Fifty years last month, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier were married in Newport, Rhode Island. On September 12, 1953, a reported 750 guests crowded into St. Mary’s Church for the 40-minute wedding ceremony and then traveled to Hammersmith Farm overlooking Narragansett Bay for the reception.

Society weddings, even those of some historical importance, would not normally move me to write, but this one has a connection with my family that stirs memories.  My parents were among the guests at this event, largely because of my father’s longstanding friendship with the bridegroom’s father. My father’s role as a prominent newspaperman and television broadcaster may also have figured in the invitation.

I would like to have fascinating anecdotes from inside the events to share with a wide public. Unfortunately, I cannot remember ever talking with my parents about their experience in seeing a famous couple exchange marriage vows. At that time, I was living away from home in monastic seclusion and focused on higher things than splashy weddings. And events that in retrospect take on historical value are often not recognized as important at the time.

What I did learn about the event was that my mother picked out a gift for the couple that was somewhat offbeat. She chose to give them a leather-bound reader’s encyclopedia, a fine selection for a couple who already had everything. In return, she received from Jackie a graceful note that has been handed down in our family archives.

Looking at the wedding from the vantage point of 50 years later, I feel a mixture of emotions. As with all Kennedy stories, the wedding events have long since become suffused with an aura of sadness. Jack’s assassination remains a catastrophe that contains what the Latin poet Vergil called “the tears of things.” For an assassin’s bullet to have ended a life so valued by a huge world community continues to haunt me.

Inevitably, another dark cloud envelopes the happy wedding scene. Revelations about the way Jack played around, bringing women into the White House for sexual activities, for me inevitably casts a pall over the events in Rhode Island. The vows that Jack exchanged with his bride that day proved to be shallow indeed.

Looking at the wedding photos, one sees a bridegroom who seems thoroughly delighted with his choice of a bride. Jack’s infectious smile looks so genuine, it is hard to imagine him ever being unfaithful to her. They appear to be a couple too deeply in love for that to happen.

Part of the experience of growing older is to become disillusioned with some of our views of the world. If we live long enough, we discover that many of the institutions and people we have known do not deserve the trust we put in them. Ultimately, they disappoint us, sometimes to our chagrin and even our harm.

Trusting other human beings, we find, can prove hazardous. Even family members and close friends sometimes betray our confidence in them. They turn out to be only human, a term that with maturity we come to see as a mixed reality. Part of wisdom, traditionally ascribed to old people, surely includes the recognition of how flawed everything human is.

More than recognition, acceptance of this fact goes far to make us wiser. In later life, we have learned how impossible it is to reform the world. After a while, the knowledge that people will often act badly figures as a given in our expectations.

I fantasize about how Jackie Kennedy must have coped with her husband’s infidelity.  Did she feel depressed in knowing that he did not reserve his sexual love for her?  Or was she enough the woman of the world to accept his misbehavior and go on with her life? Beneath that charming exterior, she may have harbored a cynical view of mankind, at least the male variety.

Jack’s and Jackie’s wedding did not lead to an ideal marriage. He, at least, had a character deeply flawed in some respects that must have made married life even more difficult than it is for most other people.

My faith tradition has always armed me against an optimistic view of the world. The doctrine of original sin is one that I have never had any trouble believing, because it describes so well what we humans are like. Something is askew with the world: sons and daughters of Adam and Eve are deeply flawed.

There are times when we forget this – – as in the early, heady optimism of the Kennedy administration. But when one looks at history overall, original sin looms large. Even our efforts at achieving peace often come to naught instead of producing the transformation of the world for which we hope. The expectation that one day peace will be achieved turns out to be ultimately illusory.

Yet, the same faith  tradition teaches that we are also deeply loved and that love will ultimately triumph over evil. In my book, this justifies being hopeful but not optimistic.

Richard Griffin

Do you remember predictions, confidently made back in the 1950s, about working Americans gaining much more leisure by this stage in our history? As a result of new technology and greater productivity, we would spend considerably less time in our workplaces and become free for travel, activities at home with our families, and cultural events.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out that way.  Employed Americans are spending longer hours on the job than in the 1950s.  The promised age of leisure has become a time of incessant labor. We are working nearly nine full weeks longer each year than do the residents of Western Europe.

Some of our fellow citizens are disturbed enough about this situation that they have organized to change it. Under the title “Take Back Your Time Day,” they are planning a campaign to raise consciousness about the harmful effects of overwork.

The first event in the “Take Back Your Time Day” campaign will take place on Thursday, September 25th at 3 Church Street, Cambridge, opposite the Harvard Square Theater, at 7:00 p.m. One of the speakers will be Juliet Schor, a professor at Boston College and author of The Overworked American.

This event anticipates a national campaign that begins on October 24th with a lunch-hour rally at Faneuil Hall in Boston.  October is to be called “National Work and Family Month,” thanks to a resolution sponsored by Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch and passed by the United States Senate. A new book, “Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America” edited by John de Graff, will provide added firepower to the campaign.

By comparison with the citizens of France, Germany, and other European countries, we take much shorter vacations. They average five or six weeks annually, while we get just over two.

It may seem inconsistent for me to praise longer vacations after the recent debacle in France. Anyone who saw the photo of the president of France and the mayor of Paris at a city cemetery for the burial of 57 old people who perished in the heat and whose bodies were never claimed, will not soon forget what happened. Neglect of these victims and others like them happened in part because so many younger French people were away on vacation for a full month.

However, the problem did not arise because they took vacations but because residents left the cities en masse, leaving too few care-professionals, family members, and neighbors to look out for those in peril from the heat. The vacations were desirable but not everybody should have been away at the same time.

Concern about overwork may also seem ironic in a time when so many Americans cannot find employment at all. In the past two years, our country has lost some two and a half million jobs, leaving many of us out of work. To make matters even more painful, many of these people have given up as hopeless the search for paid work.

Organizers of the new campaign have compiled a list of harmful outcomes caused by overwork. It threatens one’s health, with an estimated $200 billion lost to our economy through job stress and burnout. It threatens our marriages, families, and relationships. And it reduces employment prospects since fewer people are hired and are made to work longer.

You may wonder what American overworking has to do with older people. I believe it to be a subject on which we elders have something important to say. So does Juliet Schor who told me: “people in older generations have a much deeper understanding of the issue.”

Many of us who have retired or changed gears and entered into a different work mode have discovered the value of enhanced leisure. Finding more time for ourselves and others has unlocked for us entrance into new arenas of creativity. We have surprised ourselves by laying hold of creative powers we did not know we had.

Especially does this new freedom free us for spiritual discovery. We can experience the rewards of exploring our own interior and of finding God or ultimate meaning in new ways. Thus we may relate more vibrantly to Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s words: “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”

Leisure can free us to appreciate the Sabbath or our own version of it. I keep in mind the example of former neighbors who used to observe faithfully both the letter and the spirit of this special day of the week.

The father of the family, Dr. Michael Rothberg, shared with me some of his feelings and those of his wife and children about this day of leisure: “Our lives really center around it. It’s something that is always there, something that you can look forward to. It’s a time to be with the family and to be reflecting on spiritual matters.”

American society desperately needs more of this contemplative spirit. Perhaps we elders can help show the way.

Richard Griffin

“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