Transcription
Everything that woman just told you is true. I need you to hear me say that before I say anything else. Everything she said is true. And I know it is true because I learned every single one of those lessons. The worst way a person can learn anything.
I am 103 years old. I was born in 1922 in a town that does not exist anymore. A coal town in Kentucky that got swallowed up and forgotten like most coal towns did. I have been a daughter and a wife and a mother and a widow and a grandmother and a great grandmother. I have been poor in ways that would make your worst day look like a vacation. I have buried two of my children. I have buried one husband I hated and one husband I loved so much that I still talk to him sometimes when nobody is around to hear me. I have seen things that would break most people. And I am still here sitting in my daughter's living room watching that video of Janette and nodding my head because she is right. She is right about all of it.
But I need you to understand something. That woman had a good life. She says so herself. She was poor but happy. She had a wonderful mother. She had one husband for almost 60 years and it was a good marriage. She had children who lived. She walked home through clean snow and went to the movies for free and calls that one of her best memories. That is a good life. I did not have that life and I still learned the same lessons she learned. Which means those lessons are not just nice ideas from a lucky old woman who made it to 105. Those lessons are the truth, the actual truth about how life works. And if you ignore them, you will regret it. Not because I am telling you to feel regret, but because regret is what happens when you live long enough to see what you threw away.
Let me tell you about fate. Janette talks about the book, the Jewish belief that your whole life is written down before you are born. how long you will live, what kind of life you will have. She says it is not up to you. I believe that too, but not the way she means it. I believe there are things that happen to you that you cannot control. A car jumps the curb. A mine collapses. A virus finds your daughter before there is a vaccine. A war takes your son and sends back a folded flag. Those things are not up to you. She is right about that. You can be in the wrong place at the wrong time and that is the end of your story.
But here is what she did not say. And maybe she did not need to say it because her life did not teach it to her the way mine taught it to me. What you do after the thing happens, that is up to you.
I was married the first time at 16 years old. I am not going to tell you his name because I do not say his name anymore and I have not said it in over 70 years. I will just tell you that I spent 8 years living in fear every single day. Fear when he came home. Fear when he did not come home. Fear when he was quiet. fear when he was loud. I had two babies in that house and I was scared every day that something would happen to them because of him. And then one night in 1946, he went to a bar and he did not come back. Someone else's husband put a knife in him over a card game, and that was the end of my first situation. I was 24 years old with two children and no money and no family who could help. And I thought my life was over. That was the moment right there. That was when I could have decided that the book was written and there was nothing I could do. That fate had dealt me a bad hand and I just had to live with it until I died. But I did not decide that. I decided that the book might be written, but I was going to read it my own way.
I took those two children and I got a job cleaning rooms at a motel outside of Lexington. I saved every penny I could hide. I met Earl at a church supper 3 years later and I did not trust him at first because why would I trust any man after what I had been through. But Earl was patient. Earl waited. Earl showed me with his actions and not just his words that he was not going to be like the one before. I married Earl in 1949 and that was the beginning of my real life. 50 years with that man. Three more children. A farm that was not much, but it was ours. Quiet mornings and hard work, and a kind of peace I did not know existed until I was almost 30 years old.
You might hear that and think, well, you got lucky. You escaped a bad situation and found a good one. But luck is not what got me out of that first marriage. A knife in a bar got me out of that first marriage. What I did with my freedom after that, the choices I made, the work I put in, the way I decided to trust again, even though every part of me was screaming not to. That was not luck. That was me deciding that my story was not finished yet. That is what I need you to understand. Your story is not finished yet either. And you are the one holding the pen.
Janette is right that you cannot control how long you live. I have watched people younger and healthier than me drop dead from things nobody saw coming. I have watched people who did everything right get cancer anyway. I have watched people who smoked and drank and never exercised live to 95. There is no formula. There is no secret. But she is also right that people make life better or worse. She said that the people can make the world better or they can make it worse. It is all up to the people and that includes you. It is up to you what kind of person you are going to be today. right now while you were watching this video instead of doing something else. What kind of person are you going to be when you stop watching? Are you going to call someone you have been meaning to call? Are you going to apologize for something you have been too proud to apologize for? Are you going to tell someone you love them before it is too late? Because it will be too late someday. I promise you that. I have watched it be too late more times than I can count.
Let me tell you about my daughter. Her name was Mary Catherine and she was born in 1941. She was my first baby, my miracle, I called her, because she came into a house full of darkness and brought light with her anyway. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, and she laughed at everything. Even when things were bad, she would find something to laugh about. She kept me alive during those years when I was not sure I wanted to stay alive. In 1952, she got sick. Polio. She was 11 years old. I remember the doctor coming to the house. I remember the way he looked at me. I remember knowing before he said anything what he was going to say. And I remember the next three weeks watching her get weaker, watching her try to smile at me even when it hurt. Watching her slip away piece by piece until one morning I went in to check on her and she was gone. I was 30 years old. I had already survived things most people never have to survive. And that moment standing in that room with my baby girl who was not breathing anymore, that was the closest I ever came to giving up completely.
I am going to tell you what saved me. Earl did not try to fix it. He did not try to make it better. He did not say that everything happens for a reason or that she was in a better place or any of that nonsense people say when they do not know what else to say. He just sat with me for weeks, for months. He sat with me while I cried. He held my hand while I screamed at God. He made sure I ate even when I did not want to eat. He made sure the other children were taken care of when I could not take care of them. He did not ask me to be okay. He just stayed. That is what love is.
That woman Janette, she said love is hard to define. She said she would define respect instead. I understand why she said that. Respect is easier to explain. But I have been married twice and I can tell you exactly what love is. Love is staying. Love is being there when there is nothing you can do and staying anyway. Love is not running away when things get ugly. Love is not giving up on someone when they are at their worst. My first husband did not love me. He wanted to own me. There is a difference. Some of you watching this know exactly what I mean. Some of you are living with someone right now who wants to own you instead of love you. And you are telling yourself that it is not that bad, that things will get better, that you can fix them if you just try harder. You cannot fix them. I spent eight years trying to fix a man who did not want to be fixed. I almost died trying. And the only reason I got out is because someone else killed him before he killed me. If you are in a situation like that, get out. I do not care what it takes. I do not care how scared you are. I do not care if you have nowhere to go. Get out because staying will destroy you and you deserve better than destruction.
Janette talked about marriage lasting, about not giving up too easily, about giving it a chance. She is right. But she is talking about marriages between two people who both want to be there. Two people who are both trying. Two people who fight sometimes but come back to each other. Who turn their backs to each other in bed when they are angry but wake up in the morning and try again. That is not the same as staying with someone who hurts you. That is not the same as overlooking abuse. You have to know the difference. And if you do not know the difference, ask someone who does. Ask someone who has been through it. They will tell you the truth.
Let me tell you about my son. His name was James Earl Patterson Jr., named after his father. We called him Jimmy. He was born in 1951, the year before Mary Catherine got sick. He grew up watching his mother grieve for a sister he barely remembered. He grew up on that farm helping his father, learning to fix things and build things and grow things. In 1969, he turned 18 and he enlisted Vietnam. I begged him not to go. I told him there were other ways to serve his country. I told him I had already lost one child and I could not survive losing another. He looked at me and he said, "Mama, I have to go. The boys over there need help. I cannot sit here on this farm while they are dying." He died four months later. Ambush outside of Daang. They sent me a letter and a flag and a box with his things in it. His watch, his wallet, a picture of our family he kept in his pocket. I was 47 years old. I had now buried two of my children.
You want to know how I survived that? I do not know. I really do not know. There were days I did not want to survive it. There were nights I prayed to God to take me to so I could see them again. There were moments when I thought about making that happen myself. But I had three other children who needed me. I had Earl who needed me. And somewhere deep inside underneath all that grief, there was a voice that said, "You are not finished yet." That voice has kept me alive for 103 years. That voice is inside you too. I know it is. Even if you cannot hear it right now, it is there and it is telling you the truth. You are not finished yet. Your story is not over. There is still time to make it mean something.
Janette said something that hit me harder than anything else in that video. She said, "When you are young enough to change, you can change. When you get old, you are too old to change." I disagree with her on that. I changed when I was 24 and my first husband died. I changed when I was 30 and buried my daughter. I changed when I was 47 and buried my son. I changed when I was 76 and buried Earl. Every time I thought I was too old to change, life came along and changed me anyway. You are never too old to change. But you might be too stubborn. You might be too scared. You might be too comfortable with your own misery to imagine anything different. That is what will kill you. not age, stubbornness, fear, comfort in misery.
If you are watching this and you are 25 or 30 or 40 and you think you have plenty of time to figure things out, let me tell you something. You do not have plenty of time. You might have plenty of time or you might have three months or you might have until tomorrow afternoon. You do not know. Nobody knows. That is the whole point. Janette is right that your life might already be written. But she is also right that you cannot know what is written. You cannot read ahead. You just have to live the page you are on and make it count.
So make it count. Call your mother. Call your father. Call whoever raised you. Whoever loved you when you did not deserve it. Whoever stayed with you when everyone else left. Call them and tell them thank you. Tell them you love them. Do it today. Do it right now when you finish watching this because I promise you there will come a day when you cannot make that call anymore. There will come a day when you pick up the phone and remember that they are gone and you will think about all the times you meant to call and did not. Do not let that happen.
I am 103 years old. I have more regrets than I can count. But the regrets that hurt the most are not the things I did. They are the things I did not do, the words I did not say, the calls I did not make, the time I wasted being angry or scared or stubborn when I could have been present. You still have time. use it.
That woman, Janette, she said, "Treat people the way you want people to treat you." She said, "It is so easy to be nice to somebody." She is right. It is easy and most people still do not do it. Be one of the ones who does. Be kind when you do not have to be. Be patient when it is hard. Be gentle with people who are struggling because you do not know what they are carrying. You never know what someone else has been through. You never know whose child just died. You never know whose marriage is falling apart. You never know who is one bad day away from giving up completely. A kind word cost you nothing and might save someone's life.
I have lived through a depression and a world war and a polio epidemic and Vietnam and recessions and pandemics and more funerals than I can remember. I have seen the worst of what people can do to each other. I have also seen the best. And I am telling you the best is worth fighting for. Your life is worth fighting for. Do not give up. Do not settle. Do not accept a version of your life that makes you miserable just because changing seems too hard. That woman Janette made it to 105. I have made it to 103. We are still here. And we are both telling you the same thing. It is not too late. Whatever you need to do, whatever you need to change, whatever you need to say to someone before you run out of chances, do it Dale.