What Comes Next: Sunday musings…4/13/2025
1. Blogviate. To bloviate via a blog.
Today is the 16th anniversary of this silly blog. I’ll circulate the original post this week. Launched on this day in 2009 for the sole purpose of emptying out my “internal hard drive” so that I could refill it with more drivel. It’s been a great ride!
Thanks for coming along.
2. Adumbrate. To report or outline. Not at all what I was expecting.
Seems to me the “dumb” in the middle should have more influence. You know, like the “reporting” you’ve found here.
3. Healthspan V. Connection is the last piece of the Healthspan puzzle. Originally noted by the researchers of the Harvard Happiness study that followed the Class of ’55 through their post-collegiate lives, close personal connections are strong predictors of health and happiness as we grow older. This remarkable study was later combined with an equally wonderful cohort of young men from the public high school in nearby Revere, and subsequently has been expanded to include their spouses, children, grandchildren, and so on.
Through all of these generations the results have been consistent: the presence and maintenance of close personal relationships is strongly associated with an increase in happiness, and a delay in the onset of the effects of chronic disease and aging. The conclusion of the original Harvard study was very specific: happiness and its effects were present if one of the men had 3 or more close personal friendships. Interestingly their wives did not count toward the 3 (Note: I could find no mention of same sex partners). As the study expanded and examined the health and happiness of all family members it became clear that ANY close personal relationships counted, the more the better.
It should be noted that the most recent reportage in the book “The Good Life” reviews data that includes only the first few years of our new age of “remote connection” through the various tools of the internet. The influence of these relationships is therefore predicated on proximity: they took place “in real life” as we now say. The relationships that show a beneficial effect on Healthspan take place side-by-side and face-to-face. Perhaps the addition of our myriad new modes of communication enhance this proximity effect. It remains to be seen if our very new world with all of its “together while apart” connections will have a similar effect.
For now the final key that unlocks our Healthspan potential is creating and nurturing close personal relationships with family and friends. That this should be so seems obvious. Nonetheless, it is fascinating and more than a bit comforting to see it objectively confirmed over 4 generations.
4. Next. Consistent with this, Beth and I made a quick trip to Cincinnati last weekend to see our friends Bill and Nancy. Outside of our siblings and their spouses they are the couple with whom we have had the longest continuous friendship. We met in grad school, and for almost 30 years lived less than an hour apart as we raised our families and marched through our careers. Those families shared something like 28 or 29 consecutive Christmas night dinners. Married a month apart, the four of us have celebrated most of our anniversaries together; this year we will travel to Italy for our 40th.
So much of what we’ve experienced together has occurred pretty much on schedule. “What comes next?” was almost as predictable as the changing of the seasons. Kids were born, went to school, and fledged. Mostly on schedule. Both couples became empty nesters at about the same time. Bill and I went through the phases of our surgical careers, again, mostly on schedule. Each of us made one very major change in our practices here in Cleveland, and we expected that our glide paths to retirement would also be fairly similar. Bill opted to step off the practice carousel in favor of a medical director job with one of the big industry players in early 2020, but even so, it appears that we are still running side-by-side as we come to the finish line.
And so it was that we four found ourselves returning again and again to the question of what comes next. None of our parents really asked themselves that when they still had some control over the answer. Only Bill’s Mom is left of our 8 parents and sadly she was not any more receptive to the entreaties made by Beth and Nancy to the other parents that they proactively decide what the last third of their lives might look like. “Big Red” has channeled Beth’s parents and my Mom, digging in her heals and insisting that she is completely capable of handling life on her own in the family home. It was a hard landing for all of our folks, and terribly difficult for the rest of us to watch.
What about us, then? We have watched our parents fail to plan for what inevitably comes next. Retirement, for example, just happened. Even my father-in-law, so fixated on retiring at 55, spent very little time thinking about what that would mean and what comes next after retirement. More problematically, he also failed to effectively communicate whatever he may have been thinking with my mother-in-law. She never really made clear her desires or plans, leaving them in separate row boats, adrift on the same ocean, miles apart.
I don’t think this is really the case with either Beth and me or Bill and Nancy. From our discussions with one another last weekend it is clear that both couples are intensely engaged in the back and forth necessary to be in the same row boat headed toward the same beach. After a couple of days chatting and a week or so to digest the conversations, it appears that we have all learned the lesson so painfully taught by our parents’ endgames. The decisions we must make are all fairly obvious; make the decisions you must make when you still have the ability to make them for yourself.
What’s next for us is retirement. When and then where. In all likelihood “when’ will be the kicker; where can be changed at almost any point. Both Bill and I have toiled in worlds where our work has brought us great measures of respect. Indeed, if anything our results have continued to improve over time, and the respect accorded us therefore not simply due to our longevity. We have remained relevant, contributing to the continued development of our respective fields, even at this later stage of our careers. Interestingly this actually makes it harder to retire. Meaningful relevance and the respect it brings is heady stuff, no matter what kind of work you do. How else to explain the Jamie Dimon’s of the world, let alone the Buffet’s and the octogenarians shuffling in the halls of government?
When to retire seems to be the first of a series of “whens” awaiting, and perhaps the easiest. Neither one of us wants to stay beyond the point when we are no longer relevant or, Heaven forbid, discover that we have stayed too long. After that comes the hard parts. When do we leave our homes? When do we accept help in the basic blocking and tackling of daily life? When do we relinquish our agency? Having seen the end of our parents’ journeys will we have the perspicacity to decide when it’s “when”? Will we have the courage?
In the end “next” always arrives, we just don’t know when.
I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2025 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.