Larry was only 67 years old when he died.
He sat at the kitchen table, smoking a rollie made with Vogue tobacco (“has some flavour,” he told people, “not like them puny tailor-mades”) and drinking strong black coffee out of his favourite mug. It was a big mug, with his name on it and the
4-H logo. The beef club gave it to him in appreciation for his leadership years ago. From the window he could see his farmyard, laid out carefully 40 years earlier. Corrals surrounded the grey barn and lush irrigated pastures led down to the creek.
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Larry liked to remember when he was one of the best farmers in the area andÊproud of it. His cattle had the best gains and highest weaning weights. He had plenty of pasture, even in dry years, and he bragged about the premium price he got from the horsy set around the city for his high quality hay. His farm was profitable. His neighbours respected him. He sat on that sunny morning, looking out at what represented everything that was important to him, and he died. His heart quit. And he was only 67.ÊÊ
Larry might have lived longer ifÊhe wasn’t so bitter and isolated. He felt his life ended that day eight years earlier when a stroke left him with one side almost paralyzed. It was several weeks before he got out of the hospital and even then he walked with a cane, his left hand hanging uselessly by his side.
When he came home he was hopeful. He thought with physiotherapy he would be able to do farm work again. He probably would have too, had he talked to his wife. It was the bitterness and resentment about her that stalled him; made him give up.
You see, when he was in the hospital, his wife Carla took over running the farm. And she was good at it. Soon she was talking about her farm and what she would do this year with her cattle. Every time she talked that way Larry burned inside. If only he could tell her it hurt him when she talked like that, leaving him out of the decisions, as though he was no longer part of the farm he had so lovingly built up.
“I might be half paralyzed, but I’m not brain dead,” he wanted to scream, but Larry was a man of his generation, so he didn’t say anything. He just got depressed and resentful and after a while gave up even trying to get more movement back in his body.
His face took on a sour look: half angry, half self-pitying. Neighbours quit dropping by because it was a drag to spend time with him. So he sat all day drinking coffee, smoking and looking out the window. Eventually it killed him.
It wasn’t the stroke that did him in. It was the slow burning of resentment and bitterness that hurt his heart and took the meaning out of life. Maybe his soul thought, “Larry, for all practical purposes you’re already dead,” and took him out.
Larry became a statistic, like the people Dr. Don Colbert talks about in his book Deadly Emotions. Colbert mentions a Harvard Medical School study of 1,623 heart attack survivors that concluded that anger brought on by emotional conflicts doubled the risk of subsequent heart attacks compared to those who remained calm. He also mentions a 10-year study showing that individuals who could not manage stress had a 40 percent higher death rate than non-stressed individuals.
Mr. McGarrick (“call me Lou,”) definitely was not Êa statistic. When I met him he was 95 years old.
“I had a stroke when I was 89,” he told me the first day we met. “Paralyzed my whole left side. Took me three years to recover.”
Lou said he worked out regularly with the big wheel on the wall at the physiotherapist’s office, willing his left side to start moving again. He spent hours on a rowing machine. I wouldn’t know he’d had a stroke if he hadn’t told me.
So why am I telling you this? In my experience, life comes and whacks us on the head from time to time. If we can talk about how it’s affecting us and how we feel about it with the people we love and concentrate on what we can do rather than what we can’t, we’ll be more like Lou and less like Larry. We’ll be happier, which I think is one of the main purposes of life.
Edmonton-based Noel McNaughton speaks at conventions and for corporations on Farming/Ranching at Midlife Ñ Strategies for a Successful Second Age. He can be reached at 780-432-5492, e-mail noel@midlife-men.com or visit www.midlife-men.com.
