What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [46]
As with much else, he attributed it to his mother, recalling a sampler she kept on a wall of the house in Islip: Keep your face to the sunshine, and the shadows will fall behind. “It was up there so long I didn’t read it anymore, I just absorbed it,” he told me. “It did not say there were no shadows. They’re there. I just accept them as part of my life’s experience.”
One of those shadows was the death of his son Roland at the age of fifty-three from a brain tumor in 2006. (Another, which he declined to detail, was an estrangement dating almost to his divorce from Bijou from his son Laurent, fifty-nine, who lives in France and could not be reached.) “Roland was the exact opposite of me. More than once he told me he didn’t want to live his life sitting in an office or a classroom,” Robby said, proudly recalling his son’s individualist attitude. For years, he worked as a gasoline truck driver and security guard in Alaska. “I have many fond memories of him,” including, Robby said, many visits with Roland in New Port Richey, Florida, during his final year in hospice care. “He spent the end of his life in dignity. The compassion exhibited by the hospice was unbelievable. That was the sunshine.”
In therapy sessions, Robby—linking his forward-facing stoicism with lessons from his own life and his study of addiction—often uses the metaphor of an open door to explain sobriety to patients. He tells them that sobriety does not mean not being drunk. Holding his right hand in front of him and moving it back and forth, he defines sobriety, instead, as an open door of the heart, which allows one to face and enjoy the love of others while also facing and managing the pain that exists on the other side. “Sobriety is not about being ‘clean’ or ‘dry,’ or refraining from the use of alcohol or other drugs. Sobriety is embracing life in its entirety, tasting life to its fullest, working, playing, laughing, crying, building, destroying, feeling, thinking, searching. There are people who have never ingested any drug of any sort during their lifetime but who are not sober. They keep their heart’s door shut and thus block out the pain. But their life is dull and numb without the full life that love can bring.”
At eighty-nine, Robby continues to keep his dance card filled. Not quite as full as it was before his close friend Nancy Walbridge, an attractive blond fifty-five-year-old hospice community relations director, got married in 2008 and they stopped spending one night a week at a dance studio in Arlington before dining out. Guys would come up to Robby and say, “Hey, how do you get to be out dancing with such a beautiful chick?” And he would fire back, “Well, some guys have it and some guys don’t.”
He had met Walbridge at a Chamber of Commerce dinner. He did not seem remotely his age. “We connected immediately on lots of levels. Robby can talk about anything and he’s comfortable with anyone. He is a true romantic. If there hadn’t been the age difference, who knows?” she said. You can tell it pains him a little that the fantasy of youth is no longer his. But he has only himself to blame for Nancy’s marriage. After she and her boyfriend split up a couple of years ago, it was Robby who, using his therapeutic skills, helped them to work through their issues.
“I’m not going to be sitting around with a pity pot,” Robby told me one day, reminding me of his license plate. To help make things all okay, he has been spending a lot of time visiting Nancy’s daughter, Rebekah, and is becoming very involved writing a series of stories he plans to record for her toddler, Avery, and has taken up bridge. When he wanted a date for an auction fund-raiser, he called his friend Martha Hartke, who is six months his senior and the widow of Indiana senator Vance Hartke. “I’ve