There is nothing quite like death to make us think about life. I’ve been doing just that sort of thinking lately, in the wake of my kid brother’s sudden death. Although the state of mourning is never a destination of choice, it provokes a welcomed, if temporary, escape from the inertia of everyday life, from dreary headlines and other constipations that our social media diet foists upon us.
I know that I will soon return to my avocation of ruminating about matters of politics and policy. But not right now. Not yet. In this moment, my thoughts are singularly trained on the life of my brother, Bill, my only sibling, who died a couple of weeks ago. In almost any other situation, I would probably keep such thinking private. But Bill’s life was a bit different, and therein lies a lesson worth sharing.
In the early 1960s, when he had to repeat Kindergarten, my brother attracted the label of “slow”. When the redux didn’t take, he was called “mentally retarded”, back before that term was sanitized into “cognitively impaired” or “intellectually challenged”. Then came “special needs” and “learning disabled”.
Had he been born 20 years earlier, Bill would likely have spent most of his life heavily sedated in a dreary, crowded state hospital for the “feeble minded”, the label du jour of the early and mid 20thcentury. Fortunately, we, as a society, wised up considerably since then. As a result, Bill spent the last four decades in various group homes where he savored relationships with his staff and housemates and was fully engaged in community activities. He sang in concerts, competed in Special Olympics, worked in a sheltered workshop, went camping and fishing, played BINGO with nuns, watched movies, went out for ice cream and attended so many parties it made my introverted head spin.
This thinking I’ve been doing about life goes way beyond the fact that we now treat those at the low end of the IQ scale better than we once did. Instead, my focus has been on all of the ways Bill totally surpassed us so-called normal folks when it came to experiencing joy, happiness and the unadulterated bliss of human connection.
I never met a happier person than my brother. Never mind the fact that he eventually lost his sight and ability to walk, Bill packed his life with sustained joy. He had a passion for people, for connecting with them, staying in the moment with them and making them laugh. If anyone – a nurse, a social worker, a relative – excused themselves to go to the bathroom, Bill’s line was always the same: “Don’t fall in the hole!” It didn’t matter if it was the first or fiftieth time you heard it, laughter never failed to ensue.
He had an affinity for old TV sitcoms, particularly I Love Lucy, and had committed most of the episodes to memory. Borrowing from that deep well of television trivia, Bill endowed almost everyone he met with a nickname from a TV show. He called his van driver Fred Mertz, a visiting nurse Roseann Barr, his physician Dr. Kildare. One poor aide with a bray-like laugh got the title of Mr. Ed. It brightened all of their days, none more than Bill’s.
The contagiousness of Bill’s joy was readily apparent at the funeral home. The ritual of viewing the deceased in a casket is typically a somber, tearful experience. To be sure, my brother’s mourners let their tears flow. But as they stopped to view his remains, there were instant smiles and suppressed laughter. Bill was wearing a tee-shirt with his picture on it along with his mantra: “Don’t fall in the hole!” A large I Love Lucy throw was draped over the casket. It was vintage Bill connecting with people, even in death, in his own unique way.
Here is something else about my brother’s relationships with people: They were all positive. One recent study showed that 20 percent of those surveyed were permanently estranged from at least one relative. Another found that 40 percent had experienced family estrangement at some point in their lives. And who among us has not dealt with seriously fractured relationships? Well, Bill, for one.
One of the symptoms of his “disability” was a child-like acceptance of the people in his life. His expectations were minimal. He just wanted them to be nice to him. Once they passed his nice threshold – and virtually everyone did – Bill immediately took them into his life and accepted them for who they were. There was no judging, no grudges, no resentments, no jealousies.
Academicians who study this kind of stuff, have found that people living in 1957 were happier than in almost every year since then. In other words, despite a higher life expectancy, a growing Gross Domestic Product and a reduction in the work week, not to mention a smart phone in almost every hand, people are far less happy now than they were 62 years ago. A Stanford University study suggests that a key reason for declining happiness is that people are focused on the future rather than on the here and now.
Bill could have told them that. He was a here-and-now kind of guy, totally absorbed in the joy of the moment. His only thoughts about the future were focused on anticipating the pending delight of his favorite things, like seeing friends and family, petting a cousin’s dog, taking a trip to the Dairy Queen, or to anyplace that served hamburgers and fries.
The conundrum I’ve been wrestling with these past few days is not about how a “mentally challenged” man ended up with more sustained and persistent happiness than anyone I know. The research, after all, bears that out. An analysis of 23 correlational studies on the link between intelligence and happiness ruled out every potential connection, except for one. It found that people with learning disabilities were happier than everyone else.
This is what leaves me baffled: How can the rest of us, if we are so darn smart, achieve the level of happiness Bill had? What is it about our intelligence level that seems to produce so much angst, and anger, and dread, and resentment? Thanks to our brain power we, as a society, have clearly surpassed all expectations when it comes to technological advancement. Yet, we are as collectively unhappy as we have ever been.
I’m not smart enough to figure this out. All I know is that I want to spend the rest of my journey here traveling in my brother’s footsteps. That means accepting people as they are, setting aside differences in order to connect through our similarities. That means savoring the moment, living in the now. That means finding joy in everyday life, in a sunset, a child’s smile, a dog running through the park. None of that, of course, will make the very real problems and conflicts we face – in the world and in our own lives – disappear. But maybe, just maybe, if we can capture some Bill-like happiness, it might put us in a better place to work on those issues. It’s worth a try.