Hope’s Daughters. R. Wayne Willis
You must sweep the floor once a day, scrub the floor with hot soapy water once a week, clean the blackboards once a day, and start the fire at 7:00 a.m. to have the school warm by 8:00 a.m.65
How much freedom for women is going to be enough? As the grandfather of two little girls, I only want for them what I want for our four grandsons—the freedom to become all they desire and all they have the ability to become.
March 17
When thirty-three Chilean miners were entombed in 2010, one of the first stories leaked about them was a light, funny moment. One miner, not knowing whether he or any of them would survive, created a makeshift blond wig and pretended to be a well-known Chilean philanthropist handing out $10,000 to each miner on the day they all got rescued.66
I thought of what Randall Patrick McMurphy, imprisoned like the miners but in a mental hospital, said in One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest: “I haven’t heard a real laugh since I came through that door. Man, when you lose your laugh, you lose your footing.”
We could call it McMurphy’s law: humor keeps us from losing our footing. Humor, when life gets as dark as a cave or a mine or a mental hospital, helps keep hope alive. If we are serious to a fault, life can get to us, even drive us crazy, especially when the odds are overwhelmingly against us.
Norman Cousins, admitted to the hospital with a potentially terminal diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis, watched Marx Brothers videos and Candid Camera videos as part of his effort to mobilize his salutary emotions. He believed that he could enhance his body chemistry’s healing work. He “made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic affect” and gave him at least two hours of pain-free sleep. Cousins survived his illness. One thing he said he discovered from it was that “hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.”67
Hope and humor act like a tonic, releasing endorphins, our body’s own pain-reducing, immunity-building substance. Someone said: “You have two legs and one sense of humor. If you’re forced with the choice, it’s better to lose a leg.”
March 18
The number of centenarians in the United States was under forty thousand in 1990. In 2014, more than one hundred thousand of us have lived one hundred years or more.
I enjoyed reading a New York Times article: “Secrets of the Centenarians”68 on how some centenarians answer the question they get asked most: “What is your secret to a long life?”
Mae Anderson, 103, of Great Neck, New York, said:
I think not looking into the past and just living in the present is a very good thing, because picking up certain things from the past—what you should have done or could have done—is not going to help you. We’re always grateful for what we can do, and we try to forget what we didn’t do or shouldn’t have done.
Esther Tuttle will not reach one hundred till next July, but she is bound and determined to get there. At ninety two she wrote her memoir and titled it No Rocking Chair for Me. She told the reporter her secret: “Being conscious of your body. Your body is your instrument. So I always did exercises, did a lot of yoga, stretching exercises, and walking. Eat in moderation and drink in moderation.”
One-hundred-year-old Travilla Demming of Tucson said: “I always put anything disagreeable or bad out of the way. That’s the secret of life. Don’t emphasize anything that is evil or bad, but just get rid of it or rise above it.” She concluded: “I’m having a fun old age, except I’m getting rustier and rustier by the day.”
Most longevity researchers agree that 20–30 percent of longevity is genetically determined. That leaves lifestyle (think Esther Tuttle) and attitude (think Mae Anderson and Travilla Demming) as dominant factors. Although not in control of our genes, we do control our lifestyle and attitude.
Maybe old Jonathan Swift had it right: “The best doctors are Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman.”
March 19
“All we have in life is what we notice.”
Leonard Pitts, columnist for the Miami Herald, tells about an eighteen-mile hike he took to raise money against breast cancer. That day he saw things on the hike that he drove by daily on his commute but had never seen—a lake not quite visible from the road; a sidewalk curving gracefully beneath an overhang of trees; a quaint little wooden footbridge over a hollow. He surmised: “We’re all going to the same destination. The only difference is in what we choose to see along the way.”
Victor Frankl saw Nazis strip concentration camp prisoners of everything that symbolized their previous lives. Families and friends got separated, clothing got ripped off and thrown away, possessions got taken away, and bodily hair got shorn. But Frankl noticed something else. He saw a few people, in the face of certain doom, walking through the huts comforting others, even giving away their last morsel of bread.
Frankl survived the Holocaust and went on to write one of the great books of the twentieth century, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he said of those he had noticed giving away their last piece of bread: “They offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 69
What we bring to life is more potent than what life brings to us. I believe Zen master Richard Baker Roshi was right when he said that all we have in life is what we notice. Or as Marcus Aurelius, the Roman philosopher-king put it over eighteen centuries ago: “The color of our thought dyes our world.”
March 20
I saw advertised on the internet a “eulogy pack” for the sudden death of a stepfather.
The company was running a half-price special: six speeches and six poems for only $24.99 (regularly $49.98). Each eulogy articulates the sadness and disbelief of a stepson or stepdaughter at the death of a beloved stepfather. It speaks of what your stepfather meant to you in your life, his many talents and skills, and how much he will be missed, especially because he had a sudden, unexpected death. The eulogy ends with a poem that the stepchild is instructed to read quietly and sincerely. A different pack, also half-price, is offered if the stepfather’s death followed a long illness. And there are other eulogy six-packs for sale, tailored to the death of a stepmother, grandfather, or almost any other relationship.
Emotionally-constipated people through the ages have hired others to do their mourning or cheering for them. Dickens’s Oliver Twist had a job as a professional mourner. The undertaker hired him to attend funerals and look sad, weep, and model grief, and so give permission to others attending the funeral to do the same. Today, for $49.98, he might be able to hire out as a reader of eulogies composed by professionals.
Late-night talk shows and political rallies and other entertainment venues have been known to place a “plant” in the audience to laugh at jokes or applaud, hoping the plant’s emoting will be contagious, in much the same way cheerleaders are planted at ballgames.
In the 1936 presidential campaign, Roosevelt defended any mistakes he might be making in his efforts to be a compassionate leader by quoting “the immortal Dante” who said that “divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-blooded on different scales.70
Fish swim, birds fly, flowers bloom, and humans emote. When all is said and done, may we be found among the warm-blooded ones who rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.
March 21
James Anthony, many years ago at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, conducted a study of “superkids”—kids who adapt to terrible circumstances with extraordinary coping skills and keep finding ways to overcome. One family he studied featured a schizophrenic mother who believed someone was poisoning their food. Her twelve-year-old shared the mother’s fears and would eat only restaurant food. The middle