Hagerty - Life reimagined : the science, art, and oportunity of midlife

AN ENDING, AND A BEGINNING

S eptember 5, 2012, had been a trying day. I devoted much of the afternoon to crafting a response to a listener who disliked a story that had aired the previous day on All Things Considered. When you cover a beat such as religion, as I did for many years at National Public Radio, you brace for a hailstorm of outraged e-mails every time you file a report.

But I never grew used to them, and this one was particularly upsetting. Just after I sent off my response, I felt a sharp pain in my chest. My breathing became clipped and shallow. Heat radiated up my back. Panicked, I googled heart attack + women. The results were not reassuringare any health-related answers on the Internet reassuring?and I called my doctor, Brad Moore, on his cell phone. I described my symptoms as calmly as I could.

I dont like the shortness of breath, he said. I want you to call 911 immediately.

I made it partway through I can do that, when the room lurched and went black. When I opened my eyes, my colleague John Ydstie was tucking a soft sweater under my head. An ambulance is on its way, he whispered. Then I heard Scott Simons voice directing the medics to my cubicle. Dr. Moore, who also sees Scott, had called him when he heard me faint.

By the time the ambulance reached the George Washington University Hospital, I was feeling pretty good, well enough to go home, in fact. I explained to the nurse that I was a healthy woman who takes a six a.m. spinning class every day. I could not possibly have a bad heart. The nurse looked at me, handed me a hospital gown, and scanned her notes.

Youre fifty-three, right? she asked, as if that number were a clinical condition, like diabetes. I think wed better keep you overnight.

It occurred to me then that I was suffering from a condition: a physical and emotional condition called midlife. This condition presented as a disconnect between my thirty-something self-image and my fifty-something reality. I recognized it every time I passed a mirror and saw the lined face of my mother in her fifties staring back at me. I spotted it often at work, when my younger, ambitious self insisted that I clamor to cover that breaking story, while my chronological self shrugged, preferring a good nights sleep to another all-nighter. Sitting there in the thin hospital robe, I admitted there were moments, more and more frequent, when I seemed to be pushing a wheelbarrow full of dense, unfulfilled ambition up a steep gravel path. It was exhausting, but I didnt know any other way to live.

I was not left to my thoughts for long. Within minutes, my husband, Devin; my brother, Dave; Dr. Moore; and Marty Makary, a good friend and surgeon at Johns Hopkins, had arrived, creating a little party in our corner of the ER. As the five of us chatted and laughed, e-mails from NPR friends and colleagues began filling my iPhone; someone had sent an All Staff e-mail. My dear friend Libby Lewis called to say she would visit early the next morning. I felt loved, I felt cherished. Why hadnt I pulled this stunt before?

Eventually everyone left, and at two a.m. I was given a bed. I awakened with a dull headache a couple of hours later to a persistent beeping from the bed next to me. I gazed at the ceiling, reflecting on my family and friends and how desperately I wanted a cup of coffee. At six-thirty, I called Devin to see if he could bring me a double espresso. I reached him as he was leaving the house.

You need to call Dave, he said.

Why?

Just call him, he said uncomfortably.

Instinctively, I knew: Dad had died. As it turned out, he had died at five that morning, at age ninety-one.

That night, after I was discharged from the hospital, my family and a few friends collected at my brothers house for dinner.

Turns out I was with the wrong relative last night, Dave quipped when he ushered us in, and it felt good to laugh.

We crowded around the kitchen table and began swapping stories about Dad. We remembered how he learned to swing dance when he was sixty-nine, and how at seventy-four, by then two years divorced, Dad spotted Nancy at church and courted her with such charm and devotion that she had to marry him. We talked about how Dad believed in me: When I was struggling in school as a third-grader, how he spent hours helping me with homework and with prayers written out on yellow legal pads. We recalled how Dad studied French every night between two and three a.m., teaching himself vocabulary and grammar. He never progressed beyond terrible at French, but he always insisted that some things are worth doing poorly. I think he meant that some things are so worthwhile that even if you have no talent, even if the results are mediocre, it is still worth your time and effort. In his final years, his mind and body had failed himhe was nearly blind, nearly deaf, and suffered from dementiabut to the end, Dad lived each day with verve.

After hearing that my father had died, Scott Simon sent me a note. He had known Dad. They belonged to the same health club and would occasionally share a cup of coffee, Dad no doubt clueless as to Scotts fame. Scott mentioned that he had told his wife, Caroline, about my health scare and my dads death.

Caroline said, Darling, I dont care how far gone someone is, they always feel a tug from their children. Gene wanted to go instead, Scott wrote. We believe that Gene somehow knew that you needed a little help and he said to God, Barbie still has a lot of things to do. Im ready. Take me, and he said it with that incredible chiseled smile. And God said, Gene, youve got a deal.

Even now, several years later, these words make me cry. They remind me that Dad loved me fiercely and would have instantly traded his life for mine. Scotts words also illumined a larger truth: A page had turned, Dad was gone and I was here, ostensibly healthy but keenly aware that a hospital stay or worse was only one stressful event away. I saw it would not be too long before my brother and I would be next at bat, and that the next generation to fall was my own.