A friend of more than 60 years standing has sent me a thoughtful email from Mexico. It sets me to thinking further about the stage of life in which both of us have taken up residence.
Carlos and I were college classmates, first meeting in 1947 and staying in touch off and on ever since. The occasions when we have been together have always brought me pleasure.
Flowing into China, three groups of fiber-optic cables bring Internet data from virtually the whole world. Thanks to these cables, many Chinese people have access to much of the same material that computer-literate Americans take for granted.
However, at each site the Chinese government has ordered the installation of tiny mirrors, enabling officials to monitor material they find suspicious or politically questionable. Unwanted data can be blocked, and the regime can protect itself against what it regards as subversive ideas or undesirable change.
Yet, at the same time, the government allows another computer link with the outside world to operate without interference. Were not such an open source available, both foreign and domestic businesses would be seriously hampered.
Why, then, do the Chinese people not avail themselves of this channel outside the bounds of censorship? Because they would have to go to a lot of expense and bother to get on that link. The great bulk of computer users will be satisfied with the three main lines even if they know them to be tracked by their national government.
In presenting the above facts I have drawn upon an article written by James Fallows in the current issue of The Atlantic. Fallows, one of America’s best journalists, has been living in Shanghai for the past two years and now knows China well.
While reading about China and the Internet, I was fascinated with the technology that makes the system work. For me, the inner workings of the largest nation on earth continue to be awe-inspiring. Americans can expect to hear further details of such matters when the Olympics open next August in Beijing.
Many people would immediately associate this sense of wonder with youth. Children are supposed to be wide-eyed when they discover the marvels of nature. And students in high-quality high schools and colleges are expected by their mentors to cultivate this approach to their studies.
In practice, however, many young people seem to feel little awe when confronted with science, history, literature, psychology and other fields of study. They often appear to accept what they learn without notable enthusiasm. As a person who talks with students habitually, I always feel disappointed when they show no signs of excitement about learning.
So much for the younger generation. Underrated, in my book, is what a sense of wonder does to enhance later life.
Many of my age peers have discovered or rediscovered late in life the joy of learning and the sense of wonder that ideally accompanies it. Among many others, my friend Hilma Unterberger feels both this joy and wonder.
As a resident of Lasell Village, a retirement residence in Newton that requires everyone to take courses, she loves her studies. This semester Hilma especially relishes what she has been learning about the history of jazz.
Of the learning community where she lives she says, “This place is incredible.” Asked if study like hers extends longevity, Hilma does not hesitate: “No question.”
Thinking about wonder, I keep going back in memory to the day I acquired my first computer, a Commodore 64 that operated through the flickering screen of our late-1970s television set. The moral of that day for me was: “I shall never be bored again.”
This prediction still holds true. The computer, in its present form incredibly much more high-powered than that Commodore, gives me daily stimulation. And that’s without my ever having used it to play games.
In the 1970’s, at our local Council on Aging, I initiated learning sessions with computers for people whom I served. The men and women who took part in that project experienced some of the wonder that even a little computer literacy could stir up. Presumably it gave them motivation in later years for tapping into sources of knowledge of a world larger than they had previously known.
Opening our inner selves to a sense of wonder qualifies as one way to expand what are sometimes the narrow confines of later life.
This openness can counteract the emptiness frequently felt by those of us whose personal contacts have diminished with the passing of years. Wonder at the world can boost the morale of us who may be less involved in daily activities than we used to be.
Though I have focused on computer technology here, I mean to include other areas that can excite wonder. The arts, for example, are so vibrant currently that they can stretch your imagination easily. Newspapers now often carry fabulous reproductions of great paintings and sculptures. And one can find favorite music much more easily than in the past.
In most of my age peers, I like to think, the sense of wonder has not died. However, it may have become less sharp than formerly. Allowing ourselves to be stirred to amazement at the world around us can do much to enrich the days of our lives and perhaps extend them as well.
Richard Griffin
Happiness, it would appear, sells lots of books theses days. Asked why, the current poet laureate of America, Charles Simic, replies frankly. “It’s an industry, it’s really frightening,” he tells New York Times interviewer Deborah Solomon.
“People need to read a book on how to be happy?” he asks. “It’s completely an American thing.”
Searching for happiness has taken its place as the latest fad. Its pursuit, of course, is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence; but the theme has lately acquired a new intensity.
It has become all the fashion to look for ways to lay hold of happiness. More than ever before, perhaps, our nation of 300 million longs for this often elusive good.
Young people are seeking to be happy. The most highly enrolled course at my neighborhood college deals with happiness as its principal subject.
My age peers, too, are looking for this valued prize. In the hope of catching up with it, many of us are still running after happiness. Lifestyle changes, grandchildren, golf scores─all of these goals, and many others─represent happiness in our fantasies.
One place where you don’t expect to find happiness is in your hat. This statement is belied, though, by the marvelous title Oliver Sacks chose for his book (later evolved into an opera), “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”
In my own case, the hat is real. For reasons explained by the hatmaker himself, it has enlarged my own possibilities for happiness. Received as a gift at Christmas, my hat arrived with a message from one Jonathan Richards, self-described as “Irish Hatmaker Extraordinary.”
With the hat, Richards supplies both data on the product’s character and advice about living with it. “How to Enjoy Your Hat” serves as the title of this advisory, a title that has raised my consciousness. Until two months ago, I had no idea of a hat’s possibilities for personal uplift.
Until this Christmas I had thought of hats in purely pragmatic ways. Yes, they could protect you from cold and rain. But I failed to see them as sources of joy. I was still living in the backwash of Jack Kennedy. JFK was the national model of hatlessness and, inspired by his example, I came to wear hats only in blizzards.
This new hat, however, has turned me around. It has opened a broad front of euphoria.
By putting me in touch with my ancestors, it even provides a sense of continuity with the past.
“Your hat has been made for you in the shadow of the Dublin Mountains in Ireland by skilled Craftspeople, in rugged Donegal Tweed,” Richards writes. Every time I put it on I can think of those crafty Irish from whom I have inherited much of my very self.
Donegal Tweed, it turns out, resembles the skin of a modern skyscraper. The wool fibers in the hat continually stretch in rhythm to the temperature of the atmosphere. I know vaguely about the molecules in everything being in motion but, till now, never imagined fiber-stretching going on above my head.
Let me hope that this stretching enhances the thought processes going on just beneath the hat.
As to taking care of the hat, Richards, the Irish Hatmaker, instructs the wearer how to deal with the effects of rain or other water damage. “Leave it to dry in a cool place,” he prescribes. If it needs stretching, you should rotate the hat in your hands, firmly pulling the headband as required.
If the hat gets dirty, Richards would have you “clean your hat carefully by hand with a little soapy water and sponge.” An alternative, for him, would be having it dry-cleaned and reblocked.
His last instruction applies to anyone who wants to freshen up the hat or individualize it. “You can do so, he says, “by holding your hat over a kettle of boiling water and allow the steam to soften the fabric, after which you can reshape the hat to your desire.”
Jonathan Richards may be your kind of guy but he's not mine. I cannot imagine taking any of the hat preservation actions that he prescribes. You will never see me standing over a boiling kettle and later lovingly modeling the hat to its original shape.
But this Irishman personalizes the hat, an appreciation that leaves me behind. His last bit of advice makes clear his basic worldview: “Enjoy your hat! and let it talk for you.”
If I start talking to my hat or, worse still, through it, you will know that I am losing my mind. However, for personal representation, I do favor it over the cell phone.
Back to the poet Charles Simic, I find him wise to reject the pop culture approach to happiness. He finishes his interview by offering some of his own advice.
“For starters,” he suggests, “learn how to cook.”
Richard Griffin
Some events deserve much more attention than they receive. That certainly holds true of the letter, “A Common Work Between Us And You,” sent last October by 138 Muslim leaders and scholars to the pope and other leaders of Christian churches.
This initiative has come from a wide array of Muslims including both Shia and Sunnis, government and religious officials, and residents of countries all around the world. This diversity, representing groups often at odds with one another, gives the letter special force.
And in addition to the pope, a large number of other Christian leaders received this letter: the archbishop of Canterbury, many patriarchs, and the secretary of the World Council of Churches.
As if to include everybody, the senders of the 29-page letter conclude their list with the phrase “and to Christian leaders everywhere.”
At the start, the writers call attention to the place of Islam and Christianity in the world of today. Christians and Muslims, they observe, account for 55 percent of the world’s population.
The authors of “A Common Word” call this demographic reality “the most important factor in contributing to meaningful peace around the world.” They add: “If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace.”
Even more emphatically, they state “The very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake.”
Surprisingly, the signers do not speak to any of the issues that make for conflict between the two great faith traditions. Instead, they focus on the beliefs that bind the two together.
The body of the letter makes three points.
The first point is that both Muslims and Christians believe in, love, and honor the same one God. To show this they present dozens of citations from the Qur’an and the Bible. In citing the latter source, they include the Jewish community.
Secondly, the letter recognizes how both traditions, along with Judaism, proclaim the love of neighbor as vital. In both, this love flows from the love of God, and the love of God is regarded as false if it does not include the love of neighbor.
The third point draws on the two earlier ones. If Muslims and Christians have so much in common, they must act together in harmony. Here, some basic differences are acknowledged but these, they say, should not offset shared beliefs.
The writers reject the idea that Christianity is against Islam. Rather, Christians have solid reason, anchored in the words of Jesus, to be allied with Muslims. This approach provides the basis for mutual dialogue between the two faiths.
They conclude with the following appeal: “Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual good will.”
It all sounds like an inspired way to defuse tensions between the members of the two communities, Muslim and Christian.
That would seem to be the view of Pope Benedict who replied in the same spirit and welcomed dialogue. He also issued an invitation to the Muslim leader who conveyed the letter to the Vatican, and to some of his colleagues.
Another response to the Muslim initiative, this one more detailed, came from a group of some 300 American Christian theologians and other scholars who responded in a public letter of their own. The members of this group, organized by Yale Divinity School, declared themselves “deeply encouraged and challenged” by what they called an “historic letter” and “courageous.”
They also praise the letter for representing “every major school of Islamic thought.” As such, it deserves a response that moves beyond a “polite ecumenical dialogue between selected religious leaders.”
Incidentally, the New York Times refused to run information about the Yale-led response except as a paid ad.
I asked one of the signers, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, for his appraisal of the Muslim initiative. In his view, “It’s historically virtually unprecedented. They drew on their tradition the way we drew on ours.”
For the letter to make a difference over the long run, however, Cox stresses the need of follow-up. “There must be both local and regional conversations,” he says.
I also conferred with Ali Asani, a scholar who is a Muslim, about the likely impact of the letter upon Muslim-Christian relations. For him, the acid test will be “how people on the ground will look at it.” It’s one thing for the Islamic elite to embrace Christian leaders as sharers in the same faith in the one God. But will ordinary people endorse that movement toward mutual understanding?
He sees these relations as being clouded over by colonialism and European imperialism. These have made Christian missionaries branded as a threat to the societies where they have gone. A search is going on in the Muslim world for a new way of looking at the world but this new view has not yet taken hold.
“A Common Word” offers hope that someday it will.
Richard Griffin
“We are not other people.” Long ago, that reply used to come frequently from the lips of Betsy, the mother of six children, presumably when they argued about what other kids were allowed to do.
At Betsy’s recent funeral, one of her daughters recalled this as one of her mother’s favorite lines. Predictably, the recollection provoked laughter from relatives and friends assembled in the church.
The reason we laugh at such lines, it seems to me, is that Betsy’s thoughts ─ if not her exact words ─ were so much a part of many of our own childhoods.
My mother, for example, often told my siblings and me not to think that, because other kids were allowed certain liberties, we also were entitled to them. The words were different but the message was similar.
One of my strongest memories is hearing another approach: holding up members of another family as models of good behavior. In this instance it was not my mother, however, but rather my Aunt Mary who appealed to us to emulate these paragons.
A lifelong resident of Peabody, Mary knew virtually all the other longtime middle-class families of that city. Among them, she most admired those who led orderly, respectable lives. She especially prized those children ─ and they must have been rare even then ─ whose manners were proper and genteel.
That’s why, whenever she was confronted with what she considered bad manners on the part of her nieces and nephews, she would urge us to emulate the Duffs. Those children knew how to behave, at least as she reported it.
We never saw any of the Duff children, and so had no reliable means of verifying the truth of our aunt’s chosen examples. However, you can bet that we were mighty skeptical about the Duffs. We had basic confidence in them as children: most probably they knew how to get out of line just as well as we did, if not better.
Our aunt was an idealist, whereas we kids were solid rationalists. It stood to reason that those Duff kids, in real life, were no better behaved than we were. Possibly, they were even worse than we were, though we had no way of proving this.
Aunt Mary used the myth of the perfect family as a method of ensuring that her nieces and nephews would eventually prove to be, if not perfect, at least better. For her, comparative exhortation was her device to ensure our improvement.
In any event, we Griffins were quite ready to quarrel with the code of behavior that stood behind our aunt’s hopes. We would later describe this code as Victorian, outmoded even in the 1930s and 1940s when my brothers and sisters and I were children.
After all, thanks to Aunt Mary, there were finger bowls at dinner in my grandmother’s house. On such occasions we would mischievously affect to drink the water rather than dip our fingertips into it. We made a joke of them, but that never seemed to offend or upset our aunt.
At other times we received admonitions from our aunt for fighting with one another, indulging in loud outbursts of ridicule, or even talking back to adults. The Duffs, of course, would never indulge in such behavior.
Almost surely, however, she would remonstrate with us and invoke her model family. “The Duffs would never do that,” she would protest, and we would, almost ritually, reject this affirmation.
Often we would go on to make fun of those Duffs, something easy to do because we were never to meet a single one of them. Perhaps they have now grown into later life as models of maturity.
Our grandmother, with whom Aunt Mary lived, would never join in the modeling that her daughter held up to us. Perhaps that qualified as one reason why our grandmother enjoyed universal popularity among us. She was always ready to accept us as we were.
Yet, our aunt was popular, too, because we tolerated her foibles and took pleasure in making fun of them. She provided us with fodder for talking about how unrealistic some adults could be.
Interestingly, my aunt’s approach to childhood conduct appears opposite to Betsy’s, quoted earlier. Betsy was saying in effect, in this family we have our own code of conduct. Don’t tell me what other kids are allowed to do; we are different.
Though my own mother stated it differently, we held to the same principle. Just because other kids are allowed to do something does not entitle you to that same action. You are not they; their parents may have good reason for doing something that we do not allow here.
Some 70 years later, I can look back on such ideology as inoffensive and even charming. Then, however, like my brothers and sisters I would sometimes chafe at the restraints that discipline imposed and the rationale that justified them.
Richard Griffin
“What was left was the love ─ that was the core.” This is how my friend Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle sums up the last years she shared with her husband, Hob.
The first diagnosis of his Alzheimer’s disease came in 1995; he did not die of it until 2002. Olivia calls this passage “the most amazing education I’ve ever had.”
There was suffering, to be sure. Seeing one’s life partner in such decline had to be agonizing. “I just lost it any number of times,” Olivia recalls. “There were times when I would roar in my car.”
But, more important to her, “there were blessings woven through the heartbrokenness.” Compassion, kindness, love ─ all stirred within her frequently and still do.
Olivia tells this story in her new book “The Majesty of Your Loving: A Couple’s Journey Through Alzheimer’s.” She has published it under the Green Mountain Press heading.
I have found it to be an eloquent and humanly rich account of the couple’s experience.
In addition to the main text, Olivia has included at the end of each chapter, “Reflections, Suggestions, and Seed Thoughts.” Her hope is to throw light on the experience of caregiving for others who must deal with diminishment of a loved one.
Like other friends of the couple, I felt part of their journey as it moved toward its inevitable finish. The inspiration they provided has radiated outward and now forms part of my own interior life.
Hob and Olivia had a long history of serious interest in spirituality. For them, it was vital to explore various traditions and movements. Through the years they had kept in personal contact with such spiritual mentors as Bede Griffiths, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Henri Nouwen, not to mention many others.
One result of these investigations was Hob’s ordination as an elder spiritual teacher in the Buddhist tradition, a role that helped define the second half of his life.
This spirituality, it would seem, is what enabled Hob to accept his disease in an often lighthearted manner. He described his condition as “horseblinders,” and often joked about death. When asked how he wanted to die, he told the spiritual writer Joan Halifax: “I’d like to die laughing.”
On one occasion, when he and Olivia went out to a restaurant, Hob passed out and fell to the floor. Members of the rescue squad and others crowded abound him, anxious to help.
Hob looked up at them asked them to move back, saying: “Can’t you see that I am trying to die here?”
Often he would describe what was happening to him. “I feel as if someone has taken the wheels off my roller skates,” he said.
As Olivia describes it, Hob’s illness led them to make what she calls “sort of a deal.” They agreed to look deeply into what was happening, to share their findings with each other, and to negotiate the illness consciously and lovingly to the end.
The book provides a beautiful record of the years when they both coped with the illness and struggled to draw meaning from it. The experience strengthened an already strong marriage. In the latter stages they got to the point where “we didn’t need words any more.”
Before arriving at that point, however, they did need to talk about the crisis. One such discussion concerned Hob’s discomfiuret about having caregivers coming into the house.
Olivia had to explain how her own well-being and survival depended upon receiving help from other caregivers. Connected to that need, as Olivia explained it, was the need for each of them to begin letting go. As the disease progressed, their relationship would have to “disengage from its old forms.”
This, of course, was a hard saying, but Hob accepted it. At an earlier stage both he and Olivia had agreed on the value of a statement by Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit. Teilhard wrote of the adjustment he had needed to make in the face of his last illness. He finally came to thank God for what he termed the “grace of diminishment.”
For Hob, that approach presented obvious challenges. For Olivia, it raised the question of how to let a loved one go. Their way of dealing with these issues will, I believe, prove helpful to others confronted with diminishment, either their own or that of a loved one.
One reviewer (Paul Raia, a psychologist noted for his considerable experience with Alzheimer’s patients and their families) says of the book: “After thirty years of practice in this field, The Majesty of Your Loving changed the way I think about Alzheimer’s disease.”
If you wish to get the book, you can order it on the web site www.MajestyofYourLiving.com. It is available at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge; it will soon be in other bookstores as well. You may also order it from the Alzheimer’s Association in Watertown (617 868-6718.)
Richard Griffin
The film’s title may mislead you. At first hearing, it sounds like a movie about primitive wild men living in the jungle and preying on others.
But “The Savages” has no obvious violence. Rather, it takes its name from the family portrayed: Lenny Savage, the father; Jon, his son; and Wendy, his daughter. These roles are taken by actors who rank among the finest ─ Philip Bosco, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Laura Linney.
This film rates for me as the most satisfying overall that I have seen in a long time. More specifically, I admire its portrayal of a crisis faced by a huge number of American families, either right now or in the future.
Most of us are familiar with this situation: a person advanced in years becomes seriously ill or disabled and needs long-term care. Into this crisis, almost inevitably, are drawn the adult children.
In this instance, Jon and Wendy have been more or less estranged from their father for many years. They are far removed from him, both emotionally and geographically. But that all changes when Jon receives a telephone call in the night informing him that his father needs help.
The film provides a realistic and sensitive look at what happens to the father. We see something of his bewilderment as he moves from the home he was sharing with a woman friend in Sun City, Arizona, to a Buffalo, New York nursing home.
But the film centers on the effect of their father’s crisis on Jon and Wendy. They have not been in close contact before their father’s illness; getting suddenly thrown together proves challenging, to say the least.
Both are shown to have human defects that diminish their lives. Jon has been living with a Polish woman but lacks commitment to her. She is forced to return home when her visa expires.
Wendy, for her part, feels qualms about her sexual relationship with a married man back in New York City. She also feels unfulfilled by her failure to achieve much success in her career as a playwright.
Negative feelings around these issues in the lives of brother and sister are intensified by the stress they are experiencing because of their father’s situation. The stress leads to angry exchanges between them, often punctuated by profanity.
What fascinated this filmgoer was the difference between the two characters and us in the audience. They were unable to identify the stress clearly enough to let them deal with it. We recognized it and felt a mixture of sympathy, exasperation, and gentle superiority.
Especially memorable is the scene featuring Wendy and Jon seated on one side of a restaurant booth and their father on the other. Len, the father, is in the early stages of dementia. Wendy, awkward and embarrassed, tries to ask Len his wishes about end-of-life care and disposal of his body. Jon does no better.
Finally, the father becomes exasperated with them and yells out his answers so that everyone in the restaurant can hear.
In the role of reviewer, I cannot reveal to you any more of the story. That might spoil your pleasure in watching the plot unfold. But I hope to have presented enough of it here to whet your appetite for seeing it for yourself.
I hope others will admire, as I did, the skill of the screenwriter and director (Tamara Jenkins is both), and leading actors in dramatizing without condescension the family drama that touches so many people in our country.
This film takes its place with a couple of others that have dealt with similar subject matter in recent years. Yes, despite the pitfalls of the subject, some filmmakers have managed to get the point about late-life issues and their effects on family members and others.
I recall the 2006 film “Away From Her” in which Julie Christie, in a return to movie making after a ten-year recess, portrays a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. She lives in a nursing home, cut off from her devoted husband.
And I remember “Iris,” the 2001 film in which Judi Dench plays the writer Iris Murdoch, afflicted by the same disease. Jim Broadbent takes the role of her husband, with a sensitivity matching Dench’s.
It may not be coincidental that women were so largely involved in making these films. The directors of both “The Savages” and “Away From Her” are female and, of course, so were the standout performers in those two movies and in “Iris.”
I feel fortunate for having access to such good films; they help me unravel better what the journey of life means. By throwing light upon the anguish of illness and death among my age peers, and the effects those unwelcome realities have on families, these films invite their viewers to appreciate the pathos of human existence in its times of crisis and its hard-won triumphs of love and insight.
Richard Griffin