Reflections on Turning Seventy-five

 

Reflections on Turning Seventy-five

September 10, 2021

 

Seventy-five years ago today the doctors who attended my birth told my parents I would not live through my first night. At least that’s what my parents told me when I was very young. I’ve lived with understanding for as long as I can remember. I have now outlived that prediction by seventy-five years. I find it had to believe, but that’s three-quarters of a century. It’s been quite a ride. I have been no more virtuous than most people. I have achieved far more academic success than most people and have more post-graduate degrees than anyone ought to have. The highest of those degrees is my PhD in Russian history. I wanted to become a professor of Russian history but became a lawyer instead. Law was a profession at which I ultimately failed. I totally burned out on law and became clinically depressed. Through those years I had a wife and children as most people do. I lived in the suburbs of a major city (Seattle) like most upper middle class people do. I don’t know why my wife Francie didn’t leave me during those years of depression. I was useless financially and I’m sure quite unpleasant personally. My life turned around in 1997 when I entered seminary at Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry. That I would ever do such a thing was I’m sure as big a surprise to those who knew me as it was to me, but it was a move that probably saved my life.

Just after I completed my MDiv degree Francie was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I began my first call as a pastor on March 24, 2002. Francie died on July 31, 2002. Before she became too ill to say much of anything she said to me, “I’m so glad you finally are who you really are.” Those words from my terminally ill wife, who probably thought I was nuts to go to seminary when I first said anything about doing it, is the strongest affirmation of who I am and what I’m doing that I have ever had. She also said to me words along the line of, “You’ll be the one still living after I’m gone. Don’t let me or anything you feel about me stop you from living your life. If you find someone new after I’m gone, don’t let me stop you from forming that new relationship.” It’s the best advice a terminally ill person can give her spouse. Thank you, dear.

The years that have followed Francie’s death have been some of the best years of my life, though certainly not because Francie hasn’t been in them with me. I grieved her death intensely for one full year. I still grieve it, though less intensely than I did in the first years after her death. Grief over the loss of one truly loved never goes away; but it does ease some, and you learn to live with it. I will never forget the day I first walked in to the tiny pastor’s office at Monroe Congregational Church, the church that gave me my first call as a pastor. I knew at that moment that I was already a better pastor than I had ever been a lawyer. I was ordained to the ministry of Jesus Christ in the United Church of Christ on June 9, 2002. Francie was there. It was one of the last times she was able to leave home to attend anything.

Only a few days after the first year from Francie’s death Jane and I happened. I was as surprised as she was. She had expected to live her life alone, as she had since she and her first husband Paul divorced in 1991. I never expected to find another love anything like the love Francie and I had for each other. Of course my relationship with Jane is not identical to my relationship to Francie. Jane and Francie are after all quite different people. Still, Jane and I found each other. We’ve been together for eighteen years and have been married for seventeen of those years. Those years haven’t always been easy, though not because Jane and I have any difficulties in our relationship. We’ve both had professional challenges, Jane more so than I, that we haven’t handled as well as we might have. Still, I know that being a pastor is what I should have been doing all along. I think Jane would say the same thing for herself.

Now I’m retired.  I’ve been retired for nearly five years. I haven’t handled retirement all that well. I still wonder what I’m supposed to be doing with myself, yet I definitely do not want another job. I spend a lot of time writing, though not writing things like this, that essentially no one reads. Photography has become something of a hoppy of mine. I have a reasonably good eye for it. I’m learning Adobe Lightroom Classic, a truly amazing computer program for processing digital photographs. I put quite a few photos on Facebook where at least some people see them.

I’ve written books essentially no one reads. I’ve put two of them online with Kindle through Kindle Direct Publishing. I first put up is the book I turned my PhD dissertation into, Reflections on a Russian Statesman. Then I put up a revised and expanded edition of my first theology book, Liberating Christianity. I’ve received three royalty payments from Amazon from sales of those books. All three together don’t add up to five dollars. I mean to put the three volume version of my book Liberating the Bible up on Kindle too, but for some reason I keep not doing it.

What can I say about myself? I consider myself to be quite intelligent though certainly not a genius. I am and always have been strongly introverted except when I was in my role as pastor and the people I was with knew I was the pastor. I’ve felt like an outsider in nearly situation I’ve been in. I observe more than I participate. Maybe that’s why I like photography, which is all about observing. I am not and never have been into physical fitness, preferring the life of the mind to the life of the body. I am a Christian, though now that I’m no longer a pastor my faith gets expressed more in my writing than anywhere else. I have never been much of a praying type. I love singing both by myself and in church or community choirs. I once got to sing with a community choir in Carnegie Hall under the direction of John Rutter, a widely known composer of choral music. I’ve had lots of voice lessons, but I describe myself only as a passable amateur tenor.

I mentioned here that I have children, but I haven’t said anything about them. I have a son named Matt and a daughter named Mary. Matt in particular was quite a challenge as a teenager; and he and his sister got along so badly, especially in the car, that once when we were going to my parents’ house about three hundred miles from our home Francie and I took two cars so we could separate them and not have to put with their incessant squabbling. As adults they are the best of friends, and both of them have turned into truly wonderful adults of whom I couldn’t be prouder. Matt is Division Chief of Training for the Everett, Washington fire department. Mary is a specialist in early child education who isn’t working at the moment but who has a good deal of education and experience in the field. My children have made me a grandfather five times over. I couldn’t have better kids or grandkids.

I have a couple of personal myths that inform my self-identity. One is the story of the doctors telling my parents I would not live through my first night that I have already mentioned. That story tells me I’m a survivor. I’ve survived seventy-five years more than the doctors thought I would, and I’m not done yet. I’ve lived through a fair amount of trauma, especially the deaths of my wife, both of my parents, and my twin brother’s debilitating stroke that has left him paralyzed and suffering from dementia. The other personal myth of mine comes from an incident when I was either in junior high school or high school We had a next door neighbor named Larry, a boy the same age as my brother and me, who was one of the cool kids at school, something I never was. One day he pinned me to the ground in our backyard and had one of my arms pinned across my back wrestling move that, if I remember correctly, is called a half nelson. It hurt. It hurt a good deal. Larry kept saying to me “say uncle!” He said it over and over again, and I never did. I was bound and determined that I wasn’t going to. Eventually he let me go. He was impressed. So was I. This story tells me that I can be determined, stubborn even, to see something through. I got my PhD at least a couple of years after it had become apparent that there would be no jobs to be had in my field. I did it because I had set out to earn a PhD, and by God I was going to do it. So I’m a survivor, and I can be tough when I need to be.

I’m old and getting older. I have numerous health issues—asthma, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gastric reflux, migraines, and episodic atrial fibrillation. They’re all managed with medication. I’ve never had truly healthy lungs. I suspect though I don’t know that underdeveloped lungs were why the doctors told my parents I wouldn’t live through my first night. My pulmonary disability certainly isn’t getting any better with age. For the past few years I’ve been living the truth that people run up most of their medical expenses late in life. Thank God for Medicare and the Medicare supplement health insurance policy I have.

What does my future hold? Probably more of what my past has held since I retired, with a decline in my health added on. How much longer do I have? There’s no way to know, though of course I know that I’m closer to the end than I ever have been before. Both of my parents lived long lives, but they didn’t have my lungs. I carry no terminal diagnosis today. I pray that I won’t for many years; yet since my retirement my motto has been que sera sera, whatever will be will be. So with gratitude toward God and all the people who have been part of it for the length and richness of my life I’ll end with that. Que sera sera.