It was clear from the letter that my correspondent had long since come to an acceptance of her husband’s disease, but she wrote also of something else, and it piqued my interest: She had undergone surgery and irradiation therapy for ovarian cancer more than forty years earlier. The tone of the letter, the voice in which these potentially fragmenting events—her troubled marriage and the divorce, her cancer, her much-loved husband’s decline into dementia and death—were recounted, reflected such a thoughtfully sober intelligence that it spoke of something beyond mere coping; it spoke of a certain knowing integration of the grim facts of sickness and great loss into the fabric of a life that not only had made peace with adversity but had gone beyond peace into the strength that familiarity with misfortune can sometimes bring.
It was while rereading the letter that “content,” the word I later came to associate with Miriam Gabler, first entered my thoughts. At seventy-nine, she had quite obviously not been satisfied with becoming merely reconciled to her difficulties: She was content and even happy with her life; content and eager to have more of it exactly as it was; content and even determined to use her experience of adversity as a source of the wisdom that could continue to sustain her. She asked no more of life than was hers at that moment, which to her was satisfaction enough. All of this had come clear in the five brief but immensely revealing paragraphs of her letter. As I would learn when I met Miriam, she had long ago made a carefully deliberated decision—the first of many—not to let her life come undone.
Miriam Fox grew up in Norwich, Connecticut, the fourth of five children of Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a barely viable soda-delivery business. Encouraged by a doting father, she studied bookkeeping in high school and took a full-time job after graduation. Her conversion to Catholicism at the time of her marriage to Frank Marshall two years later predictably caused a furor in the family, leaving her mother with lifelong smoldering resentment. Her father, on the other hand, overcame his disappointment and was able to forgive his favorite child. Unlike many who convert for marriage, Miriam never took her new religion lightly, schooling herself and becoming as devout a Catholic as though she had been born to it.
Miriam and Frank were divorced eight years after her 1962 treatment for ovarian cancer. She went back to bookkeeping in order to support herself and the two children, but her health was never the same after the illness. The series of X-ray treatments that had helped cure her cancer brought its own problems, consisting of radiation damage sufficient to cause multiple bouts of intestinal obstruction over the years, and a tendency toward frequent loose stools, a problem that worsened after 1992 when at age sixty-six she was diagnosed with another cancer, this one of the large bowel. The required surgery excised the right side of the colon and a considerable length of the most involved portion of the small bowel that had been scarred and bound into dense adhesions by the previous operation and subsequent X-ray therapy. From then on, even more frequent stools continued to be a problem, necessitating great care in choice and preparation of foods.
As a result of the many years of constant bowel looseness and periodic obstruction, Miriam, at five feet four inches and one hundred pounds, is a very thin, slight woman, but only physically. There is nothing of debilitation about her. On the contrary, her determined visage, a clear and evenly modulated voice, and the direct gaze with which she regards me as we exchange greetings on my arrival and throughout our hours together give her the appearance of a petite and totally self-reliant matriarch accustomed to the give and take of an engaged life. There is an unmistakable tenacity about her, already apparent within our first moments of conversation.
Thanks to a meticulous caution with diet, Miriam is not at all malnourished. The caution consists of choosing foods well and of extreme attention to the details of preparation. But she so loves her kitchen that pains taken with cookery are hardly a burden for her. In fact, she thinks of cooking in much the same way as she does the other creative activities that bring her pleasure. What is a nuisance, though, is the problem of a cataract in her left eye, so dense that she needs to carry a magnifying glass when she goes shopping, in order to read the small print on labels. She cheerfully puts up with a disability she considers negligible, because both she and her ophthalmologist are reluctant to consider surgery.
Like so many other men and women in their late seventies, Miriam takes several drugs to control an element of coronary disease and hypertension. And, of course, she has needed constant medications to keep her stools under reasonable control. Considering all that her body has been through over the past six decades, her total of five prescription drugs is no more than the average for someone her age.
Early in our conversation that afternoon, Miriam made it clear that her present contentment has not come about unplanned. Even before reaching middle age, the examination of a life not her own had led her to a deliberate decision to cultivate interests that would serve her well in later years. The life she examined was her mother’s, a chronically dissatisfied woman who had never developed the independence or interests that might have brought some measure of enjoyment into an existence that gradually became more isolated and embittered toward the end of her life. “I resolved that I wouldn’t let such a thing happen to me when I got older. I’ve realized recently that I may not have had the sense to plan my life, but I did plan my old age. I decided even in my late twenties that I wouldn’t be like my mother. I’d find things I could be interested in, so that when I’m older, I’d have plenty to do.”
The first of the “things” Miriam undertook was a writing course when she was thirty, done by correspondence with an organization called Writer’s Digest. Since then, she has taken other such courses, at a nearby community college and elsewhere. An easy, articulate literary style attests to the courses’ effect on her ability to transmit her thoughts in direct and absorbing sentences. Hers is a style influenced not only by years of attention to craftsmanship but also by her having acquired an associate degree in general studies at the same community college, when she was fifty-four. In fact, she embarked on a bachelor’s program but “never got very far because Don came on the scene to distract me.”
As she reached her later years, and particularly after the onset of Don’s illness, Miriam increasingly turned to writing as a way to study and clarify her own thinking and sometimes to share it with others. Her real purpose was to explore her mind in words, as a way of understanding feelings and the circumstances in which she found herself. But she did submit some of her musings for publication, and has been very successful. As I’ve pored over some of the twenty-three articles she has published in a variety of periodicals—ranging from The Providence Journal to the magazine for the elderly called Ozarks Senior Living, produced in Springfield, Missouri—I’ve found myself thinking of Miriam’s as a sensitive, insightful, and candid voice for so many older women, and perhaps men too, living alone, who find meaning in what some might deride as merely the humdrum details of their daily doings: braiding a rug, cooking, buying a cemetery plot, resolving a personal issue, reminiscing about a beloved father long gone. These are the topics of some of the pieces she has written over the decades, but more frequently in recent years.
Many of the “humdrum details” in Miriam’s writing are centered on the few small rooms of the home that is so much the expression of herself that she seems as comfortably clothed in it as she does in the warm-toned slacks and blouse she is wearing during our conversation. This woman is so much of a piece with the envelopment she has created around herself that even a stranger feels embraced by it. “I love my home. I wake up here each morning and I’m happy that I have just one more day. I don’t know what to do first. What I pray for is to remain in this house as long as I can take care of myself. I’m just so pleased to be here in this place of mine—writing, reading, quilting, braiding rugs, cooking. I love to cook. Here, let me show you a poem I treasure that spells it out for me.” With this, Miriam gets up, goes to her small study, and brings back a copy o
f Alice Walker’s “Grace.”
Grace
Gives me a day
Too beautiful
I had thought
To stay indoors
& yet
Washing my dishes
Straightening
My shelves
Finally
Throwing out
The wilted
Onions
Shrunken garlic
Cloves
I discover
I am happy
To be inside looking out.
This, I think,
Is wealth.
Just this choosing
Of how
A beautiful day
Is spent.
For other reasons too, but particularly for her cherishing of this poem that conveys so much of the richness that Miriam has found in her daily life, the word “content” comes so readily to mind as my image of the entirety of her. There is a happiness in this image of Miriam, a happiness bespeaking an implicit inner assurance by which a world made small and safe is contemplated through the self-aware eye. Through such an eye Miriam sees the good within which it is possible to enfold oneself when horizons of ambition have been drawn close enough to encompass a sheltering surround of tranquility and familiar things. “To be inside looking out. / This, I think, / Is wealth.”
“So many people seem to be unhappy,” Miriam says, and a tone of impatience creeps into her voice. “They can’t be satisfied; they can’t solve anything. I can’t waste my time with that sort of thing, and I can’t waste time with people who don’t nourish me.” She is an active member of the local senior center, where she has taken several courses, including quilting and rug-braiding—and more writing. There is so much to do. “My days are so satisfying. I love this life of mine, and the big thing is to appreciate it. It was the experience with ovarian cancer that first had such an influence on me in that regard. It played a big part in teaching me that time is so precious, and so are people. And the intestinal cancer just added to that feeling.” “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” counseled the Bard. “Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.” Miriam has used her adversity well.
Between the lines of all that she describes is a sense of the commitment to the areas in which she finds fulfillment. Miriam is not just a little old lady who sends brief articles off to magazines—she has made of herself a skilled writer who works hard at improving her craftsmanship, and at reaching into the depths of her mind and experience to find words and ways that might most clearly respond to her literary needs and the needs of her readers. The rug-braiding, the quilting, the cooking—all of these are arts to her, just as they are sources of contentment. “It’s not enough to be busy. The busyness must have meaning.” The very fact of her horizons’ nearness magnifies the plenitude of all they encompass.
But to Miriam, the ineffable spirituality that she intuits even beyond those horizons has brought a kind of transcendence. “I want to serve God in some way,” she tells me, and that way has been illumined for her by what she refers to as the “tremendous role that faith has played” in her life. She has been a devoted Catholic for more than half a century, and always very active in her parish. She still attends mass almost every week but no longer says the rosary or goes to confession. Though she loves worship and especially the music, her belief nowadays manifests itself less within the well-marked boundaries of Catholicism, and gradually has become defined in a far more personalized way, a way that remarkably enough takes account of a lingering sense of the Jewishness into which she was born. “I consider myself a Jewish Christian,” she tells me, “and I have a precious relationship with my God.” She prays often, largely in a nonformalized way that is hers alone. In a letter she later wrote to me, she says, “I believe as Martin Buber did, that God lives wherever man lets him. For that gift I have experienced the greatest sufferings and the greatest joys of my life.”
Also nonformalized is Miriam’s approach to her own death. Does she think about it, I ask her, and does she have any formed notions of what lies beyond? “I do think about it sometimes, but I’m not afraid of it. If I drop dead, be happy for me. It doesn’t disturb me that I have no answers to what happens after death. The fact is that I’m too busy living to be worried about dying.”
A great part of the being too busy is Miriam’s relationships with the people around her, whether in the senior center, her church, or the community of Mystic. “Relationships is my middle name,” she states emphatically, and her manner of saying those words conveys the enthusiasm with which she engages with people. But here, too, she does not spread herself widely or indiscriminately. Just as she needs others—including her son and daughter—to nurture her, she needs to nurture others. “I would like to be remembered as helping other people. I think life is difficult, and I can sometimes do or say things that make it easier for people who need what I can give.” When Miriam says, “I thank God for my ability to deal with my life,” there is no mistaking that “thank God” is an expression of religious belief and not merely the usual meaningless turn of phrase as most of us are inclined to use it. If anything has sustained Miriam Gabler through the times of being beset with so much, it is her unshakable trust that God has been guiding her life. “A belief in a higher power is a tremendous help, and the trust in God that you’re living the life you were meant to live, and, God willing, you’ll accept it. Trust is so important to me. Because I trust in God, I’m willing to accept whatever comes. I’m trying to be very realistic about where I am in life. I feel very grateful.”
Miriam attributes her self-reliance to her reliance on faith, to a trust in God that seems inherent within her. Though she has long followed the Catholic rite, the source of her faith seems as independent of it as it is independent of the Judaism that first introduced her to belief. In one of the letters we exchanged after our meeting, she wrote, “I’d like you to know that at age nineteen I was engaged to a nice Jewish boy. When I suggested to him that we attend services, he laughed at me. I broke the engagement. At twenty-one I married Frank Marshall, getting ‘hooked’ when he said his religion was important to him. I learned much later that his relationship was with the Catholic Church. He had none with God.”
I interpret “I’d like you to know” as meaning that the thing Miriam really wants me to know is that, to her, the basic trust is in God, and only secondarily in religious forms. I was struck by this partly because of a meeting I had had perhaps a month earlier, with a man totally free of faith in either God or religion, who in his own way is aging as successfully as Miriam is. But their relative positions on the spectrum of reliance on higher powers was only the tip of an iceberg of differences between them.
The most visible difference is physical. William G. “Pete” Barker is one of those elegantly tall (six feet one inch, and 175 pounds) and prosperous-looking executive types who are to be seen gracing the front pews of Episcopal churches every Sunday morning, along with their attractively wholesome wives and children, in such Connecticut towns as Greenwich, Darien, and New Canaan. While Pete is nominally Episcopalian and a retired executive, and he does live in Greenwich—and is, to fill in another bit of the picture, a loyal-to-the-point-of-fervent Dartmouth alumnus—he is in most other ways very much a species singularly his own. So far removed is he from ever being sighted in those patrician pews that he has to think a moment when I ask him his religion, before responding (or perhaps “owning up to” is a better choice of words to describe what he is doing) with a laconic, “I’m Episcopalian, I guess.” He has for almost thirty years been married to a Jewish woman, whom he occasionally accompanies to a Reform synagogue, but only because he enjoys the services and admires the rabbi, with no hint of religious connotation to either of those likes.
Even Pete’s canine preference is so different—and perhaps metaphorically so—from Miriam’s as to deserve comment. Not only are they not loving little pets like Lucy, but the two aggressive Barker (and barking) dogs begin roaring at me the moment
I appear in front of their house, throwing their powerful chests against the door as though determined to knock my intimidated body to the snow-covered ground and make lunch of it. They—both mixed-breed shepherds, one with a Doberman and the other with a Bernese mountain dog—have to be grabbed by their collars and locked in a bathroom before it is safe for me to cross the threshold, to the vast amusement of their apologetic master, who then smilingly turns his lanky form toward me and takes my limp and uncertain hand in a firm grip of greeting. Like their owner, the dogs epitomize vigor and reservoirs of energy, but, unlike him, neither of them seems to have an ounce of affability or goodwill toward me. When my pulse comes down a bit closer to normal, I am ushered into a large living room pleasantly cluttered with the papers, books, photographs, and mementos of a life that has never slowed down enough to arrange itself into fastidious neatness. Though this is precisely the sort of atmosphere in which I am accustomed to working, I am mildly surprised by it, because I have been told that my host spent most of his career managing the finances of a large corporation. I soon learn that he has done a lot more than that.
The long peak of Pete Barker’s career was spent as senior vice president and chief financial officer of CBS, a position for which he was well qualified by previous experience at a large petroleum company in Philadelphia and by his schooling at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth, where he had also taken his undergraduate degree. His first marriage took place in 1957 while he was a finance officer in the army (a job that did not prevent him from learning how to jump from airplanes with the paratroopers). Nine years and one son later, he and his wife divorced, soon remarried, and then divorced again in 1977, when Pete was forty-four years old. That same year, he married Gail Gottleib, who currently teaches broadcast and cable advertising at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business, following a successful career of her own as a sales executive.
The Art of Aging Page 9