The Lives They Lived

While the time flexibility of retirement takes a working lifetime to, routines develop.  It's a time to forge new interests or recapture old ones.

Way back when, in an era when a copy of the Sunday Times would not set me back that much and was readily available sans employment ads in the hinterlands in which I lived, a walk or drive to the pharmacy or 7-Eleven for a week's reading enjoyment would conclude my weekend in the best way.  Of its many features, the one that made the top of my list came in the first magazine of each calendar year, devoted to The Lives They Lived.  As a young doctor, I took an initial fascination to the obituaries as my patients in Boston not always survive my most expert care.  I inherited most at the end of their lives, often people with declining physiologic function without a lot of appreciation for what they might have been like in their prime.  The obituaries in the Globe or Patriot-Ledger restored life to what had too often been viewed as protoplasm.  Some of these people trusted to my care at the very end did some pretty remarkable things before they needed medical care.  Newspaper obituaries gave an abstract, whether my patients, a relative, or a more public person.  But that one issue of the Lives they Lived took a few dozen people of accomplishment and restored their lives within a page or so from a list of positions held to a description of the kinds of people they were, their branch points, their passions, their foibles.  By the end of an essay, I knew each of theirs better than I perceived my own.

As I moved into practice, the Patriot-Ledger became the News-Journal, again reminding me that everyone had a time in which they were not on their last legs, even if I didn't know them that far back.

The Internet being what it is, all sorts of information has been entered into cyberspace by somebody, organized for easy retrieval with some type of wizardry that I don't understand, and now allowing The Lives They Lived to be moved from an annual January treat to a daily reminder of the glories of what people can accomplish.  Each day, double preceding shabbos, I call up two lists.  One is On This Day which I search the death anniversaries for the following day.  As with my patients, I do not recognize most of the people on that list, reinforcing my belief that people can do some very important things without my knowing about it.

Then comes the daily death anniversaries in Wikipedia, which has links to the biographies, typically in encyclopedic detail.  My pattern of search has taken a few forms over my first retirement year, but the first go round is generally limited to people who might be Jewish or were Islamic.  Sometimes I was right, sometimes not.  You cannot tell by a name.  While intermarriage has been a 20th century population scourge, as I read the obits of the Jewish people, 19th century Europe had its attrition that way too, but the couples mostly persevered and achieved.  In recent months, I've become intrigued by people listed as European who were adults in World War II.  Eminent scientists turned on their Jewish colleagues sometimes and protected them sometimes.  Composers, authors, entertainers suffered displacement but were able to hit the reset button.  In modern America, all avenues to Jewish prominence were open, though not always with propagation of the religious identity.

Next I go back to the beginning of the daily list, picking out obscure people from the middle ages who were princes in city-states before they became nation-states.  Life spans beyond 60 were uncommon, as appendicitis which I just recently experienced with prompt reversal would have been lethal at that time.  More importantly, even the most sophisticated regencies were surprisingly tribal, with an insatiable desire to usurp somebody else's position or behead anyone whose thoughts posed a challenge.  By the 18th century, we start to see the list move from yichus to prominence achieved by one's own talent or diligence.  I call up all the scientists and physicians next.  My final review goes to those who failed to reach age 50, which includes a surprising number of people who lived amid respectable medical care.  There were suicides, transportation trauma, warfare, malignancies, and a variety of other events that shortened life spans, though they were long enough to perform some major athletics, composition, writing, or art.

There is something just inspiring about people who had the motivation and talent to excel. In addition, as a youngster I used to like to browse the Encyclopedias in the school or public libraries.  Those multivolume tomes have been made obsolete, though replaced with electronic forms.  I've recaptured my fascination with browsing them again with not particular assignment other than my own curiosity to fulfill.