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The Centenarian: Arthur Warner McNair

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

— Eliot

He’s one hundred years old and his long hands, once strong, are growing translucent. He does not so much sit in his wheelchair as he is held upright and at a slight slant by straps. Even awake his eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the fluorescent lights in the roof of the home.

His meals of pureed food are spoon-fed to him by attendants who speak to him in the tones he once used, long ago, on his infant children. When the drapes in his room are partially opened they reveal a view of a gravel roof, exhaust fans, and the brick facade of the opposite wing of the home. It’s not a view but he doesn’t mind. His eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the present, and he’s gone off on a fishing trip in the summer of 1949 where he will say to no one in particular, “Jesus, the fish are thick on the ground.”

Don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s not in the here and now, because he’ll surprise you now and then. He’ll come out for a bit if it is worth it, but it seldom is. And then only for a moment.

He’s my mother’s brother, my uncle, and his life has now spanned a full century.

In the year of his birth, 1909, the NAACP was founded as was Tel Aviv while the keel of what was to become the Titanic was laid in Belfast. Taft took over the Presidency from Roosevelt (Theodore) and “Alice Huyler Ramsey, a 22-year-old housewife, and mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, became the first woman to drive across the United States.” Airplanes were only six years old but the Germans were already working on the anti-aircraft gun. Wisely so since the United States Army Signal Corp Division purchased the world’s first military airplane from the Wright brothers in that same year. Not to be outdone, the US Navy decided it needed a central base in the Pacific and thought Pearl Harbor made strategic sense.

In the year of his birth Geronimo died, Barry Goldwater was born, and Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of radio. There’s a radio in his room next to his bed but it’s never turned on. Neither is the television that hangs from the ceiling and if his phone rings, it’s a mistake. But in his mind, there are signals still coming in from elsewhere, from elsewhen, from out there, and if you sit with him quietly, without trying to engage him and without expectation; if you sit with him “where here and now cease to matter” you can sometimes sense where he really lives in this his hundredth year.

C. S. Lewis observed “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” Live long enough and your body slowly betrays you and sometimes takes your mind and soul with it.

Many of my uncle’s relatives seem to think that’s what has happened to him. And perhaps they are correct. Alzheimer’s, senile dementia, and other associated afflictions are the terror of the elderly and their families. Indeed, they are the things we fear most about growing old next to unremitting pain from a degenerating disease. As one of my cousins said, “It’s about ‘quality of life.’

Dementia might well be the overriding problem that afflicts my uncle as he waits in his room with his name on a card in a slotted holder next to the door. “Dementia” is what we all assume when the elderly become less and less present to us as we perform our dutiful visits. We reintroduce ourselves and then carefully monitor how long they can hold who we are (son, daughter, sister, brother, friend) in their minds, and measure that against how long they held that knowledge the year before. It is almost always for a shorter time and that calculation distresses us.

So we call for more care, for more or different drugs. After all, their care is expensive and we need to get the value for money spent on our aged relatives knowing. We want them to know at least, who we are for more than five minutes. Their forgetfulness distresses us because it cuts us off from them just when our need to remind them of our love is greatest. It also upsets us because it is a portent of what waits for us when it is our name on the card in the slotted holder next to the door. Dementia.

Maybe. Maybe not.

I’d escorted my then 94-year-old mother from her home in California to her childhood home in Fargo for my uncle’s 100th birthday. My mother is still active and present and, all those who know her agree, inspiring. But her knees have betrayed her recently and long flights that change planes in Denver are something that can no longer be done without a dutiful son whose firm motto is: “There will be no falls on my watch.”

In the same home, just down the hall from my 100-year-old uncle, lives my mother’s other brother Jack who is 96. He sleeps a lot but still reads, or seems to read, the daily paper. Mom would spend time with him too. During those moments I’d sit with my uncle aslant in his wheelchair with his eyes shut against the glare of the lights and the blur of the common room. It was mostly a quiet time but, now and then, he’d speak to the air. He’d say things like, “Well, Barbara, what are we going to do about the tree this year?” and, after a minute or so, “Biggest damn Walleye I ever saw.” Fragments and scraps of thoughts. As the poet says, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

It came to me that perhaps we sometimes mistake senile dementia for sanity in the elderly; that we are so impressed with our slivers and crumbs of knowledge about the workings of the human mind we mistake them for insights into the terra incognita of the human soul. It seemed to me, as I sat with my uncle, that maybe what I was hearing from him was a sane man’s sane reaction to his circumstances.

If you knew to a certainty that every single day for the rest of your life, you’d be dressed in diapers and confined to a wheelchair with blurred eyesight in a small brick-walled room what would you do?

If you knew to a certainty that at every meal for the rest of your life a woman who talked to you as if you were a baby would spoon three flavors of baby food into your mouth, what would you do?

If opening your eyes, you knew that all you would see would be a bright fluorescent glare and the blurred shapes of dozens of others, mostly women, lolling about in wheelchairs, what would you do?

If you knew to a dead, solid certainty that you were never going to be released from your room until you were released, at long last, from your body, what would you do?

If you were a sane man, just what would you, at long last, do?

I don’t know about you, but I would figure a way out of that prison. And if that way out was only deeper in, that’s where I’d go. I’d go deep into my Palace of Memory and I’d use all my energy to construct a world inside that was made of the most vivid moments of all the years I’d lived.

In my Palace of Memory, I’d be building the world’s worst sandcastle on the beach in Balboa as my father and uncle tossed a football back and forth on the hot sand. I’d be waking up in the back seat of our 1951 Chevy and seeing my grandparents’ faces pressed against the glass as the first snowflakes I’d ever seen fell softly behind them in the twilight. I’d be with my first wife on my wedding night at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. I’d be at my book-editing job on the better days. I’d be in a taxi in New York going downtown to Studio 54 at three in the morning making all the lights. I’d go back to a warm field in a California twilight and listen to the breath and laughter of a young girl heard once and never again. I’d sit in the sun in front of a rose-covered cottage in Big Sur. I’d be laughing on the Spanish Stairs in Rome or weaving drunk along a cliff road on the Greek island of Hydra under a bronze moon and above a wine-dark sea. I’d be high up in a hotel in Paris looking down at the Seine in the rain. I’d hold my one-year-old daughter over my head while lying on the grass in the Boston Public gardens in the spring and see her face framed with cherry blossoms.

All those and a thousand other rooms in my Palace of Memory I’d visit over and over again until they all ran together in a blur as the train of my life, accelerating, finally left the station and leapt towards the stars and beyond and, finally forgetting all of that, I saw for a fleeting moment the mystery complete.

More than anything else, I would not be in that brick-walled room in the old folks’ home any more than I absolutely had to.

I like to think that is what is going on in the soul of my uncle. It’s not only “pretty to think so,” but it has the added advantage of possibly being true. Because he is not always “away.” He will come out into the present if the moment is right.

When my mother came in to see him the first time and said, “Mac, it’s your sister, Lois,” he said, without a pause, “Oh, my irritating little sister. How are you doing?” What followed was a pretty lively back and forth until he tired and left again before being wheeled downstairs for his lunch purees.

Then, a few days later, at the hundredth birthday party his family had arranged, the special presentation involved about thirty Barbershop Quartet singers. Both he and my uncle had been half of a barbershop quartet for decades and every Barbershopper for miles around showed up to honor both of them who sat in the front and listened to a cascade of songs.

At the end, of course, the singers launched into “Happy Birthday” which was taken up by the 150 other friends and family at the party. The last extended “Youuuuu…” faded and in the moment of silence that came after, my uncle opened his eyes and in a clear strong voice sang, on key, “Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.”

Then he closed his eyes and left again taking with him, I hope, one last room to add to his Palace of Memory.

[First published June 24, 2009. Arthur Warner McNair passed peacefully in his sleep in his 100th year on October 8, 2009]

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • The Old Salt January 17, 2019, 4:30 PM

    Damn, you can write like no one else. That is perfection.

  • Sam L. January 17, 2019, 4:59 PM

    That’s one heckuva family you have.

  • Jeff Brokaw January 17, 2019, 7:21 PM

    Wonderful stuff. I echo the thoughts above: the same two specific thoughts I had in mind when I clicked the “comment” link.

  • MMinLamesa January 17, 2019, 11:22 PM

    Wow, that was beautiful.

    I’ve been…training my brain for decades that at the end of my earthly interlude, to play “the movie” of my memories.

    I met a man, Carl, when he was in his 90th year when I moved into a home I bought in Golden CO. He creakily walked past my studio one day and we started a lifelong friendship. Sadly it was only to last another 4 years but in that time I learned more from him then any other man in my life. Near the end, he would fall and his wife decided she couldn’t care for him at home anymore and placed him in an assisted living facility. Carl knew he was never leaving that place. He refused food & water and passed within a week.

    I hope he went to that Palace because what little I did know about him told me he had had a rich life.

    Of course I don’t know what happens when we leave but I sure as hell hope the coaxing I’ve been doing merits me a couple minutes before I head off.

  • ghostsniper January 18, 2019, 4:24 AM

    Some very good writing right there. Don’t believe I’d read that before.
    It must feel like a mental tether, to be trapped here, with brief interludes to there, until the last one snaps. What are those tethers that disappear right after birth and slowly reappear close to the end?

    I believe what CS Lewis said, we are but souls trapped in organic bodies for a spell.
    Just last night I was pondering, what if the released soul is so much better than the prison we must now occupy and we’ve learned that this prison is supposed to be the best there is, but isn’t?

    Similar to the thought process of the persons on the Titanic staring over the slightly slanted edge of the deck watching the first lifeboats descend. Wanting to stay on the big, comfy deck, but knowing continued life will only happen in the discomfort of the cold, hard lifeboat. Decisions.

  • H January 18, 2019, 4:35 AM

    My father was born in 1909, and nearly made it to 9/11. Mercifully his slide was short and gentle for the most part, but Mother’s slide was longer and bumpier. Some people slide altogether differently, of course.

    When Mother started her final slide I got to spend a lot of time with rehabilitation people and “counselors” who never actually provided any useful advice, and it seemed like the alleged counselors were always stuck off to the side in little half-assed offices that were more like remodeled broom closets and there was a lot of standing around waiting in the hallway with no place to sit, bored to death, whilst the ineffectual counselor talked to her boyfriend or polished her nails or whatever she was doing whilst ignoring me. When my feet hurt, I get pi$$y; just sayin’.

    One of these persons described as a counselor had a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Obama in her cramped little windowless office, if that tells you anything about the mentality…….

    Anyway one day I was thusly standing beside one of these little office doors, waiting patiently whilst my feet were screaming loud enough to be nearly audible, when I saw one of the facility administrators walking down the hall with a bevy of nurse interns, giving an orientation. I am sorry to report that if we were down by the ocean, that place instantly would have become the Bay of Pigs, if you follow my drift. Anyway, across from the little office door containing the non-counseling counselor who was ignoring me and my aching feet was the nurse’s station, and another door which the administrator opened and started explaining the various alarms and monitors behind the door.

    And down the hall rolls this little old guy in his wheelchair. He’s scooting himself along with his feet instead of turning the wheels by hand. His head was bald and he looked a lot like a parrot. A very lecherous parrot, it turned out. He looks at the ample back ends of all these nurse interns, and gets a big grin on his face and goes, “Mmmmmmm” pretty loud. Two or three of them turn around and grin back at him. Then he goes, “MMMMMMMMMM! Nice!” real loud, and they all started laughing.

    The nurse behind the counter of the nurse’s station kind of hunkers down, shakes her head and puts down her pencil, and slowly lurches to her feet. Clearly she has seen this before, and often. She comes around the counter with a resigned look on her face, and says “Hello, Leroy. How ya doin’. Let’s get you back to your room,” and slowly wheels ol’ Leroy down the hall, away from all that prime pork. It was quite sad, really.

    • Charley HuaChu January 18, 2022, 7:13 AM

      Lord, when my turn comes (likely in the next few years, I’m 81 fer goshshakes) Please, PLEASE, let me be a LeRoy.Mmmmmm! yeah.

  • Phillipa Crawford January 18, 2019, 6:16 AM

    I hope you are right about the Palace of Memory. For their sakes, and our own.

  • John the River January 18, 2019, 7:29 AM

    Just finished going through that with my mother, though in comparison she was just a kid when she passed. 90.
    She not only lived in the hall of memories, she invited some of the oldest residents in her hall out for a visit. She would tell me about what her parents said to her when they stopped in and my late father came in and adjusted the bed for her also. I found out later that her cousin Dick, who had been her closest friend growing up, passed away in Ohio two months before her. But at the time I thought it odd that the only living relative she saw was her Cousin Dick.
    She also saw some different spirits, she told me that my sisters came in with their new babies. My two childless sisters.
    Her dementia had an inventive flourish. The best story came while I was feeding her, six months earlier she had had a minor stroke and lost the ability to chew but regained it slowly. So that day as I spooned the food I’d brought (Lobster Bisque) into her mouth, she swallowed and then stuck her tongue out. At me I thought. I asked her about it. She replied, “There are holes in the wall so the people inside can watch me eat. I’m sticking my tongue out to prove to them I can swallow. And I don’t like them.”
    OK. That’s cool.

  • Karren mccabe January 18, 2019, 5:44 PM

    Dear G. V.
    Thank you for this wonderful love story. I’ve shared it with my family (my mother is still a fairly young 96).
    Karren (and Ed)

  • S.K. Orr January 18, 2019, 7:21 PM

    Truly one of the most poignant and insightful essays I’ve read in a long, dry season. Thank you for reminding us that those of us who did not die young are heading inexorably towards the days of memory palaces and interior castles…until we pass from this life to the next.

  • Howard Nelson January 18, 2019, 10:12 PM

    Mr. McNair, thank you for your visit with us. Your wonderwording nephew does you proud and sweet, justifiably so.

  • Tom January 19, 2019, 10:18 AM

    Dang. I need a box of Kleenex for this one.

  • F January 20, 2019, 10:00 AM

    For the last 10 years of her life, at least, my mother’s greatest ambition was to live to 90 years of age. On her 90th birthday, I called to wish her a happy birthday. She said “yes, isn’t it wonderful? I’m 91 today.” I tried gently to correct her, but she would have none of it. She passed five weeks later, having realized her ambition but thinking she had, in fact, lived another year on top of the 90 she wanted.

    In the last years of her life she told us she had become engaged to a man who was going to take her to live in Hawaii. I don’t remember her having much interest in Hawaii when she was younger, but perhaps she just hid it from us. Nor, of course, did we ever meet her fiancé.

    My father — her husband of nearly 60 years — predeceased her by 13 years, leaving her very angry for a long time. He did not grow old in an old folks’ home; he fell down as he was getting ready for bed in his 79th year, and was gone by the time she got to him. A massive heart attack, we were told.

    I think his way of passing far preferable, and the fact that he passed while his mind was still sharp much the better course. And of course I’m glad he never knew she was going to marry and live in Hawaii.

    • gwbnyc January 17, 2022, 3:16 PM

      Thanks.

      At 83 the veins leading to my father’s kidneys failed, he collapsed, my mother called 911 and he was airlifted to a university hospital 100 miles away, in the same town where he played minor league baseball and met my mother. My wife, my mother and I were at his bedside when he regained consciousness. He looked at my mother and said, “This is not what we discussed.” He looked at me and said “I never thought I gave you and your brother an even shake.” I replied, “That’s not true, Pop.”

      After a day or so passed my wife and I were dismissed and my father died alert, in his right mind, two weeks later. My mother followed him after thirteen years at 96- I thought she’d see a hundred.

  • gwbnyc January 17, 2022, 2:59 PM

    “from elsewhen

    get one/give one

    “Old Men”/Nash

  • Tom Hyland January 17, 2022, 3:42 PM

    The dementia is a spooky thief. I just read “A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel Garcia Márquez” written by their son Rodrigo. In the last couple of years of Gabriel’s life, when he could still read, he was holding one of his own books and proclaimed, “My god, this is amazing! Who could ever write like this??” Towards the end he could recognize only his wife. He didn’t know anyone else.

  • ghostsniper January 17, 2022, 5:56 PM

    If you knew to a dead, solid certainty that you were never going to be released from your room until you were released, at long last, from your body, what would you do?
    ==========
    Somebody hand me a pistol.

  • Dirk January 17, 2022, 6:33 PM

    This stuff scares me. I’ve witnessed it take some of the strongest men and women I’ve known. We are addressing these issues right now, with my wife parents, 91 and 92. Sad really.

    VI

  • Hale Adams January 17, 2022, 6:55 PM

    To Ghost,

    I do sympathize — I would not want to be a dementia patient, either. My sister and I spent a dozen years watching my mother come apart at the seams, little by little. When she finally died in February, 2020, at almost 92, it was a blessing, both for us (my sister and me) and probably for Mom, too.

    But please remember, suicide is forbidden. I shudder at the thought of having to explain to God just why I threw His gift back in His face.

    My father was spared a long decline. He was diagnosed with late-stage kidney cancer in the spring of ’97, just before his 70th birthday, and he was given six to twelve months to live. Mom said that after they saw the doctor who handed Dad his death sentence, they went back to the car, and as Dad settled in behind the wheel, he drew a heavy sigh, turned to Mom and said, “Well, Lois, at least I don’t have to worry about losing my mind.”

    His mind was clear until a few days before the end, right before Christmas. He lapsed into a semi-comatose state, eyes closed, muttering to himself at times. At the end, he was muttering, and then said, as clear as a bell, “Master of Ballantrae”, and then he slipped away. He had been a big fan of Robert Louis Stevenson, growing up in the ’30s and ’40s, and had a nice bound set of Stevenson’s novels still, as an old man. I like to think he was with friends or family in his last moments, discussing what books they liked, and why.

    To Gerard,

    You’ve written a fair amount about your Van der Leun grandparents, but not much about the McNairs, except for this one piece, as best as I can remember. If I may be nosy, do you have any other stories about your mother’s family?

    Hale

  • jd January 17, 2022, 7:03 PM

    I’m with Sam above who said, “That’s one heckuva family you have” and
    a beautiful way of letting us meet them. Thank you for that and so much else.

  • billrla January 17, 2022, 7:09 PM

    Old age is a pain in the ass for everyone involved.

  • John Venlet January 18, 2022, 4:25 AM

    I recall this from its earlier posting. It remains wistfully inspiring. Gerard’s reference to the “Palace of Memories” also brings to mind alzheimer’s patients called forth from their palaces by music. A number of examples of this can be viewed/listened to here.

  • Jack January 18, 2022, 7:13 AM

    I can’t think of anything that I fear except, and please Lord forbid, any tragedy that might occur with my daughters. But if I were to fear a thing it would be dementia simply because I loathe the idea of being a burden to my family. My job is to love, protect and provide for them and that is primarily what I live to do.

    I had an associate in Tulsa who developed Alzheimer in his mid 50s and he spent a number of years in a facility, wasting away while his wife and children could only stand by and watch. It went on for a while and then he died. God’s mercy.

    He was survived by a close friend and business partner who had never married and had no living family. Shortly after that death this friend was diagnosed with Alzheimer and within a week of that diagnosis the chap bought a pistol and killed himself with it. I suppose that’s one way to do it.

    • Vanderleun January 18, 2022, 8:35 AM

      Not for everyone but it is a way to the exit. “First star to the right and then straight on until morning” or, as I’ve written elsewhen:

      The Suicide’s Note

      I should prefer another Life–
      An Aeon past or fore —
      Where tasks assigned to Calcinite
      Are sealed beyond bronze doors,
      That Time’s slow tricks would emulate
      Pure placement by pure chance,
      That when This past became That fore,
      I need not choose the Dance.

      I should prefer another Skin —
      One roughened Smooth with age —
      That Youth should wear as recompense
      For posturing on Earth’s stage,
      That It Pay Twice for having Once
      Set this Bright Being free
      Within the light upon the stairs
      Which rise up from the sea.

      I should prefer another Night —
      Not this Sphere strung with stars —
      That in the Dark would –Luminous —
      Fold Near into the Far.
      Then such a Path would never need
      Knowledge of Braille to know,
      But harvest Light from the sun’s Rose heart
      Til the forgetting of the Snow.

      • CT December 28, 2022, 8:12 PM

        Reminiscent of Dickinson.

  • Snakepit Kansas January 18, 2022, 10:26 AM

    I lost my Dad just over two years ago. His mind started slipping slowly then the rate increased sharply. It was difficult to see such a good man deteriorate both physically and mentally. An unknown and merciful infection finally took him rather quickly. Probably not any infection or virus worse than the one I have right now with this chest cold. It is an annoyance and inconvenience today. Some day, a similar virus may take me.

  • James ONeil January 18, 2022, 11:29 AM

    At 83 things that happened 10 years ago seem like yesterday. When I was 20, 10 years was half a lifetime ago, 40, a quarter of a lifetime. Not speaking for anyone else, but I’m glad I’ve been, I’m glad I am, and I’m glad the universe will (probably) keep on truckin’ after I’m gone.

    The preceding paragraph doesn’t make a lot of sense, lessin’ one’s reading resonates with the nine hundred and ninety nine un-wrote side thoughts but hey, at eighty three I can just let it be, no worries, grin.

    • Snakepit Kansas January 18, 2022, 5:23 PM

      James,
      Time references in ratios make perfect sense. I’m now cruising through my mid-50s. I calculate I am well into the third quarter of this venture. Hopefully you will leave a legacy that makes all your efforts to date, worth while to you. I hope to do the same and recognize some of its fruits through my two. Family was always important to Dad, and I know he was happy with how his legacy was developing though me and my family.

      Yes, no worries.

  • TN Tuxedo January 2, 2023, 8:42 PM

    In the past year, I have unintentionally committed portions of this essay to memory as my family has dealt with my father’s dementia. A few days ago during our visit, he politely told us he needed to head back to the house. We asked him where he thought his house was. He pointed across the highway to the house on the hill and said, “Right there. With Norman McMaster.” Norman was his childhood friend who lived across the street when he was a kid. In more lucid times, he told stories about the adventures he and Norman had out in the country. Dementia or no, I can’t blame him for wanting to go back to those idyllic days, which for him seems as easy as walking across the road.

    Yes, Palace of Memory indeed.