Pete has been an avid track and field athlete all of his adult life, beginning as a senior in high school when he took up the shot put. He started doing judo at twenty-nine, and not only became a black belt nine years later but went on to compete in the Senior Nationals when he was forty-four. He transferred his affections to distance running at about that time. It was while training for the New York City Marathon in 1980, when he was forty-seven, that he noted the unexplained weight loss that proved to be the first evidence of the near-mortal disease that, twenty-five years later, would make him the subject of my interest.
Pete did enter the marathon, but had to drop out at the seventeenth mile because his back had begun to hurt so much that he found it impossible to continue. But back pain soon became the least of his problems, because he was also developing a fever that reached 105 degrees within the few days when he was trying to ignore his discomfort. Once his wife was able to force him to see a doctor, he was diagnosed with subacute bacterial endocarditis, an infection of the valve between the left atrium and ventricle of his heart. A long course of high-dose antibiotics cured the disease, but left him with a badly damaged valve that gradually became so incompetent that his heart enlarged, the ventricle weakened, and the heart’s ability to eject blood dropped to 32 percent from a normal of more than 70 percent. After a time, even the most intensive medical treatment of the failing heart became ineffective, and open-heart surgery to insert a new valve was recommended. In 1993, the pathetically inept mitral valve was replaced by one of graphite. Except for an abnormality of cardiac rhythm called atrial fibrillation, Pete’s heart has continued to function well, though it requires the help of a battery of pharmaceuticals. These include verapamil and two beta blockers, as well as a blood thinner to prevent clotting around the valve. In addition, a diuretic is needed in order to decrease the possibility of fluid overload that might lead to heart failure. Pete also takes Flomax, a drug meant to overcome an element of obstruction in a boggy prostate. Because of some mild pernicious anemia, folic acid and a monthly shot of vitamin B12 are also included in the regimen.
Another man might consider himself dependent on medications and hemmed in, or at least tethered, by the constant feeling of apprehension that the heart disease might slip out of control. But this is hardly Pete Barker’s way. “I’ve had no morbid thoughts that my life has been shattered,” he tells me, matter-of-factly. Pointing to his head, he adds, “It’s up here. It’s an attitude; it’s what’s inside your head. You could easily say, ‘Oh my God, I’m a cripple.’ But I’ve never done that.”
From the outset, Pete’s attitude toward having been so sick was fortified by the comments of his doctors, who not only refrained from discouraging his predilection for an active life, but supported it. “There was never any block put in front of me that said ‘You shouldn’t do this.’” So he did it, whatever “it” may have been at the moment of his enthusiasm. “Nothing seemed difficult to do; never was it suggested that I lie back, and no restrictions had been put on me.” He has never thought of himself as a “patient,” merely a vibrant man who periodically visits the doctor to keep everything in running order. He has never felt any need to integrate his experience of illness into a new philosophy of life. Unlike Miriam Gabler, a brush with death has not left him with revealed wisdom that he might not otherwise have attained.
Miriam and Pete share only one perspective about having come through illness of such nature and magnitude that it leaves powerful residues and significant potential for recurrence, a fact of which they are both very much aware: Neither of them thinks about being someone who might become sick at any time; they make no compromise with that knowledge. One has viewed her disease as an opportunity to grow, and the other as if it never happened, but despite such diametric differences, they share an equanimity free of morbid preoccupation.
Though Pete’s illness has, like Miriam’s, left permanent and indelible evidence of its depredations, his attitude toward them is to proceed as though they do not exist—in fact as though the illness itself was more a hurdle to be jumped than a near-catastrophe requiring course adjustment. All of this is manifest in the answer he gives me when I ask how his close call with death has influenced his attitudes about life, or changed him. “Quite frankly, it didn’t.” How different this is from the response given to the same question when it is asked of Miriam Gabler. “No, not at all,” replies Pete almost flatly when I ask him if his joust with lethal heart disease has made life seem more precious. “I don’t think a miracle has happened.”
The proof of Pete’s dispassion is indicated by the things he has done with his life since recovering from the first phase of his illness. Soon after the endocarditis, he took up running again, and it was not long after surgery before he returned, at age sixty, to the shot-putting he had done in high school and college. Since then, he has thrown the discus, the javelin, and the hammer, though putting the shot remains his favorite. He had retired from CBS in 1991, two years before the mitral valve replacement, and embarked on a series of business ventures involving television production, and he plunged back into them as soon as he had sufficiently recovered from the operation. None of these enterprises being particularly successful, he finally decided to think of himself as retired, in his late sixties.
In 1990, at the age of fifty-seven, Pete replied to a New York Times want ad for actors, and since then he has enjoyed a part-time semiprofessional career in film and amateur theater, including more than thirty plays and multiple appearances as a movie extra. With this added to his other interests, he is, in his own words, “much too busy.” In addition to the fun and excitement of his acting career and all the time he spends training for the various masters’ and senior athletic events in which he competes, he serves as lead director for two mutual funds and writes the newsletter for his Dartmouth class. And, of course, Pete being Pete, he finds plenty of other large and small matters requiring his attention, which keep coming up in the course of his bustlingly active life. As he punningly told me while describing his feats of athleticism: “That’s what retirement can be: giving it a shot. You finally have the time and the freedom—you should try things you’ve never done before.” He is a man on whom has been bestowed a super-abundance of things to enjoy. His life is vibrant, colorful, and quite obviously great fun.
And yet, it is the life of a man who knows that he is seventy-three, and takes account of it. But the accounting is less in terms of the number of years than in the messages he gets from his body, which his long experience of athletics has taught him to interpret so well. Relying on those and on his own good sense, he knows just how far he can go. “The things I’m doing,” he points out, “are things I can continue to do. There are no artificial walls in terms of age.” With care and prudence, there is no more reason he will have to give up any of the activities that bring him joy than there is reason that Miriam Gabler will have to give up hers. This is implicit in the answer he gives me—and only barely in jest—when I ask him what he looks forward to. He begins by describing the five-year categories of the Senior Olympics, which allow athletes to compete only with those in their own age group. Though smiling as he says it, Pete is quite serious when he describes his objective: “I’d love to set the world’s record at the shot put when I’m a hundred.” I reply with the obvious, “Let me know a few weeks in advance, and I’ll try to arrange my schedule so I can come to cheer you on.” Though I am two years older than the potential record holder, I am just as determined to be there as he is.
I already know the answer, but I ask Pete to tell me what role faith has played in his ability to overcome illness. His reply is matter-of-fact, free of the emphatic certainty of some of those who are, underneath their air of assuredness, not quite certain. “Absolutely none,” he says, and it launches us into a discussion of his real creed, which is humanism. Somewhere in the middle of it, I play the devil’s advocate by posing the well-worn question of motivation when there is no God looking down with favor. Why does Pete
Barker live a moral existence, why does he pay scrupulous attention to playing the game of life fairly and with regard for others, if there is no reward? Indeed, why should any of us? “Because it’s the right thing to do,” he says straightforwardly, as if the answer should be self-evident. He quotes a commencement address by Kurt Vonnegut that he keeps in one of the piles on his desk, in which the speaker tells his young audience that, as a humanist, he tries “to behave decently, without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I’m dead.” Whether articulated by humanist or person of faith, it is a worthy credo, and one with implications well beyond selflessness. In fact, Vonnegut’s—and Pete’s—is in its own way a formula for aging. If there is a single factor that is the foundation stone for all successful aging, a factor that allows every other element, encourages every other element, and nurtures every other element, that factor must surely be a healthy self-image. We need to approve of ourselves, to take pride in what we have become, to feel a vibrancy in our moral sense—we must, quite simply, be happy with what we are.
None of this is to say that self-criticism and a bit of chronic dissatisfaction with ourselves as we currently are does not remain the bedrock by which the foundation must be supported. The fact is that none of us should ever be completely “happy with what we are.” If we are to think of aging as another stage in the maturing process of life, then it must also be a stage of the continuing self-examination that may lead to repairing the defects we find in ourselves and the world, or at least those defects about which something can be done. Aspiring to something better is the restlessness we all need, a form of energy that fuels correction of the factor that Miriam Gabler calls “the part we play” in our own dissatisfactions, and provokes the stimulus to the factor that Pete Barker calls “giving it a shot.” To be content, like Miriam, is not to be inert, but to make the most of every opportunity within the horizons she has drawn for herself. Nor is it to be so intoxicated with one’s own robustness—as some might erroneously believe Pete Barker to be—as to become smug about all that is being accomplished. Almost paradoxically, we feel better about ourselves when we aspire to be just a bit better than we are. What is meant by the “what we are” of the preceding paragraph is thus seen to be “the kind of human being we are,” including openness to change. Like so many seemingly hackneyed old aphorisms, “Every day in every way” is saturated in truth, and holds unique significance for the later decades of life.
Some aphorisms, however, hold up less well when scrutinized through the lens of reality, and those referring to good deeds are particularly prone to prove windy. Despite the famous maxim, for example, the seventeenth-century physician-philosopher Sir Thomas Browne was unquestionably correct when, in his Religio Medici, he wrote, “That virtue is its own reward is but a cold principle.” Virtue without sensitivity to the hopes and needs of others is a kind of self-satisfied sterility, barely worthy of the name. Ironically, it is when we practice virtue in regard to its value to individual human beings other than ourselves that it rewards us the most. The reward is a happiness that sustains the self-image we need—at any age—for the peace of mind that nurtures the spirit. Here again, the words of Plato come to mind. In Book XLII of Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes quotes him as saying, “Virtue was sufficient of herself for happiness.” Virtue, in the form of the good we do because of sensitivity to our fellows, can best be seen less as selflessness than it at first seems—less as selflessness than as the purest form of enlightened self-interest. It helps us to feel good about being “the kind of human being we are.” Whatever else William James may have incorporated into the notion of pragmatism, this is a test of truth and values with which he would have agreed. We do, in fact, help ourselves by helping others. If there is a God who watches us closely, he surely knows that our reward in such things is as much on earth as it is in heaven—and sooner rather than later.
With all of this in mind, it would seem superfluous to ask Pete his thoughts about an afterlife, and it was. “I think you just stop” was his reply, and those words convey the lack of concern that he also shows for anything that will happen after death, including his heritage; he has never thought much about how he will be remembered. Like Miriam Gabler and everyone else I spoke to about such matters, he lives each day as a blessing unto itself—though he will doubtless phone me with vociferous objections when he reads this page and sees the word “blessing” associated with his name.
Pete shares with Miriam the sense that his response to illness, to life, to morality, to aging, is—and he uses the very word—“inherent.” He believes that it arises of itself, without consciously needing to be called upon, from that vague mix of influences called nature and nurture that combine to form character. If this is so, it has no specific origin from one or several factors within that amorphous coagulum. Miriam might say the same about the basis for her inherent faith.
But in speaking to both of these thoughtful people, I find myself grappling with just that notion—the notion that one’s response to life’s circumstances is inherent, as though the word is synonymous with “immutable.” I cannot agree with Pete when he tells me that his constructive reaction to adversity is necessarily the outcome of what he unchangeably is, any more than I agree with Miriam that hers has been guided by the hand of God. Human nature is far too complex for such simplistic explanations, and there are far too many shades of Eros and Thanatos in each of us—shades, respectively, of the life and death principles, of the optimistic and the morbid, of the need for guilt and self-punishment and the need for joy and the self-expression that leads to fulfilling happiness. As with the amorphous coagulum of influences that forms one’s character, there is within us a disordered amalgam of impulses and instincts that are harmful and impulses and instincts that lead only to the good. It is not written in our stars or ourselves that we are compelled without option to respond to either good or bad in any fixed, predetermined, or “inherent” way. We have free will, whether we believe it to have been granted by God or granted by the very nature of the human mind. We are, in fact, capable of choosing how we respond to the circumstances of our lives, and in this way we are capable of changing them for the better—even when our initial impulse is counterproductive. Miriam says as much, though she attributes her wise choices to God. I attribute them, on the other hand, to self-examination and the choices it has revealed to her. Though Pete has made choices too, his are less conscious, less deliberated. But he has made them nevertheless.
There are more than a few lessons to be learned from the lives of Miriam Gabler and Pete Barker. One of them is that choice remains, even in the face of adversity. To once again state the obvious: It is not the adversity itself that determines the shape of the future, so much as our response to the adversity. We have it within us to consciously and with deliberation choose a response that would seem to contradict what we conceive to be our inherent nature, if that course of thought and action is constructive and shows promise of leading to a better life. Especially when that course reverses an accustomed detrimental pattern of dealing with difficulties, the going may at first be rough, but sustenance can be found in the knowledge that the long-term dividends are great.
The difficulties lessen with each small triumph after the first few. Every hesitant trip to the gym, every tempting calorie reluctantly pushed away, every difficult refusal to allow rancor and self-righteousness their insistent demands, every small contribution to another’s needs, every hour spent nurturing a relationship—all of these are building blocks to the gradually rising edifice of a changing, and in time changed, image of what we are. In the doing of these things we after a while begin to think of ourselves as the kind of people who do these things; we then do more of them. There is a pride in it. A sense of virtue in the context of such small beginnings thus does become its own reward, and we see our faces reflected in it.
Nothing encourages right living so much as the thoughtful, deliberate doing of it. Because we need successions of small succe
sses in order to begin the process and keep it going, we must create them wherever we can, even if we have to drag our protesting selves kicking and screaming into action. Man is the only animal to have been granted the ability to continue developing during the later periods of life, and much of this depends on seeing oneself as the kind of person who can overcome the tendency to do otherwise. It is incumbent on us to use this ability.
And this is the real lesson of aging, or of any other stage of life. Whether it pertains to exercise, proper diet, creativity, goodwill, or the outlook and self-image that make all of them possible, choice exists for each of us, though it may sometimes involve a deliberate and difficult overcoming of lifelong tendencies or patterns in the opposite direction. Some of us are “inherently” more inclined toward making right choices than others, but no one except the most emotionally crippled of us are incapable of it. No matter the difficulty, it is necessary to reach into the complex of interacting and competing impulses and instincts, to choose those that promise later years of fulfillment and value to others. Once having made the decision to do what is necessary, the behavior must be implemented regardless of how difficult it seems at the outset. With time, it becomes an accustomed, glorious habit, as it is for both Miriam Gabler and Pete Barker.
THREE WHO OVERCAME
I have written of prevailing over ill health and adversity—and, coincidentally, of making fundamental changes in ourselves—as though such victories must be achieved alone, the road toward attaining them traveled with only our own resources. Ultimately, of course, there is at least partial truth in that notion, because no one else can make the choice for us. Having made it, we must continue on that path, knowing that the determination to persevere does in fact come from some deep inner source that outside support may abet but cannot supplant.
The Art of Aging Page 10