Who Wants To Be One Hundred?
My father, Charles William (Bill) Schuler, would have been a hundred today (for a fuller account of his curious life, click “Publications” on this website). Born on July 3, 1922, he passed away two months shy of his ninety-seventh birthday, on a sunny afternoon in a Naples, Florida hospice unit. Although my grandfather had succumbed to emphysema while still in his early sixties - his demise hastened by exposure to toxic mold spores - his widow, Goldie, soldiered on for another forty-plus years before giving up the ghost at a hundred and two. Until his last years, I think Dad had every intention of surpassing her record for longevity.
He might well have done so had he not squandered the opportunity with lifestyle choices that could well have killed him much earlier. For most of his life, Dad had been unusually conscientious about his diet, and took pride in his age-defying ability to wield chainsaws, brush cutters, and similar equipment in maintaining their lakeside property. But after a prostate cancer scare, he and my mother, Nancy, packed up their lives and moved to a continuing care community adjacent to Jacksonville’s Mayo Clinic. Although they had purchased an attractive single family home in that vast complex, the very fact that he was now surrounded by folks leaning on canes and shuffling behind walkers proved disheartening.
Dad could never picture himself as “old” (the image he chose for the homepage of his Facebook account was a flattering studio photo of him in his Army dress uniform, circa 1945). But now the reality was beginning to press in upon him and his discipline started to crumble. He began abusing the sedatives and opioids he’d once taken as prescribed, lost interest in physical labor or any other form of exercise, and began turning up his nose at the bland but balanced meals his wife placed before him.
He and my mother lasted nine years in Jacksonville, but by 2014 he had become too emotionally volatile and physically compromised for her to handle. At this point the only real option was to bring them to Madison, where my wife, Trina, and I could provide additional support.
Needless to say, this arrangement didn’t sit at all well with Dad, who soon made it know that he intended to return to Florida post haste. By late 2016 he’d persuaded Nancy to spend the winter in a Naples beachfront hotel, promising that the two of them would use their round trip tickets to come back North in early March. Before they embarked, I warned mother that once Dad had escaped from Wisconsin, he’d never return. And he didn’t.
The sad fact is that after seventy years of marriage, Bill separated from Nancy and for another two-plus years continued to live singly in a sixth floor suite overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Although she joined him for several months each winter, they lived in separate quarters, as he opted for a life of increasing dissipation. On March 20, 2019, I retrieved Nancy for the last time and brought her back to Madison.
The next day Dad fell in his suite while preparing breakfast and was hospitalized. A thorough examination exposed several nutritional deficiencies and untreated infections, none of them life-threatening. Nevertheless, over the next month he continued to deteriorate. Hospice was called in, but in less than two days Dad was dead.
Questions remain. Did my father convince himself that he was impervious to the effects of an increasingly intemperate lifestyle, and that his genetic inheritance alone would allow him to break the century barrier? Or, had he decided that it was better to spent his remaining years in hedonic pursuits even if it subtracted from their quantity? Or, as is most likely the case, was his executive capacity so degraded at this point that his predilections now overruled his reason?
Ironically, Nancy, with a lifelong history of chronic asthma and, in more recent years, COPD, will soon be ninety-nine and gives every indication of pushing past one-hundred. She has survived heart valve replacement, double hernia surgery, and a brain bleed all within the past two years, but her vital signs are well within normal parameters. Still, even for Nancy daily existence offers few rewards and the steady loss of personal agency both frustrates and saddens her. Trina’s and my active presence seems only to remind her of what she can no longer do for herself, and cancels out any sense of appreciation or gratitude.
In recent years I’ve run across predictions that, if present trends continue, the number of centenarians is likely to increase from today’s ninety thousand to three and a half million by 2050. From what I’ve seen up close and personal, I’m not sure I want to be included in that number.
