A Second Life

Five years ago I started publishing a weekly E-Letter. In my first issue I talked about the second life that each of us will have the opportunity to experience. My friend, and subscriber, Dave immediately emailed back and said, “A second life after 50? I think I'm on my third right now.”

Dave is right; he is in his third age.

Alan Pifer, former chairman of the Carnegie Corporation Project on an Aging Society, has suggested that our increasing longevity gives us a new third quarter in our life span. He says this “should constitute a period of rebirth, with the awakening of new interests and enthusiasm for life, and few possibilities for being productive.”

The challenge that we face is how can we make our additional years better for ourselves and better for our society.

William A. Sadler, author of The Third Age, uses sigmoid curve (a S laying on it’s side and stretched out). According to Dr. Sadler there is a brief dip in the learning curve during early adaptation to life. Then we progress upward towards a peak near the middle of life, where we reach a plateau. From there it is a gradual descent. This is the old, conventional view of life.

The poet T. S. Eliot, at age seventy expressed a conventional view of the second half of life in very unconventional and blunt terms: “I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.”

What has really changed is our lengthening life span. In eighteenth-century American, the average life span was barely forty. From 1900 to 1993 the average American life expectancy went from 47.3 yeas to 75.5 years. As we enter the twenty-first century, the average American life span is nearly eighty.

Many of us are getting a thirty year bonus. I’m going to live mine to the fullest. Dr. Walter Bortz of Palo Alto, California, has specialized in vital aging, says that we should plan on living one hundred years or more. Between 1960 and 1996 the number of centenarians in America increased from 3,000 to over 55,000. He feels that millions will pass this milestone in this century. There will be too many of us to be mentioned on the Today Show. Willard will have to up the age to 110 or 115.

According to Dr. Sadler, “Getting older has commonly been associated with five deadly D words: decline, disease, dependency, depression and decrepitude (feebleness). After these, of course comes the sixth dreaded D word, which marks the end of the line.”

Ever since that first E-Letter I have focused on the R words, such as rebirth, renewal, regeneration, revitalization and rejuvenation. It has also lead into a new career field and looking at new dreams and goals. I’m enjoying my second life.

I welcome and encourage feedback. I want to hear your stories. It also lets me know I anyone is reading this.

A Memorial Day Note

I know Memorial Day is still several weeks away, but I came across this article I had written in 2002. I was looking or something else but this one spoke to me. If we want to do something different this Memorial Day, May 28th, we should start planning now.

While researching material for my Memorial Day presentation to the Columbia Gorge Kiwanis Club I came across the following on the Internet:

"This weekend I am going to do something different. I am going to buy some carnations each day and go to one of the nearby cemeteries and walk through the sections for soldiers. When I find a grave that has no flowers, I'll leave one and say a prayer for the family of that person, who for some reason could not bring their soldier flowers. I will pray for our country and all who serve or have served. For their families, who also serve by losing precious days, weeks and months spent with their loved ones who are off serving, preserving peace and the freedom we have in this country. I'll pray for the families who paid the ultimate price, who's loved ones died, or were taken captive and never returned. I'll pray for anyone who may still be held in captivity and thinks perhaps they are forgotten. I do NOT forget."

How are you going spending this Memorial Day? Is this just the third day of the three day weekend that marks the beginning of summer? Did you visit the grave of someone who served his or her country? Did you pause for a moment to remember the true meaning of today?

I will be in a local cemetery tomorrow morning with a bunch of carnations, looking for the graves of servicemen without flowers. I will leave one and say a prayer for that person. In many cases, it’s not that the families forget; there are no families left to remember these men & women. I do not forget.

Moina Michaels wrote in the following in 1915.

We cherish too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies.

General Order 11 of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued in 1868, states:

“Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation’s gratitude, the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.”

In 2002 I went to a local cemetery. Since then I have traveled to Cathlamet, Washington, my mother’s hometown and visited the cemetery when my relatives are buried. I have taken a bunch of carnations and visited each of their graves. I have also honored the veterans long forgotten.

Where will you be on Memorial Day, May 28th, 2007?

The Mess at Walter Reed

You may have not noticed the news coverage of living conditions at the Walter Reed Medical Center for solders well enough to be outpatients.

The Army and the Defense Department began investigations after The Washington Post published stories that documented problems in soldiers' housing and in the medical bureaucracy at Walter Reed, which has been called the Army's premier caregiver for soldiers wounded in. Even the network news programs picked up the stories.

The problems at Walter Reed pertain not to the quality of medical care for wounded soldiers but rather to the treatment of those who are well enough to be outpatients, living in Army housing at Walter Reed. One building, called building 18, was singled out in the Post reports as being in bad repair, including having mold on interior walls.

The Commanding General at Walter Reed has now been relieved of his command. His firing could very well mean an end to his Army career. I had been hoping that they would treat him like the slum landlord that he is and make him live in building 18.

The investigation is now beginning to look at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and other military medical treatment facilities around the United States. A blue ribbon panel is looking the housing conditions and the processing of determining disability when soldiers are unable to return to duty.

I spent 23 years in the Navy Medical Department and was stationed at Bethesda in the late 1970’s. As young, new commissioned Medical Service Corps officer at the Naval Hospital, St Albans (in the heart of Queens) New York I had first had experience dealing with patients from all the uniformed services. During the Viet Nam war patients were sent to the military hospial closest to their home. We always had more Army patients and Navy and Marine Corps.

The challenge has always been how to keep these young men and women motivated. They are separated from their units and most are also separated from loved ones. They are in limbo, waiting for the medical and military bureaucracy.

We need to find new and creative ways to make these young men and women feel useful and productive. With all the modern technology there has to be better ways.

Congress says they fully support our troops. Now it is time for them to provide the resources necessary to take care of our wounded warriors. They need more than just the lip service that our politicians are famous for.