HEALTHY AT 100 (33 page)

Sometimes we are loved more deeply than we realize, but it can take a crisis to break us out of our patterns so that we can receive the love that others have for us. Author Elizabeth Songster describes the dramatic events that helped her to comprehend the depth of her husband’s love:

It was right before Christmas. My husband, Dan, and a buddy of his, Mike, had gone [each in his own car] to a canyon near our home in Southern California to see if the vegetation, scorched by fires a few months earlier, was growing back. Dan and Mike were both members of the California Native Plant Society. They were real “plant hounds,” always exploring the nearby canyons and hills to see what kind of plants they could find and photograph.

That day, after Mike left [to drive home from the area where the two men were exploring], Dan decided to do a little “solo research” by hiking into Laguna Canyon, a more remote section of the area that was not often explored. He had walked into the
canyon a few miles, gotten some pictures and was starting to make his way back to his truck, when he stepped on a water-soaked patch of ground that gave way. He fell thirty-five feet down the rough slope, hitting a number of trees, before he landed on a ledge. He could tell right away that something was terribly wrong with his left leg. It lay across his other leg at an “impossible angle.”

Stunned by the fall, it took Dan a little while to realize that he was too crippled to walk. Then Dan knew he was in serious trouble. Night would fall soon and not a soul knew where he was. He had to get to the main trail or he might die out there before anyone could find him. He braced the broken leg against the other leg and, resting his weight on his hands, began inching his way down the canyon.

Making slow and painful progress, Dan stopped often to rest and call for help. The only response was the eerie sound of his own voice echoing off the walls of the canyon. As the sun set, the temperature began to drop. It was cold in the hills at night and Dan knew that if he stopped for too long, he would probably lose consciousness. It was increasingly hard, but Dan forced himself after each pause to keep hauling his sore body forward on his aching hands. He continued this awful journey for another twelve hours.

Finally, his strength and determination gave out. He was utterly exhausted and couldn’t move another inch. Although it seemed futile, he summoned up a last burst of strength and shouted for help.

He was astounded when he heard a voice return his call. A real voice, not another mocking and empty echo. It was Dan’s stepson—my son, Jeb. He and I were out with the police and the paramedics who were searching for Dan.

Earlier, when Dan didn’t come home, I had gotten worried and called Mike. At first, Mike tried to find Dan himself, driving from canyon to canyon looking for Dan’s truck. Finally, he called the police and reported Dan missing.

I’d kept calm and strong until the moment Jeb said he’d heard Dan’s voice. Then I dissolved into tears, finally feeling the fear and dread I’d been pushing aside for hours. It took two hours for
the rescue team to bring Dan down the ravine. Then the paramedics trundled him away on a stretcher and when I got to see him at the hospital, my tears started anew. The thought of how close I came to losing this wonderful man undid me. It was only when I felt Dan’s arms around me that I finally stopped sobbing.

As I sat next to his hospital bed, my eyes fastened to the face I had been so afraid I would never see again, Dan told me his story. Immediately after his slide down the canyon, when he realized the seriousness of his predicament, Dan said that he thought of me and how much he would miss me if he didn’t make it back. As he lay at the bottom of the rough cliff, he groped around until he found a suitable rock. Using the rock, which was sharply pointed, he managed to carve a message to me in a large rock near where he lay. If the worst should happen, he hoped I would eventually see the rock and know that I had been with him always, held close in his heart.

I started weeping all over again. I knew how deeply I loved my husband, but I was unprepared for this, the depth of his love for me.

For somewhere deep in the wooded hills of Laguna Canyon, there is a large rock with a heart carved on its side. And in this heart are carved the words, “Elizabeth, I love you.”
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I have met on the street a very poor man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

—Victor Hugo

L
ove’s mystery and wonder, of course, are not reserved only for those who are married. But there is a special way that love can touch two people in an intimate relationship who commit themselves wholeheartedly to the journey together.

Such relationships take us through whatever we need to learn to become more conscious, loving people. They open our hearts, break our hearts, and heal our hearts—sometimes all at the same time. They give us opportunities to develop courage, patience, and resilience. They teach us to be compassionate and forgiving. They give us the strength to fulfill the purposes for which we are alive.

And now modern science is recognizing that loving and intimate relationships also keep us healthy.

It is a striking fact that mortality rates for all causes of death in the United States are consistently higher for divorced, single, and widowed individuals of both sexes and all ages.
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Such statistics explain why life insurance companies recognize people’s marital status as one of the best indicators of how long they are likely to live.

The Hammond Report was the study that followed the smoking habits of nearly half a million Americans and led ultimately to the warning printed on every cigarette package that smoking is hazardous to your health. If you look at the table above, extracted from the Hammond Report,
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you’ll see something that may astonish you.

As you can see, the premature death rate for smokers in each category is roughly double that for nonsmokers. What I find most remarkable, though, is that the premature death rate for nonsmokers who are divorced is almost equal to that for married smokers. For men, apparently, the breakup of a marriage can be nearly as lethal as a lifelong habit of smoking.

One of the first, and still one of the most remarkable, of the many studies exploring the influence of love and social connectedness on human health was conducted by epidemiologist Dr. Lisa Berkman beginning in 1965. Now the chair of the Department of Health and Social Behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Berkman led an intensive study of seven thousand men and women living in Alameda County, California. She found that people who were disconnected from others were roughly three times more likely to die during the nine-year study than people with strong social ties. The kinds of social ties didn’t appear to matter. What mattered was being involved in some social network, whether it was family, friends, church, volunteer groups, or marriage.

This dramatic difference in health outcome and survival rates was found to occur regardless of people’s age, gender, health practices, or physical health status. But what most astounded researchers about this study was that
those with close social ties and unhealthful lifestyles (such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise) actually lived longer than those with poor social ties but more healthful living habits.
Needless to say, people with both healthful lifestyles and close social ties lived the longest of all.
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Is this study some kind of aberration? No, it is not. Many other studies have come to similar conclusions. When seventeen thousand people in Sweden, for example, were examined and followed, it was found that those who were the most lonely and isolated at the beginning of the study had nearly four times the risk of dying prematurely in the ensuing six years.
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For another example, an analysis of the medical risks of social isolation published in the journal
Science
in 1988 concluded that lack of emotional support was a greater risk factor for disease and death than smoking.
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These studies and many others like them are warning us that the medical consequences of loneliness are real and can even be fatal. At the same time, they are providing us with compelling evidence of the scientific basis for the healing powers of friendship, love, and positive relationships.

Studies have even shown that having a companion animal can make a huge difference. It’s no secret that children often love pets, but recent research has taken it a step further, proving that children raised with pets are less likely to become asthmatic, more likely to be kind to other children, and more likely to have healthy self-esteem once they reach their teens. Researchers are also finding that having pets positively influences children’s physical and emotional development and even their scholastic achievement.
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One of the most celebrated “pet studies” was undertaken by Erika Friedmann and her co-workers at the University of Pennsylvania. They found an unmistakable association between pet ownership and extended survival in patients hospitalized with coronary heart disease. Those patients who had pets at home were far more likely to
survive, even after accounting for differences in the extent of heart damage and other medical problems.
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The medical value of pets became unexpectedly apparent to researchers who were conducting the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial. They were studying the effects of two pharmaceutical drugs (encainide and flecainide) on men who had had heart attacks and were now experiencing irregular heartbeats. Paradoxically, the drugs were found to cause an increase in cardiac deaths. At the same time, however, it was found that those patients who had dogs were only one-sixth as likely to die during the study as those who did not have dogs.
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Can you imagine what would have happened if the drugs rather than the dogs had been shown to cause a sixfold decrease in deaths? The drugs would be prescribed for every heart attack patient in the country with an irregular heartbeat, and drug companies would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars telling physicians and the public how great the drugs were. But because the loyalty and loving friendship of a dog cannot be bottled and sold, there has been no such publicity campaign, and most people to this day do not realize how much healing can be found in loving relationships—including ones with companion animals.

In another study called the Beta-Blocker Heart Attack Trial, researchers followed more than 2,300 men who had survived a heart attack, to see whether there would be an increase in survival for those taking a beta-blocker drug. There was, but the researchers ended up discovering something far more significant. Stunningly, those patients who had strong connections with other people were found to have only one-quarter the risk of death—even when controlling for other factors such as smoking, diet, alcohol, exercise, and weight. In fact, the decrease in death risk due to social connectedness was found to be far stronger than that for the beta-blocker drug being tested.
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Partly as a result of this study, physicians today widely prescribe beta-blocker drugs for people who have survived a heart attack. Ironically, doctors typically issue these prescriptions during appointments with patients that last all of fifteen minutes, during which they never
mention the far greater proven importance of friendship and social support.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., tells of the difference in health outcomes human relationships can make:

Many years ago when I was a teaching pediatrician at a major medical school, I followed six young teenagers with juvenile diabetes. Most of them had diabetes since they were toddlers and had responsibly followed strict diets and given themselves injections of insulin since kindergarten. But as they became caught up in the turmoil of adolescence, desperate to be like their peer group, this disease had become a terrible burden, a mark of difference. Youngsters who had been in diabetic control since infancy now rebelled against the authority of their disease as if it were a third parent. They forgot to take their shots, ate whatever the gang ate, and were brought to the emergency room in coma or in shock, over and over again. It was frightening and frustrating, dangerous for the youngsters and draining for their parents and the entire pediatric staff.

As the associate director of the clinics, this problem was brought to my door and I decided to try something simple. I formed two discussion groups, each consisting of three youngsters and the parents of the other three. Each group met to talk once a week.

These groups turned out to be very powerful. Kids who could not talk to their own parents became articulate in expressing their needs and perspectives to the parents of other children. Parents who could not listen to their own children hung on every word of other people’s children. And other people’s children could hear them when they could not hear their own parents. People, feeling themselves understood for the first time, felt safe enough to cry and found that others cared and could comfort them. People of all ages offered each other insights and support, and behaviors began to change. Parents and their own children began to talk and listen
to each other in new ways. We were making great progress in the quality of all the family relationships, and the number of emergency room visits was actually diminishing.
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