareness of age. The topic is unavoidable as many shuffle in with their walkers and then navigate the heavy chairs.

Some stories repeat, occasionally during the same meal. I don’t mind. I’ve been repeating stories for years.

This is what we do as we get older.

It is eye-opening to be staying in this community with so much wisdom and history. I was considering that with approximately eighty residents of eighty years of age, that is over 6,000 years of experience around me.

This is a reminder that I will, if lucky, reach my eighties someday.

I wonder what stories I may be telling.

A humbling thought.