Rina Lewis Better 2 Write
Family Values
What I learned from Better Together
We were seniors, and they were seniors: we, with our bouncy ponytails and carefree smiles, and they, with their lined faces and tired eyes.
All of them had been hit hard by old age. Some were in wheelchairs. One woman was blind; another had just lost her husband of 67 years. “My” senior, a gentleman of ninety, required a full time aide. Yet, still they were smiling. Everything about the seniors seemed serene.
By mid-February I had formulated my question: What kept the seniors smiling?
These seniors had seemingly little to smile about. Their bodies were shutting down, their spouses dead or dying and their mobility limited. I couldn’t understand their serenity.
Mr. Joseph Korngruen, my senior, epitomized success; he had started with nothing and built his way up. Escaping war- torn Austria on the Kindertransport, he arrived in Great Britain as an orphan. He served in the British army, and eventually traveled to America, where he worked during the day and studied at night. After majoring in chemical engineering, he eventually became a manager of several factories.
So when I asked him what his greatest accomplishment was, I was expecting him to point to his large house in the Hamptons, his appointment to manager at only 23, or his management of a company with five thousand employees. I was shocked when he answered easily, “My family.” Family!? Fascinating.
When I dream about my future, it is mainly the professional arena on which I focus. Should I teach? Maybe psychology is more my type of thing. I picture myself standing in a power suit, lecturing; publishing the Great American Novel-changing the world in some significant way. Family, to my mind, was just a group of people whom you sit with at dinner- it never merited being on my top ten goals in life, let alone the top one.
I figured it was just Mr. K who felt this way. But I was wrong.
Over time I began to see that this perspective was no anomaly: Every one of my classmates’ seniors shared that above all, it was family that sustained them.
“My greatest accomplishment,” said one woman “was raising my four children.”
“I love my grandkids to pieces,” said another.
“My daughters make me happy.”
“My family keeps me going.”
These were some of the most successful people I had ever met. They had climbed mountains, built businesses, crisscrossed countries. These were men and women who created lives for themselves, often from nothing. And as they looked on from the vantage point of their years, they could honestly say that their greatest achievement was family?
Family by default: their careers are gone, they can’t drive, and most of them can’t walk. Of course they look forward to their family to break up their monotonous lives! But I wasn’t so sure.
I did some research and found my answer. Published in 2013 by Harvard University, the Grant and Glueck study followed 724 men over a seventy-five year period. The men were surveyed bi-annually for three quarters of a century. They gave ratings on how satisfying they found their marriages and jobs, and researchers monitored their health with X-rays, blood tests, urine tests, and echocardiograms.
The researchers came away with one major finding: above all, good relationships are most correlated to happy, healthy lives. They found that throughout each stage of life, the men who fostered connections with their family, friends and community were consistently more satisfied with life than their less social peers.
“Society places a lot of emphasis on wealth and leaning in to our work”, said physiatrist Robert Waldinger. “But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community.”
We were seniors, and they were seniors. We had dreams, and they had experience. Mr. K. taught me that my dreams of power suits and changing the world needed to expand to include bedtime stories and time together.
There is so much glitter in our world- cars, careers, multiple homes, all singing their own brand of the siren’s song. Maybe it is time to reassess our priorities. Sitting at the dinner table discussing basically the same events day in day out just doesn’t have that same allure. But seeing, feeling, the seniors’ genuine peace of mind, I know in which direction I will steer my ship.
And that makes me smile.