A Year of Doing Good

by Judith O'Reilly

  Good deed no. 42.

  Saturday, 12 February

  I am mortified.

  I dropped my eldest son at football on the wide open green space above the market town, and my daughter at dancing, and took the eight-year-old along to his Communion class. Fortunately the church is opposite the dance school. Shabby Catholic that I am, I resent the fact it is not just the children who have the Communion class, but that mums and dads do too. This morning’s class was supposed to be about baptism, and I can’t even say what there was in it that set me off; maybe it was all the discussion about the importance of baptism and what it meant in terms of welcoming a child into a community.

  When my son was stillborn we wanted him baptized but the hospital priest wouldn’t do it; he did perform a naming ceremony, but refused an official baptism. You could get cross about that sort of thing, but you have to let it go or it sweeps you away to live in Angry-town where the mad people squat outside huts of corrugated metal and throw stinky poos at passers-by. There I was, hiding on my hard wooden chair at the back of the church, when of course the nice woman organizing the sessions asked me to move to the front row as she had a sore throat and didn’t want to shout. The session started, the tears began to fall and I was lost. No tissue, no hanky, no place to hide. I lasted as long as I could – even blowing my nose on my best purple scarf, which, now I think of it, I should take off – but finally I had to walk past everybody and out the church.

  It wasn’t even one of those subtle weeps, but an all-out, piggy-nosed, puce-faced, pink-eyed, hysterical crying jag. Then, right at the church door, if I didn’t walk into another mother arriving late with two of her children. She ended up having to get me tissues from her car. She disappeared back into the church for my coat as I stood shivering in the cold by my own car, and finally the session finished and my eight-year-old came out along with the other children, followed by the nice catechist, who started walking towards me. I’m rooting around in my handbag, desperate for some make-up to hide what’s been happening from her – from everyone – when she puts a hand on my arm. I look up at her, and I don’t really want to because I know how ugly I must look, how mad I must seem. I think, ‘Please don’t be nice. Please don’t say “How terrible” and “Not to worry” and “These things happen.” ’ But she doesn’t say any of those things. Instead, she says how she had lost a son at thirteen, that he’d gone out to Scouts and never came back and that tomorrow would have been his twenty-first birthday, and as she speaks I think, ‘I’m not the only one.’

  After, when everyone had drifted off, the oaken church doors shut and locked, and there was quiet in the churchyard but for the blackbirds’ song, my son held out a warm toffee ball. The children were given a sweet after the Communion class and he’d chosen a golden toffee penny. He had taken off the crinkly wrapping, rolling the toffee round and round in sticky fingers to make it a keep-for-later caramel treasure till he saw me wipe away my tears and suddenly it was mine.

  Good deed no. 43: picked up litter on Bamburgh beach.

  Sunday, 13 February

  En route to Mass we drove into the local market town, bumping over the cobbles to the florist’s, which unusually was open, preparing for Valentine’s Day. I picked up a small galvanized tin bucket of lucid-blue hyacinths for the catechist and a card. There are moments you brace yourself for in the aftermath of a child’s death: the anniversary itself, when you see a friend’s child you know would be his exact same age, the day he should have started school with shiny face and shinier shoes, the birthday when he’d have stepped proudly into double figures. I already know that this year, when he would have been twelve, will be bad because I remember being a whip-smart, precocious, plaited twelve. And eighteen and twenty-one with keys he won’t turn and doors he won’t open. There are other moments, though, that catch you raw and unawares. A football match where the cold wind whistles down the touchline, a fond dad calls out your son’s name and his son answers. Those moments, years after, when a world stops turning and you fall off, spinning, your arms and legs spread wide, your eyes closed, one thought: ‘How I do miss you.’

  The catechist told me her son’s friends remembered him and that she’d been to the grave yesterday and there was a sunflower and a rose already there.

  Good deed no. 44: said, ‘I understand because I’ve been there’ – after all, she did the same for me.

  Monday, 14 February

  Better fettle today, helped by my daughter’s Valentine letter, which she gave me over breakfast before clambering onto my knee to open it for me.

  I Jud (To Judith – apparently she didn’t write ‘Mummy’ because that would have given the game away. Cunning for a five-year-old, huh?)

  I love so much (I love you so much)

  theut (that)

  I cud dust (I could burst.)

  fum (from)

  And a back-to-front question mark.

  Good deed no. 45: picked up litter along the lane.

  Tuesday, 15 February

  An email popped up yesterday from Karl, the teenage radio-wannabe, and I imagined him sitting in his teenage boy’s bedroom lined with posters of wagons, spot cream and Old Spice aftershave on the shelf and an old toy farm under the bunk beds where he and his twin brother still sleep, his broad shoulders hunched, huge fingers carefully pecking at the keyboard, enquiring ever so politely about his missing work experience. So I have pinged off an email to London radio presenter and political pundit Iain Dale asking for a favour. This willingness to help the young that aren’t our own must be biological – most of us don’t burn goodwill begging a favour for ourselves, put someone out, testing their patience, risking rejection – yet we are willing enough to ask on behalf of a child or a young person, to cajole, to plead, to persuade. How else does the species survive? Result. When I asked Iain whether there was a chance Karl could spend a day with him at LBC, I said it would be like Billy Elliot but on radio with a really big lad who couldn’t dance and Iain as Julie Walters. And thank God he loves Julie Walters. He’s agreed – hurrah. And although I know him through his blog and he knows me through mine, I have never even met him so that’s a pretty starry thing for him to do. He says Karl can spend the day in the Global Radio News Centre, which supplies lots of different stations, and be there for his programme going out. I am very excited.

  In point of fact, I have been noticing a bit of a buzz lately when I have done my good deed, and I have discovered why. It turns out that good deeds may have health benefits. (I wonder how they are with migraines?) According to research by Allan Luks (then with the Institute for the Advancement of Health in the US) which was published in The Healing Power of Doing Good in 1991, weekly helpers who had personal contact with those they helped were ‘ten times more likely to say they were in good health compared to once a year volunteers’. Luks (who surveyed 3,296 people) reported that 95 per cent of these regular volunteers also described ‘a feel-good sensation that gave them a personal lift, reducing stress’. It came in two stages: an initial physical rush (with helpers reporting various sensations such as warmth, energy and euphoria), which Luks termed the ‘helper’s high’; followed by a second longer period of emotional well-being involving ‘increased self-worth, calm and relaxation’. It is claimed that helping triggers a drop in stress-related chemicals and a release of endorphins (which are the brain’s neurotransmitters – or messenger chemicals – killing pain and acting as the body’s natural high).

  Further research by Jorge Moll and colleagues (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006) indicated that when a person makes a donation, the brain is engaged in the same way as when he receives money. Magnetic resonance imaging was used to show that making a donation engages a particular pathway in the brain that depends on a neurotransmitter called dopamine (the release of which signals reward or pleasure to the brain).

  According to this research, if I do good deeds, I am going to feel good. That should save on the wine bill.


  Good deed no. 46.

  THE ADVOCATE

  I haven’t got a very scientific brain – at school I gave it up pretty much as soon as I could. The only things I have retained from school science lessons is how mercury looks in a dish – jostling and spreading and silvery-rolling – and that the chemistry lab always smelled of blackcurrant. One man who knows more than most about the state of scientific research into giving behaviour is Dr Stephen G. Post, co-author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People and a professor in the department of preventative medicine at Stony Brook University in New York. In an academic review of more than fifty scientific and medical investigations into the experience of individuals ‘who act sincerely for the benefit of others’, Post reports benefits in terms of happiness, health and longevity across the various studies. His review states that ‘when we help others, we help ourselves’, and suggests healthcare professionals should consider recommending such activities to patients.

  I am interested that unwittingly I may have been boosting my immune system, sleeping more soundly and enhancing my self-esteem while adding years to my life. I ring him. Post sounds affable and mellow and clever, like a man who has sussed how to live and live well, but he warns me against putting ‘the cart before the horse’. People do good to help others and not because they can be certain of happiness or health. ‘Benefits are really a by-product or a side effect of sincere helping,’ he says. Like a true American, he quotes the essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, ‘No man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself’ – emphasizing ‘sincerely’. ‘Motivation matters. If people were being helpful for their own interests, that would be unsustainable, but what happens is that when people get involved in helping others, they discover a new self – it is transforming.’

  I wonder how a scientist becomes so interested in the idea of doing good to one’s fellow man, and Post describes a long personal interest in moral philosophy and comparative religions. But he argues that science adds another dimension to the conversation about goodness. ‘Especially because there are real sceptics out there who have been raised on some very cynical, ungrounded assumptions about human nature.’ He mentions Freud and Sartre. ‘Science gives people some certainty about their own good nature if they need it, and some people really do need it.’ I wonder whether I need reassurance about the basic decency of my fellow man, and decide I don’t. I wonder whether my motivation to undertake a year of doing good is a response to cynicism – it’s not. But I do like the fact science appears to indicate that good deeds are a good thing for the good-deed doer. Yes sirree, I do.

  Wednesday, 16 February

  Good deed no. 47: made the workmen fixing a leak along the road a nice cup of tea.

  Thursday, 17 February

  Picked up a packet of Lifeboat Tea this morning. I have bought Royal Air Force Tea before – loose tea from the Rare Tea Company described as ‘tea for heroes’ and ‘calming in times of national peril, fortifying when courage is required’, which is pretty hard to resist (particularly when 10 per cent of the £5 price goes to the RAF Association Wings Appeal).

  Today I thought I would try a spot of ethical shopping with Lifeboat Tea – 7p (out of the £2.49 price) going to the RNLI for equipment and training. According to their website, ‘by drinking Lifeboat Tea you too can save lives’. The tea was apparently created after the Fastnet race of 1979 when freak weather conditions blew up during the offshore yachting race, 15 people died and 140 had to be rescued by lifeboats, military and commercial vessels, aircraft and helicopters; and it has since raised £100,000 for the charity’s funds. On the front of the packet is a picture of lifeboat men in an inflatable boat riding choppy waves and on the back a picture of a chap called Mark Criddle, RNLI coxswain at Torbay Lifeboat Station in Devon, telling how he received a silver medal for gallantry in 2008 for rescuing the crew of a merchant ship listing and powerless in force 9 winds and rough seas. The packet says, ‘It took Mark and his volunteer crew over 50 attempts to bring the eight men across to the lifeboat.’ He did his bit and I did mine; I drank a cup of tea and didn’t drown in it.

  Good deed no. 48.

  Friday, 18 February

  Have finally got Karl’s draft CV and told him I need more details because it is so thin, and I need something more to work with. Academically, the lad appears to have three C-grade passes at GCSE and a City and Guilds, Level 2. I don’t even know whether to put D, E and F grades in. Heart sinks.

  Good deed no. 49: liaised with Karl’s family over a date for the work experience and chivvied him up on his CV.

  Saturday, 19 February

  Good deed no. 50: bought pork pies and quiches for a pooled supper and attended fund-raising Valentine Family Disco in aid of the kids’ first school and village hall.

  Sunday, 20 February

  Caught train to London for half-term week. Al is working all week, but at least this way we see him for breakfasts. We are staying in the house of friends who are away on holiday.

  Good deed no. 51: donated £10 to my JustGiving charity page for the local hospice (including Gift Aid, I now have a grand total of £25.54. This might take a while).

  Monday, 21 February

  Before Al disappeared off to work this morning, we took the kids to breakfast at Carluccio’s in Canary Wharf. The children were as good as gold, but even so the sharp-jawed guys in sharp dark suits at the table next to us moved away to better talk about markets and yen, which I tried not to take personally. We ordered pains au chocolat for everybody, cappuccinos for us and hot chocolates for the children, which they plunged headlong into in a race to see who could rot their teeth first.

  ‘Do you realize my good deeds probably mean I’ll live for ever?’ I said to Al.

  He looked at me, then down at my plate. ‘Are you trying to make yourself feel better about that pain au chocolat? Because I’ll eat it for you if you want.’

  I adopted a pious expression. I have been reading books. I have been reading scientific papers. This means I know things. ‘Research has proved that good deeds add years to your life.’

  My husband glanced at the clock on the wall as if he thought he might catch it in the very act of measuring his brief span and measuring it briefer yet. ‘I don’t see how good deeds could make you live longer,’ he said, and sat back in his chair, ‘maybe it just feels that way.’

  Because I know I am right – that good deeds will indeed lengthen my mortal coil – I ignore him, wave at the waiter and order another basket of bread with an extra pain au chocolat.

  When I got home again, I looked it up. In an article published in the Journal of Health Psychology, Doug Oman, currently an associate adjunct professor of public health in the School of Public Health in the University of California at Berkeley, found as long ago as 1999 that older people who volunteer for two or more organizations have a 44 per cent lower mortality rate – compared with a 30 per cent reduction in mortality associated with exercising four times a week. According to Oman, volunteering ‘has the potential to add not only quality but also length to the lives of older individuals worldwide’. Hey, hey, hey – moving my arms around my body in a victory dance. Ah’m going to live for ever.

  Good deed no. 52: bought a £2 raffle ticket (the prize a mini break) for Macmillan Cancer at Canary Wharf.

  Tuesday, 22 February

  Good deed no. 53: liaised between Iain Dale and Karl and his mother re dates on work experience.

  Wednesday, 23 February

  Good deed no. 54: mentored a media student who is worried about essay writing and study skills, offering to put her in touch with study skills expert. (I have a Dickensian connection to this kid. My natural father died of lung cancer when I was a baby. This first father had a half-sister. This kid is the half-sister’s great-granddaughter. As it happens, I went to grammar school with her mother. At fifteen, the mother dropped out with a teenage pregnancy. Thirty years later she makes contact about the daughter. Such is life.)

&nbs
p; Thursday, 24 February

  Good deed no. 55: donated £1 at the till of an organic shop to Whole Planet Foundation, which provides micro-credit loans to impoverished women.

  Friday, 25 February

  One of the reasons we came down to London this week was my friend’s fiftieth birthday dinner. We ate Beef Wellington, and Orange Bavarois – which is like eating air made of citrus and cream – and we all seemed very grown-up sitting around a dinner table discussing what proportion of income you should give to charity if indeed you have any money to give.

  My grand total so far this year is £25, which is ridiculous compared to one of the guys at the dinner who gives ‘around the three and a half per cent mark’. According to the Sunday Times Giving List, which runs alongside the Rich List, to make it into the ranks of the UK’s top thirty philanthropists (ranked on the proportion of wealth they give away), you would indeed have to donate at least 3.2 per cent of your wealth to make the cut. You would have to go some to beat the top giver in 2010, though: Chris Cooper-Hohn, a hedge fund manager who has ploughed over £1.1bn into a charitable foundation.