Activist Post February 16 2013
Grandpa is a good soul who overcame tremendous hardship and is alive and well to this day despite some recent medical issues he’s happily recovering from. We’ll call him Fred. We’ve studied him forever to figure out the secrets to his long happy life. Some will sound like common sense; and some you may never have heard of or correlated with longer life.
Singing – For real? Grandpa is a lover not a fighter who always enjoyed music, especially theater. But that doesn’t have to be you to apply. How many of us sing in our car or hum while we work? He sang his whole life and was the leading man in numerous plays, always ready to lend a hand to community entertainment. It turns out – singing is good for the heart, mind and soul. Singing is seen as a symptom of happiness.
Sense of Humor – it must be Fred’s sense of humor that brought him through hardships. Let’s just say he joined WW2 to escape his home life. He made it through the Great Depression as well. But he never takes himself too seriously. He doesn’t fear the eccentricity label – he doesn’t seem to fear anything. Embrace humor if you want to cope with what lies ahead.
When his heart recently stopped, he had been in the middle of singing with his seniors follies choir that appears at nursing homes, many of the residents of which are much younger than him. One hospital visit and pacemaker later, he’s sitting up in bed laughing, saying: “So much for that singing health study you sent me – look where it’s landed me!” He was joking and serenading the nurses and back at home in no time. A sense of humor must mean something if it can change our entire physiology in seconds.
When a thyroid surgery changed his voice, we were afraid he couldn’t sing anymore. “Oh but hey!” he exclaimed. “I can start singing like Johnny Cash! He talks a lot when he sings anyways.” You can’t keep a humorous man down – you can’t hold anything over his head – he laughs in the face of his troubles. He was clear into his 80s before significant health problems arose – that’s a life many of us envy and aren’t granted.