“If he dies before me, I’ll kill him,” says Cathleen McBride jokingly about her husband Owen McBride. As a person with early stage Alzheimer’s disease, Cathleen really does need his help.  They are both committed to being care partners to one another as they cope with the challenges this disease brings.

So are Bernice Jones and her husband Victor Jones. “I’ve had to work very hard at it,” says Victor of the new relationship that he has with his wife since the onset of her disease. “I tend to be a take-over person, it’s hard to be a partner,” he adds.

All four of these people have been through a four-week workshop run by Elaine Silverio, a nurse on the staff of the Alzheimer’s Association of Massachusetts. There they talked about the experience of getting this illness and together explored ways of helping one another cope with it.

The main message that comes through conversation with these couples is one that is not enough appreciated by us members of the general public, or even by many doctors and medical professionals. As Victor Jones explains it, “Alzheimer’s disease is not a sudden trapdoor through which people fall away.”

Rather, as Cathleen McBride affirms, “there is life after Alzheimer’s disease.” From this comes the importance of taking action in the face of a diagnosis confirming its presence. For my money, the best action is to call the Alzheimer’s Association, Massachusetts Chapter, where one can find all sorts of helpful responses.

This nonprofit agency, with five offices in Massachusetts and its connections with similar organizations in other states, can be reached at a 24-hour phone line: (800) 548-2111. There, skilled people like Elaine Silverio, a woman with 20 years’ experience in neurology, can refer you to doctors with special training, to individual counselors, and to one of 200 support groups.

Things are constantly changing in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, so it is important to be informed. New medications have been developed that can slow down the cognitive decline characteristic of this disease. Cholinesterase inhibitors have been found to delay such decline in 50 percent of cases, with the drug Aricept currently the most used. Other medications can be expected to hit the market soon.

When she first was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Cathleen McBride, a former Roman Catholic nun and missionary in the Philippines, went through a range of emotions. “It was a blow to me personally,” she says, “but I could talk about it.”

She attributes much of her rebounding to her family and home environment. “I came from an upbeat family. I’m a New Yorker, too. If you’re not upbeat in New York, you’re downtrodden,” she explains.

Her spirituality also plays a part. “It’s so much a part of me, that I don’t see it as a separate thing.” Perhaps that factor has led her to say: “I am really only beginning to enjoy the now of life, something that completely passed me by before.”

For Bernice Jones, the diagnosis did not come as a surprise, since she had been experiencing difficulty in dialing phone numbers. The hard part now, she says, is “trying to readjust to what I can accomplish.”

And that is her husband’s main concern. “I feel a great deal of sadness,” he confesses, “that the skills Bernice was so good at are eroding, and also her self-esteem.” But their relationship remains strong, perhaps stronger, so much so they can even talk about the future.

That future raises what Victor calls the ultimate question: “Will she go off to be cared for by someone else?” He admits to himself and to her that a change in her condition might make her going to a nursing home a good thing.

The occasion for my meeting these two couples is a series of “memory walks,” the first two of which takes place on September 20 in the Berkshires and Northern Quabbin Valley. Then on Sunday, September 21, there will be seven walks with the Greater Boston one beginning in Cambridge. Information about them is available at (617) 868-6718. The final walk will happen on October 4, starting in Walpole.

The motto of these days is “Taking Steps to End Alzheimer’s” and planners have developed a fight song to the tune of “On Wisconsin.” The song is called “On With Life” and is meant to express some of the spirit animating these early-stage people.

Their purpose is to promote awareness of Alzheimer’s disease, and to raise funds for the association, and for research into the causes and effective treatment of AD, with a view toward eventual development of more effective responses.

Meanwhile, everyone ought to become aware of the progress made in enabling sufferers to live with Alzheimer’s and care partners to cope with it better. With the disease’s advent, life does not come to an end. It continues and can even bring unexpected richness to human experience, as the Jones and McBride couples witness.

Richard Griffin

How would you like to wake up from major surgery only to discover later that your operation was entirely unnecessary?  That unpleasant experience has happened to a lot of people in this country and hardly anyone seems sufficiently outraged about it.

The most shocking instances recently would seem to have taken place at the Redding Medical Center, a hospital in Redding, California. Lawsuits leveled against that hospital charge that unnecessary surgery and other procedures were done on 366 patients. The plaintiffs have accused the doctors of elder abuse and contend that some patients died because of such treatment.

In 2002, the federal government sent FBI agents to Redding on a raid to investigate charges of Medicare fraud, among other things. Kickbacks to doctors and excessive charges to Medicaid patients are also under investigation.

The hospital in Redding is owned by Tenet Healthcare, a company with a highly dubious past. In 1999, this corporation owned 129 hospitals, making it the second largest hospital chain in the United States. Now it owns some 100 including two hospitals in Massachusetts: Metro West Medical Center in Framingham and Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, neither involved in the scandals.

Tenet Healthcare is the second incarnation of a company called National Medical Enterprises which was convicted of Medicare fraud in 1994. This embarrassment that led to the resignation of its founder and CEO, Richard Eamer.

Last month, in response to government findings, Tenet Healthcare agreed to pay the federal government $54 million dollars. As is frequent in such cases, however, the company did not have to admit wrongdoing. The company called the payment “a business decision.”

More problems lie ahead; last week the government notified Tenet of proceedings to bar Redding Medical Center from participation in federal health care programs.

Under both its names, the company has been widely esteemed for its money making prowess. In fact, it has been called “the darling of the marketplace” as its profits have soared. However, some people have seen this as a threat to good medical practice. One of its shareholders, M. Lee Pearce, M.D., in a letter to board members, spoke of the problems at the hospital in Redding as “DIRECTLY related to a philosophy of Wall Street Medicine” (his capitals).

After its recent problems with the law, the company’s stock plunged from $70 to $14 in three weeks, a sign of public alarm about its actions. This spring Tenet announced its intention to sell 14 of its hospitals, instead of expanding as it had planned.

Many, if not most, of the patients who suffered the ravages of this kind of medicine were presumably over age 65. They and others were victims of what was tantamount to assault; their situation should inspire outrage about a national health care system based on profits rather than human need.

Larry Polivka, a Tampa-based gerontologist who cares strongly about the medical needs of older people, feels concern about what he calls the “loss of soul in contemporary health care.”

He is especially critical about “Tenet’s policy of routinely cracking open chests when there was no medical reason to do so – – another breathtaking sign of the moral bankruptcy of U.S. healthcare and the business that runs it. Only money and profits matter.”

What worries me is how vulnerable we elders are to this kind of manipulation. Especially do I feel concern about those of us who may be isolated from other people. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the proportion of Americans over 65 who live alone has risen steadily over the past 45 years. By 1995, the number of us living by ourselves has reached 32 percent, up from only 10 percent in 1950.

These statistics about living alone mean that, when things get difficult many more of us are likely to lack an advocate. A sudden health crisis may send us to the hospital by ourselves, without a family member or friend committed to argue for our best interest.

This situation can make us vulnerable to unscrupulous professionals who may not have our interests at heart. Certainly had we been transported by ambulance to the Medical Center Hospital in Redding, we would have been easy prey for doctors who wanted to get extra pay for surgery we did not need.

Ideally, we would have asked for a second opinion. But in an emergency, that would almost surely have been impossible. Even with an advocate at our side we might not have had the presence of mind to insist on seeing a doctor entirely focused on our wellbeing.

We older people have good reason to push for the reform of the health care system. Yes, Medicare preserves us from being entirely uncovered by insurance, the way more than 40 million of our fellow Americans are. But all of us desperately need a system that will provide for people of all ages and make scandals like the Redding abuses much more difficult to inflict on us.

Richard Griffin

Some estimates of those dead in France’s August heat wave have risen to ten thousand. Most of these victims of soaring temperatures were apparently old people who were left to their own devices in coping with the suffocating environment. Living alone turned out to be hazardous this summer.

Having spent a week in Paris earlier this summer, I can easily envisage the setting in which many French elders live. Along narrow streets, in old stone buildings that rise several stories, many without elevators, old people often inhabit small apartments. Often these pensioners stay to themselves and lack close attachments to other people in their building.

On occasion, I have talked with such people and have admired the way they find quiet satisfaction in daily life in a huge bustling city to which they feel attached. But I never envisioned disasters coming from the summer temperatures as happened this month.

William Pfaff, a nationally syndicated columnist, has suggested that dying like this was a good way to go. In his view, being overcome by extreme heat produces a death that is comparatively easy. He ends his op-ed with this affirmation: “I say we should be grateful to pneumonia, broken hips, and heat waves that can take us gracefully to where we all must go.”

What he leaves out of account, however, is that most of the people living in Paris and other cities died alone. They had no family members, friends, or neighbors to comfort them as they departed this life. That seems to me among the least desirable ways to die, isolated and cut off from the consoling touch of fellow human beings.

France’s government officials are clearly feeling pangs of guilt. Behind the careful rhetoric, statements from the president and others suggest a belated realization of failure to accept responsibility for the safety of older citizens and others. Few heads have rolled: the equivalent of their Surgeon General has resigned but no one else thus far.

Why did not French officials learn from what happened in Chicago during the summer of 1995.  There an estimated 739 people, most of them elderly, died in a single week in July. They succumbed to heat that registered 106 degrees the first day and between the 90s and low hundreds on succeeding days. Twenty-three hospitals could not accept new patients; ambulance drivers had to travel for miles to find a hospital to admit their passengers.

Studies of the Chicago experience revealed lessons that were available to authorities in big cities everywhere. Parisian officials could have been prepared for the onslaught had they heeded what was learned in Chicago. A book by Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, in particular could have been of great value to French government figures.

The great French heat wave occurred mainly in August, the worst time it could have happened. This month is the time when a great many city dwellers leave town for their annual summer vacation. They clear out en masse leaving many shops and restaurants closed, and reducing the work force in hospitals and other places where help is usually available.

My instinct has been to praise the French for their culture’s insistence on taking time off. But now I have come to realize the drawbacks of having so many people away at the same time. Having only a skeleton force to help at times of emergency can clearly prove harmful to the population.

In addition to reduced emergency workers, there is also the absence of family members, friends, and neighbors. Tante Suzanne finds herself cut off from nieces and nephews when she may need them most. Basking in the Côte d’Azur may be good for the younger people’s mental health, but how about the needs of family members left back home in the stifling heat?

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a similar human community to support an older person. I would extend the net wider and add that adults of every age need the resources of other people to sustain them in good physical health and mental condition. No doubt, however, we older people have special needs that come with disability and sometimes flagging spirits.

I see the French debacle as a failure, not only of government, but of the whole community. Yes, the government failed in its responsibilities but too many ordinary people did not respond to the needs of their elders. As family members, neighbors, and citizens at large, ces messieurs (et ces dames) failed to see what they could do to help save those who lived near them.

Segregation of any sort has its price. Segregation by age can sometimes deprive older people of life itself, as the French experience shows. We may sometimes wish to be largely left alone but the time comes when being left alone can prove fatal.

One can hope that nothing like this disaster occurs again.  The French have an opportunity to develop a renewed appreciation of how much we, older and younger, need one another.

Richard Griffin

To me, and presumably to the 25,000 other people assembled for the occasion, it gave exuberant joy to see personally one of the greatest moral heroes of the 20th century. To behold him standing on the stage in Harvard Yard bowing and smiling in response to our cheers brought tears to my eyes.

Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, came to be honored but he honored us all with his presence. As Harvard President Neil Rudenstine said to him, “You are the conscience of a nation, the soul of a people.”

Others helped bring out the dimensions of the man. “You have led the entire world on a walk toward truth,” said Prof. Jeffrey Sachs in tribute. And another faculty member, Henry Louis Gates, spoke to Mandela of “your nobility, your presence, your straight back; your unbowed head… as regal as any king.”

Mandela is now 80 years of age, so those words of Gates describe an elder statesman as yet vigorous and dynamic. In fact, if you examine photos of the younger Mandela, you will see a man whose looks, in the way of some older people, have much improved with age. He has come into the full maturity of years with distinction, both physical and spiritual.

Nelson Mandela carries those years lightly. In fact, he joked about his age by telling about a middle¬aged woman who wanted to see him 10 years ago. After his aides admitted her to his presence he asked what she wanted. She replied, “I came to see how a man of 70 looks like.”

“Now I am 80,” Mandela explained. “I am encouraged to see so many people who have turned out. I am not sure if you came here to see how a man of 80 looks like.”

Nelson Mandela has lived to an old age which has brought fulfillment both for himself and his people which he could only have dreamed about. For me he is a modern-day Simeon, that New Testament elder who lived into his 80s, long enough to see the Lord's promises fulfilled.

Mandela came to Harvard accompanied by his wife Grace Marchel, herself an elder citizen, who married him this past summer. She, too, has a charismatic personality which she showed forth waving and smiling in response to enthusias¬tic applause. This column could have been about Mandela and Marchel finding new love in old age.

To me, and presumably to the 25,000 other people assembled for the occasion, it gave exuberant joy to see personally one of the greatest moral heroes of the 20th century. To behold him standing on the stage in Harvard Yard bowing and smiling in response to our cheers brought tears to my eyes.

Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, came to be honored but he honored us all with his presence. As Harvard President Neil Rudenstine said to him, “You are the conscience of a nation, the soul of a people.”

Others helped bring out the dimensions of the man. “You have led the entire world on a walk toward truth,” said Prof. Jeffrey Sachs in tribute. And another faculty member, Henry Louis Gates, spoke to Mandela of “your nobility, your presence, your straight back; your unbowed head… as regal as any king.”

Mandela is now 80 years of age, so those words of Gates describe an elder statesman as yet vigorous and dynamic. In fact, if you examine photos of the younger Mandela, you will see a man whose looks, in the way of some older people, have much improved with age. He has come into the full maturity of years with distinction, both physical and spiritual.

Nelson Mandela carries those years lightly. In fact, he joked about his age by telling about a middle¬aged woman who wanted to see him 10 years ago. After his aides admitted her to his presence he asked what she wanted. She replied, “I came to see how a man of 70 looks like.”

“Now I am 80,” Mandela explained. “I am encouraged to see so many people who have turned out. I am not sure if you came here to see how a man of 80 looks like.”

Nelson Mandela has lived to an old age which has brought fulfillment both for himself and his people which he could only have dreamed about. For me he is a modern-day Simeon, that New Testament elder, who lived into his 80’s, long enough to see the Lord’s promises fulfilled.

Among current world leaders Nelson Mandela is one of the few who deserves the title given to Ghandi – Mahatma, or “Great-Souled One.” In his lifetime he has demonstrated his great soul through many actions but none so meaningful as those which followed his release from prison in 1990.

The great day of liberation came after he had spent 27 years in confinement on trumped-up charges of treason leveled against him by the apartheid government. Those years he spent on Robben Island, which in “Long Walk to Freedom” he calls “the university.” He and his fellow political prisoners called it that “because of what we learned from each other.”

After walking free at last, Mandela led the nation through a series of epoch-making transformations. Throughout, he insisted on not taking any revenge of those who had treated him and his followers so badly for so long. To this day he has refused to direct reprisals toward his oppressors. That takes a kind of spiritual power which few other leaders have ever proven capable of.

Almost anyone else, unjustly deprived of almost three decades of freedom, along with forced labor and other punishments imposed on him, would find it impossible to forgive his abusers. But if Mandela had given into the impulse for revenge, he would have condemned his country to continued strife, perhaps civil war.

As he approaches the end of his term of office, the president of South Africa continues to show himself a man for others. He is determined to do all that he can to improve living conditions for the people of his coun¬try. And his concern includes the other countries of the world.

As he said in his acceptance speech at Harvard, “The greatest single challenge facing our globalized world is to combat and eradicate its disparities… We constantly need to remind ourselves that freedoms which democracy brings will remain empty shells if they are not accompanied by real and tangible improve¬ments in the material lives of the millions of ordinary citizens of those countries “

Richard Griffin

Three weeks before my most recent birthday, the Registry of Motor Vehicles sent me a new driver’s license. This card enables me to operate an automobile legally for the next five years. It comes as reassuring to know myself entitled to drive without restriction except for needing to use “corrective lenses.”

For the first time since 1946, I did not need to wait in line at a registry office. Instead, I applied online, filling out a short questionnaire and paying the 40-dollar fee by credit card. In response to this electronic sleight-of-hand, the new license arrived in the mail a few days later. So much for the grief associated with the registry during most of my past life.

The birthday I just celebrated was my 75th so I am now covered until I reach age 80. You can expect to see me behind the wheel until at least 2008, tooling around town and on highways, provided my longevity continues in force.

For convenience, it is now a great system. This time around, they did not require me to leave my chair. And I do not have to think about it for the next half decade.

This situation would strike me as altogether ideal were it not for Russell Weller. He is the 86-year-old resident of Santa Monica who, at the time I was applying for my new license, plowed into a crowd at a farmer’s market, killing ten and injuring another 50 or so.

Weller held a valid license but had been involved in various minor automotive mishaps such as driving into the wall of his garage. About the fatal accident, he said, in a statement read by his minister: “There are no words to express the feelings my family and I have for those who suffered loss and pain as a result of Wednesday's devastating accident. I am so very distraught, and my heart is broken over the extent of the tragedy.”

According to the local police, Weller thinks he must have  stepped on the gas instead of the brake.  A news photo showed him using a cane when he walked out of the police station with his grandson so he apparently has a disability.

Reading about the Santa Monica tragedy has altered my consciousness. Now, when I see a newspaper story about an auto accident involving an out-of-control vehicle, the first question I wonder about is age. Was the driver a person of my years or older?

This association threatens to put me in the uncomfortable position of ageist, a person with stereotypes about old people. Just being old yourself does not protect you against this virus. To find myself classed among those who expect every older driver to be accident-prone would make me squirm.

The numbers show elders to be in fact at greater risk of accidents than most other drivers. As a group we rank above teenagers but that does not come as much consolation. Compared to other adults, we do worse although many of us have learned to compensate for driving deficiencies by modifying our habits. Thus we may no longer drive at night or on superhighways, for instance.

In reflecting on my own easy license renewal, I have to wonder if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has fulfilled its responsibilities for ensuring public safety.  Should I have been given the right to drive from 75 to 80 without any official even looking at me?  I answered the questions truthfully but still the Commonwealth knows little or nothing about my physical and mental functioning.  Was it prudent to have kept me on the road, sight unseen?

These questions I recognize as, in a sense, not in my own self- interest. It may seem masochistic for me to quibble at a process that efficiently rewarded me with what I wanted. Only something verging perilously close to self-hatred, you might say, would make me doubt this well-oiled new system.

To my great good fortune, in some 57 years of driving I have never had a traffic accident. Not do I hear any complaints from family members or friends about the way I drive now. I, in my regular Sunday softball game, I can handle the bat well enough to manage a few base hits and then run around the bases, then I presumably have enough well-being to steer a car with some skill.

But that may change and the Commonwealth has no system in place to track my decline in driving capability. Should there not be some way, backed by public consensus, of tracking drivers of all ages for our fitness for the road?

In the meantime my approach will be to ask family members to be vigilant about my automotive skills as I point toward 80. I want them to advise me if and when they spot any decline. Then I may at least be able to modify my driving habits to enhance everyone’s  safety while still staying on the road.

Richard Griffin

How did I ever get to be 75 years of age? It’s a long story from which only a few highlights can be shared here. But the secret behind my success can be summed up in one word – survival.

The first important event was my being born. A fill-in-the-data-book entitled “Baby’s Days and Baby’s Ways” records this birth in Peabody, Massachusetts on August 19, 1928, “the Little One” measuring 22¾ inches.  

Getting born, I am still persuaded, is fundamental if you want to achieve longevity. You simply must survive the event to give yourself a shot at reaching the three quarters of a century mark or beyond.

Later on, in kindergarten, I had to defend my manhood against one of my classmates (a boy, you should be reassured) and gave him a bloody nose. This encounter, so satisfying to me as the solitary pugilistic triumph of my life, also qualifies as a survival event. After all, the other kid might have had enough machismo to fell me with a mortal blow to my nose.

While growing up, I also survived tons of nutritionally incorrect food. At the risk of shocking you, let me report consuming a whole lot of Spam. That does not mean spam, the stuff that comes unbidden to your computer screen, but the alleged food that comes in a can. Like my brothers and sisters, I used to eat it all the time and, if I may confide a shocking fact, actually liked it.

Almost as bad, for supper we used often to open cans of Franco-American spaghetti. Scoop it out, heat it up, and we quickly had what my taste buds approved as a delicious meal.  If only I could have had a tall rich chocolate frappe to wash it down with!

Moving to college was something that was to prove especially hazardous to my survival. That’s because my first-year survey course in English literature exposed me to J.B. Munn. Professor Munn, if not the worst teacher I ever had, is still right down there fighting for the title.

Fortunately, he bored me only to tears. Many other students around me were bored to death, something that could easily have happened to me. Observing rows of my peers, all of them fatally overcome by boredom, served me as an object lesson of the fate that could have cut short my life.

Another professor, Harry Levin, during his lectures on the novel, was always coughing. Ritually, at the end of every second sentence, this brilliant academic would fetch a handkerchief from his pocket and hack into it. Who knows what contagion I might have contracted had I ever allowed myself to sit close to the master’s throat?

Another survival threat came when I discovered sex. At about age 20, I learned some details of what sexual partners do with one another. It came to me as such a shock that I almost died of astonishment.

Fortunately, during most of my life, sickness has played only a bit part. But other medical factors have posed challenges. Nosocomial exposure, danger coming from hospitals, I have come to recognize as bad for my health. This started in boyhood when I entered a Boston hospital for a bad case of the mumps and was there infected with scarlet fever.

The same is true for iatrogenic disease, the illness that comes from doctors. I have learned that you have to be wary of them taking out your gall bladder instead of your appendix, and various other blunders. A dentist to whom I was once referred took out of my head the wrong tooth. His apologies and those of my regular dentist, a personal friend, failed to move me deeply.

In my days as a student of theology, I also faced serious dangers. As the Latin term “odium theologicum” (theological hatred) suggests, the level of venom felt by theologians against one another is right down there with that of politicians, and even academics.  

During this era, I took a special interest in liturgy but soon discovered mortal danger lurking there too. I should have been warned in advance but did not know the answer to a question celebrated in church circles : “What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist?”  The answer: “You can sometimes negotiate with a terrorist.”

Then as a columnist of many years’ standing, I sometimes reflect on all the grief I have received from deeply disgruntled readers. I don’t want to exaggerate here but some, at least, would have liked to see me rot in prison for my allegedly disloyal views. Escaping assault and battery from those readers, with its potential for limiting longevity, is a blessing for which I am thankful.

From all of the above dangers, you can easily judge how lucky I have been to reach 75.  Any one of these threats could have done me in, but here I am at the three quarter mark of an ever faster-moving lifetime.

Richard Griffin

Bob Spaethling has never forgotten details of a horrific event that happened when he was only 16. Walther, a young friend and fellow German army recruit, was shot dead in front of him, not by enemy soldiers, but by SS troops at the order of an officer. The unfortunate victim had run from the army truck that he drove. When it was disabled, he had failed to blow up the vehicle as standing orders required.

That was in 1944 and, though things were going badly for the Wehrmacht of which he was a member, this teenager from a small town in Bavaria had felt glad about going into combat. In fact, years before, he had refused the chance to join relatives in California because he looked forward to being in the army.

On arriving at the front lines, it took him less than 30 minutes of enemy shells raining on the members of his platoon to realize how unrealistic his notions of warfare were. He had entered hell, where human life was agonizing and desperate. As a regimental runner this teenager faced hazards on every side. That he survived the traumatic experiences to reflect on them and share his recollections with me some 60 years later has to qualify as a kind of miracle.

“How do you forget a war? How do you forget the sights of men killing each other, or the sounds of dying?” These are questions Bob asks in the unpublished memoir he has written for family and friends.

Flashing forward a few years to as new setting, he tells me about joining the American army at age 25. To his own amazement, in 1953, he found himself drafted to serve in the armed forces of the nation to which he had emigrated after the war. “I’m a peace-loving man,” he says, “but I’ve been in two different armies.” When he explained to the American recruiting officer that he had already fought in a war, the man said to him: “Son, that was the wrong side.”

Fortunately, his service in the army of the United States did not require him to fight. Though he could have been sent to the Korean War, instead he was shipped to Mannheim in his native Germany, to a unit responsible for tending huge cannons aimed toward the Soviet Union and capable of firing atomic warheads.

A theme that emerges strongly in conversation with Bob is his love of America and his fellow Americans. It started at the time of his first contacts with American soldiers, right after the war. “I felt total amazement about the humanity of the American soldiers,” he says. “I could not believe it: they did not want anything.”

And about us as a national community he speaks with conviction: “The American people have a sense of common decency that will never go away.”  At the same time, he still cares about his original country, though it no longer feels like home. One of his life goals is to be “a decent American and a German at the same time.” He wants to reconcile the two cultures, a tall task that he describes as “endless.”

Bob does not hesitate to reply to questions that many people regard as still sensitive and painful. Asked what drove his people to accept Nazi domination, he replies: “Most Germans were not evil but they were cowards.” When I asked about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant pastor and prisoner of conscience who was hanged for rising up against Hitler, Bob answered: “He is a person there should have been more of.”

Was there something in the Germans that made them especially vulnerable to dictatorship? “No one in those days,” Bob says, “could imagine the depths of depravity that Hitler represented. They totally underestimated the power that was coming through the Nazis.”

His fellow Germans had a distorted view of obedience. In Bob’s view, they had internalized a teaching of Martin Luther, centuries before. “Your body belongs to the State,” is the way Professor Spaethling puts it.

He can claim that title as an academic retired after a long career on the faculty of two universities. From the vantage point of age 76, Bob regards as one of the best decisions he ever made an action that all of his friends and colleagues disapproved of: he gave up tenure in the German department at Harvard to join the faculty at UMass as that branch of the state university was starting.

In retirement he continues his scholarship and calls it the best time for him. “I’ve had my best writing energy as an older person.” In 2000, after working seven years on his major opus, he published “Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life.”

As I gaze on a photo of Bob Spaethling in his German army uniform at age 16, I feel yet again a sense of awe at the astonishing changes of fortune in his long life.

Richard Griffin