The death of Dr. Robert Butler has stirred both my emotions and my thoughts. When word came that he had died on July fourth, it struck me as unlikely, even impossible. After all, I had spent the first full week of June with him as I took part in the Age Boom Academy for journalists conducted by his International Longevity Center in Manhattan.
Bob Butler seemed to be enjoying excellent health, as his active participation in the academy suggested. On the day we finished, I saw him emerging from the converted townhouse on East 86th Street and walking briskly westward. There, I said to myself, is a 83-year-old who knows how to live and will surely live much longer.
Dr. Butler seemed too eminent to die. No one in the field of aging had as impressive a record as had he. Though not widely known to the general public, he was a household name among gerontologists. After all, he had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for his book “Why Survive?: Being Old in America” that launched the age movement in this country. He went on from there to found the National Institute On Aging and became its first director. And in 2008 he had published “The Longevity Revolution,” a book that celebrated the extension of life for so many Americans.
In dying, Bob exemplified a by now well-established ideal in the field of aging. It’s called “the compression of morbidity” and suggests that the best model for dying is to live as long as possible without major disease and then to die suddenly, or after only a few days of being ill. Even more than most people, Bob, as a physician, would not have wanted to go through a long-drawn-out dying process.
A colleague recently asked me to explain the fact that people die. In particular he wondered how our friend Bob Butler could have encountered death so suddenly and surprisingly. In response, I told my colleague that I consider death the great mystery, a phenomenon that no human being will ever understand. We live and we die, both realities that lie outside our comprehension.
Because of Bob Butler’s death I now feel closer to my own. Mine will probably be quite different from his but we were near in age and shared some friends and many interests. I would hope to share Bob’s immunity from dementia, a disease currently afflicting more than five million Americans and in time likely to touch many more.
I feel thankful for having known this benefactor of the community. He was a person whom I considered a mentor. Besides that, he lived and worked to make life better for others, and thus offered a fine example that I will continue to value highly.