Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our weekly series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last weekend, Dick Van Dyke told us how dancing, singing, and loving life keeps him going as he turns 100. (Dick’s birthday is December 13!) This week, Jay Neugeboren, 87, explains why, at his age, “routine is a condition of survival.”
If you want to receive Ancient Wisdom directly in your inbox every week, sign up here.
When friends and family sometimes remark on the state of excellent health I’ve enjoyed for the last few decades, I’ll often explain my good fortune by saying that I don’t do the minor stuff—colds or the flu—that I only do major illnesses like cancer and heart disease, and that I got them out of the way early on in life.
In 1940, when I was 2 years old and being operated on for a ruptured appendix, the surgical team lost my vital signs for more than 30 seconds. When I was 19 years old, I was diagnosed with giant follicular lymphoma, and received 1,000 roentgens of cobalt 60 radiation to each side of my neck. And when I was 60 years old—though I had no high cholesterol, no high blood pressure, no worrisome family history, and I was swimming a mile a day—I had emergency quintuple bypass surgery. Two of my three major coronary arteries were 100 percent occluded, and the third, the left anterior descending artery (the infamous “widow-maker”), was 95 percent occluded.
Once, some years ago, when I did get a nasty case of the flu and took myself to bed for several days, my youngest son, Eli, became frightened “because,” he later explained, “I’d never seen you sick.”
Now, when Eli tells me I’m looking fit, and I reply by saying what I say to others when they remark on my state of health—that I’m a lucky guy—he’ll shake his head in disagreement. “Maybe,” he’ll say, “but you take really good care of yourself, Pop.”
