The Book of Charlie

by David von Drehle

The fourteenth-century mystic and visionary Dame Julian of Norwich survived the Black Plague to write with confidence that “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” The lesson, so simple yet so difficult, is that life can be savored even though it contains hardship, disappointment, loss, and even brutality. The choice to see its beauty is available to us at every moment.

Charlie made an art of living. He understood, as great artists do, that every life is a mixture of comedy and tragedy, joy and sorrow, daring and fear. We choose the tenor of our lives from those clashing notes.

After a pause, he counseled his youngest to let it go. You’ll kill yourself getting worked up, he told her. “I don’t have time for people like that,” he said.

Frankl concluded that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” of meeting whatever life presents.

For people trying to thrive in uncertainty, iterative and incremental development is a consolation. It says, don’t try to solve everything. Stop demanding answers to every question about your life and career. Look instead for a small step forward. Just answer the next question. Find the next step. And take it.

Yet Charlie seemed to derive as much delight from recalling these blunders as he did from remembering his triumphs. He had an understanding that mistakes can have virtue. They show that we are making the effort, engaging with life, “in the arena,” as Theodore Roosevelt famously put

Another president, Harry Truman, said: “Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.” There is value in making decisions, right or wrong, and moving on. Perfectionism, by contrast, can become an enemy of life itself, freezing us in place while the world goes on without us.

There is no living without making mistakes. As Epictetus, that marvelous Stoic, said, “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr had a slightly different spin on the same truth. “An expert,” he declared, “is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow fi...

For young people coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, “keep your daubers up” was a bit stodgy, perhaps. But it’s a fine distillation of Charlie’s life secrets. It is a Stoic admonition: how we choose to keep our daubers is very much within our power. And the guidance is liberating, creative, in the way that Charlie was free and vibrant. A person gives meaning to the expression by living it. With our daubers up—whatever it means exactly—we’re ready for opportunity. We’re poised to learn and grow through change. We’re alert and alive, determined, unbeaten. There is readiness in the phrase. Stay sharp. Don’t slump. Keep going. Hang in there. Be true to yourself and to your daubers. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a philosopher who knew infinite grief and loss—loss of his father as boy, loss of his brothers as a youth, loss of his wife as a young lover, loss of a child as a father—kept his daubers up by seeing that right now is what matters, because it is the only thing we can touch. The past has slipped beyond our influence and the future is outside our knowing. To be happy and fruitful, we must engage with right now.

Conversely, the source of unhappiness and frustration is this, according to Emerson: “Man postpones or remembers, he does not live in the present, but with reverted eyes laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.” We “cannot be happy and strong,” he concludes, until we live “in the present, above time.” With our daubers up.

I remembered Charlie’s rather skeptical view of medicine—which seemed strange coming from a doctor. When people close to him got sick, he treated them with bed rest and plenty of water. Charlie urged faith in the ability to thrive.

The valley of death is perhaps the most difficult place for a Stoic self-confidence to survive. There we come face-to-face with the ultimate limit of our power, the humbling fact that no creature has ever been able to change.

Between the two of them, they filled each visit with a jolt of the life force that Chinese philosophers call ch’i. It has to do with vigor and morale and it flows from a right relationship to the order of things. Charlie and Mary Ann channeled ch’i. They understood that sorrow requires no pursuit; it finds us whenever it chooses. It had found them before. It would find them again.

Charlie nodded as she continued. “The marriage always comes first,” she said. “Your children will grow up and leave. They live their lives and you must live yours. Why, when my boys were young, I never let five o’clock arrive without freshening my makeup and getting my husband’s drink ready.”

My writer-friend’s father once mentioned that the road was lined with signs in Hebrew. “What do they say?” my friend asked. “You know I can’t read Hebrew,” his father replied. Charlie nodded amiably as I reported this. He had worried about the hallucinations when they started, but now they didn’t seem so bad, he said. There were much worse things that could happen to a person. He knew, because some had happened to him.

But springtime blossomed again in the Missouri River valley, and the trees spread their green umbrellas for summer. Charlie had a change of heart. His birthday was near, and having come so far, he decided that he might as well keep going to 109. How unlike Charlie, I thought to myself, to imagine that he had control over something as powerful and capricious as death. One of the core teachings of Stoicism is that death keeps its own datebook; it can come at any time, and the only certainty is that it will eventually get to you. Therefore, “let us postpone nothing,” in the words of the amiable Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca. “Let us balance life’s books every day.” That had been Charlie’s approach for a lifetime. But now he set his course for 109 and delayed his final accounting.

“I just plowed along,” he finally said. In fact, Charlie had adopted his mother’s philosophy, which was “so simple,” and served Charlie so well: “Do the right thing.” This was a very practical philosophy, he continued. “If you do the right thing, it covers a whole raft of situations.” Warming to the question, Charlie went on. “I always say: This will pass.” Whatever the challenge, “you’ve got to work through it, and hold the line, and don’t fall apart. Stick in there. There’s no future in negativism.”

And finally: “Nobody’s going to do it for you. You’ve got to do your own paddling. So always keep your daubers up—no matter what.” Could it be that this life, in this tempest of change, through economic depression and prosperity, in wartime and peacetime, youth and age, joy and grief, boiled down to such simplicity?

Charlie lived so long that the veil of complexity fell away entirely and he saw that life is not so hard as we tend to make it.

The essentials are familiar not because they are trite, but because they are true. I picture him even now, his eyes dimmed but his mind bright as a diamond, filling this sheet of paper with his simple truths. Work hard. Spread joy. Take a chance. Enjoy wonder. And I have my answer, my book for my kids. How does one thrive through a maelstrom of change? By standing on ground that is permanent.