We the Very Old
We the very old are like polar bears clinging to ice floes that are drifting beyond the archipelago of melting glacier fragments, moving ever farther apart from each other, out into the ocean. Or perhaps we are like candles in paper boats, launched by people we leave behind into dark waters, flaming just a little while longer before vanishing. That’s a more welcome image and not so lonely.
A phone call. “This is Karen, Jean’s daughter.” Before she said, “I have sad news…” I knew what it would be. Her father, Don Johnson, had passed away.
He was one of only a few of my contemporaries still here. His wife, my very dear friend and college roommate, died several years ago, of Alzheimer’s. If anything was surprising, it was the fact that Don had managed to live for so long without her. He had been so stricken by her death that he was unable to attend her memorial service; he was in the hospital. While caring for her he had neglected his own health.
To me, Jean and Don Johnson were a model of what marriage could be. Both were educators, he a professor at New York University, she a teacher at the Friends’ Seminary (Ck NAME) in Manhattan. They lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village, and always had room for visitors—colleagues, former students, friends. That continued after their children grew up and they moved to a still smaller place in the same university housing complex. Somehow, they made space. One time when my daughter and I were visiting, a former student of Don’s called to ask if he could leave five suitcases with him for three months. I couldn’t imagine where they could be stashed, but Don and Jean said yes and tucked them into the coat closet. Their hospitality seemed boundless.
At their dinner table you could always count on interesting conversations. What did you think of Big Science? What is Big Science? Did the Americans really save lives by burning down Tokyo and bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The Johnsons had lived and taught in India and traveled widely in Asia. They were working on a high school curriculum focused on world history to replace the traditional European-centered one. Once, at their dinner table, I met a scholarly poet from India, longtime friend of theirs and a colleague of Don’s, who had just retired from teaching and would soon be heading for India, intending to live a meditative life in a cave.
They lived modestly and had a full and generous life, my friends. Both considered themselves immensely lucky to have found the other. I’m guessing that Don was ready to go and that—no matter what happens after our lives end—Jean was waiting for him on the other side of death, in the light.
