07/30/2009

Many years ago, a professor of mine spent a great deal of time lecturing on the intricacies and correlations of health, wealth and happiness. He pointed out that people could be very sick but still feel content. It’s true. I remember meeting people in cancer support groups who felt lucky to be alive and were joyful just to be getting close to each other.

Money, my professor also said, is no barometer of happiness. People can be happy or sad regardless of the size of their bank accounts. And looks? While attractiveness may be a factor for some people’s outlook on life, studies show that the most important contributor to the human happiness quotient was the feeling of belonging to a group or community. It didn’t matter if it was a church congregation, a knitting circle, a bowling league or a group of golfing buddies — just being able to find and attach to others in a social context significantly elevated positive emotional energy.

When I moved into a Pasadena neighborhood five years ago I noticed a neighbor who was well into her 90s and living alone. Bound to a wheelchair and cared for by full-time help, she was wheeled up and down the street every day for her morning walk. I was curious and asked the other neighbors about her. This is what they told me.

Her name was Ruth. She had been a member of a large and prominent Jewish family in Austria. With Nazism rapidly on the rise, she was sent out of the country along with her sister and a cousin to go to school in England. The rest of the family died in the Holocaust.

Later on, Ruth met her husband, Eddie, who worked in the chemistry department for Caltech, and they bought their Pasadena home in the 1950s. Although Ruth never had children of her own, she made it her job for many years to be a nurturing, maternal force for new families — especially the foreign ones — coming to Caltech. Whether they were graduate students, post-doctorate appointees or incoming faculty members, Ruth helped newcomers adapt to their new setting and find whatever they needed to settle in comfortably.

Because she befriended and helped so many from all over the world, neighbors surmised that her generosity of spirit derived from having lost so much that was dear to her during the war. They thought she deeply understood the importance of having a home and belonging somewhere and wanted others to have that as well.

After Ruth’s husband passed away in the 1990s she continued to live in Pasadena alone in her house until she needed live-in nurses. After a few years of watching Ruth and her nurse come out of her house and take daily strolls I noticed that they always pulled up in a car outside the house and took their walks from there. I came to learn that Ruth had adamantly refused to leave her home and go to residential care, but eventually her failing health necessitated moving to a place that could deliver better care. Dear Ruth only agreed to go to the extended care facility if they promised to bring her back every day for her daily outing to the place she belonged, so she could continue to experience the neighborhood in which she had invested so much of her life’s emotional energy.

Ruth finally passed away some months ago. For over half a century, Pasadena provided Ruth a home and a place to belong. In turn, her role as a warm and welcoming guide for newcomers from many lands helped Pasadena grow into the cosmopolitan place it is today.