Lessons on the Limitation of Our Own Mortality
To Gerald Baker, the reckonings of mortality came later than for most. The first sign appeared 30 years ago with the death of his mother. The next arrival was with the death of Baker’s father, who, not disposed to conscious effort or special enhancements to his diet, body, or daily regimen, lived to within a few weeks of his 105th birthday. His death arrived last week surrounded by “a loving family.” The younger Baker describes his father’s death as a good one “to end a good life.”
The Extraordinary Gift of Life
Gerald Baker, writing in the WSJ, confesses to being a “believing Catholic,” albeit one of “imperfect standing.” With the sands of his own hourglass running down fast, Junior Baker reflects on his father’s lessons on a good life.
Lying awake at night, Baker Junior reviews his father’s life, trying to piece together memories from 60 years.
As I did, I came to a remarkable realization: I couldn’t recall anything negative at all. This wasn’t just the usual emotional gauze we unconsciously paint over the memories of those we have lost. My mind filled with only happy reminders of his kindness and selflessness. I racked my brain to unearth anything—a cross word, a quarrel, some nursed grievance. I came up empty. Instead, I am aware only of his constant benign presence, a preternatural sangfroid, a steady, undemanding love.
Reflects the younger Baker, Senior, as the English are wont, could be a little distant at times. “Unexpressive, almost too stoical.” Suffering from dementia, a disease that robs victims of “not only their memory but their personality,” Senior, on occasion, did manifest small, unwonted flashes of confused frustration.
Junior Baker memorialized his Dad in the pages of the WSJ. Of Senior’s life: “a model of service and duty for our modern age of self-devotion and entitlement: six long years in the British army in World War II, a marriage of unstinting loyalty to my mother for 46 years, six rambunctious children—one of them lost in unthinkable tragedy at 6 years old.”
Shortly before he died, devoted to his faith, Senior, with Junior accompanying him, sang with “gusto” Senior’s favorite hymn to Our Lady, learned by Junior’s father perhaps 75 years ago. This was from a man who couldn’t remember what he had had for breakfast that morning.
Baker Junior is often asked about the secret to his father’s longevity.
Genes, obviously. A lifelong regime of temperate habits that amounted almost to an extremism of moderation. Temperamental self-restraint—if the curve of emotional stress can be captured as a chart over our lifetime, most people’s lines would look like a mountain range of peaks and valleys. My father’s would resemble the flat horizon of the ocean.
But there was something more. The greatest irony of his lengthy life was that he was unafraid to let it go. It reminded me of the line from the Gospels: “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”
WSJ Baker gives one secret: religious or not it is this appreciation of our mortality that offers the best lesson—however long or short the life.
An Undeserved Gift
Senior Baker loved and enjoyed life’s many pleasures.
… to him, it was life itself that was the extraordinary gift, the true pleasure. Every joy, large or small, was merely some new, undeserved bonus, to be greeted with a kind of surprised gratitude. Every pain was merely the small price we pay for living.
Senior Baker was never so presumptuous to think he was going straight to paradise. His son contradicts, no one under the rank of sainthood deserved it more than Senior Baker.
My prayer is that now, reunited at last with my brother and my mother, he’ll spend at least part of eternity interceding for a son who didn’t deserve him.
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