Something Special - By Frank and Peg Brady :: The art of a meaningful retirement.

Chapter 1

THE LIFE ALTERING EVENT 1990

Denial

It was 1990, during a bitterly cold winter. I had just arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport after a red-eye from Europe. It was around 11:00 A.M. and I had a busy day ahead of me with a meeting scheduled at 4:00 P.M. at AT&T in New Jersey to discuss a business opportunity in Egypt as well as a business dinner planned for 7:00 P.M. I didnt need to drop by my offices at Rockefeller Center in New York City, so I decided to call a lifelong friend of mine, Bob Papa, to meet me for lunch. We met for a quick bite and were swapping stories. Suddenly, I didnt feel so hot.

I said to Bob, I must have eaten something on the plane last night that didnt agree with me. Im feeling a little queasy. Thats when I looked down at my shirt pocket. Bob, look at this.

Wow. I see that. Whats up with that? he asked.

I kept staring at my shirt pocket and thought it looked as if I had a gold fish flopping around in there. Thats when I started feeling lightheaded and breathless, as if I had just walked up five flights of stairs. I dont know what it is, Bob. Its the strangest thing. The thought never occurred to me that I could have a serious health problem. Things like that happen to other people, not to hale-and-hearty Frank.

How does your heart feel?

Its beating like crazy, I admitted.

Bob looked at me, a bite in his mouth, and said with a degree of nonchalance, Yeah, it could be your heart. And I dont think thats a good thing. I heard about a guy who had something like that and he actually died on the golf course. Maybe you should go see somebody.

Bob and I kept eating and chatting as if we were ladies at a tea party. After lunch, I was still not quite back to normal so I figured, for a little piece of mind, I would swing by Dr. Michael Daras office before my meeting. Mike is another friend of mine who lived across the street from me when we were kids and I was sure I could get in without an appointment. I told his receptionist that I thought I was having a bit of a situation and showed her my shirt pocketit was still doing that flopping thing. She frowned and took me directly to an exam room, instructed me to take off my shirt, and to wait for the doctor. I was sitting there on the table in my T-shirt, flipping through a magazine, swinging my legs, and looking at my watch. I had two hours before my meeting and I was beginning to get fidgety.

After Mike entered and pleasantries were exchanged, he put his stethoscope to his ears and listened. Then he put the blood pressure cuff on my arm, pumped it up and waited for the pings. There it was again, the same frown the nurse had exhibited, and he said, I dont really have the equipment here in the office to properly diagnose whats going on, Frank. You shouldnt be alarmed. I dont think its anything to worry about, but if you have the time, why dont you go on over to Chilton Hospital. Im going over there anyway and Ill meet you.

Okay, Mike, if you think I should, but my schedule is pretty tight. Ive got back-to-back meetings at 4:00 and 7:00. I gotta get in and out.

He responded that he would try to accommodate my schedule, told me to get dressed, said he would meet me at the hospital emergency entrance, and then left the room. I put my shirt on and went out into the hallway and was headed back to the receptionist area when I heard someone banging on the back door. I was standing right there, so I opened the door and there were these two EMTs with a gurney waiting to get in and an ambulance was parked right behind them with its lights flashing. I was thinking that something serious had happened to somebody in Mikes office and I was eager to help. I held the door open for the paramedics and they went running in with their gurney.

While I had the door open, I noticed my car sitting right there in the parking lot and I decided just to get in my car rather than go all the way through the building, through the front office, past the receptionist, and around the outside of the building. I was feeling really parched and I was
thinking that Mike might be awhile meeting up with me, so I stopped by Friendlys convenience store to get a Diet Coke. I moseyed into Friendlys. I slurped on my Coke while I moseyed back to the car. I slurped on my Coke while I moseyed over to the hospital.

When I finally arrived at the hospital and walked up to the E.R. with my Coke in hand, several hospital staff came rushing toward me in a frantic scramble to get me into a wheelchair and then onto a gurney. They were shouting at me and each other, asking, Where have you been? and pushing me inside in what seemed like a mad dash. Thats when it finally dawned on me: I was the patient that the paramedics had come to get at Mikes office and I had gone AWOL.

While I was being wheeled down the hospital corridor with the ceiling tiles whipping by overhead, shoe soles squishing on the terrazzo tile, hushed voices talking back and forth, I was still in denial, thinking how bizarre the ordeal was. At 5:30 that night, Peg came into my hospital room to find me no longer in denial. I was wired up to every medical device ever invented and oxygen was being forced into my nose. Peg started crying and I can remember thinking, Oh my God, Im not going to live until morning.

I was 48 years old and I didnt have a clue about my body. When minutes counted, I was focused on the next meeting, the next project, and a Diet Coke. When Mortality knocked at my door, I denied its existence.

Meeting Canceled

After five days in the hospital and a ton of tests, a final diagnosis was revealed. I had atrial fibrillation or afib. Afib can be a life-threatening condition leading to angina and stroke or, at the very least, a chronic health problem of diminished capacity. Afib is an irregular, rapid beating of the artrial chambers of the heart caused by an electrical malfunction, a sort of electrical storm in the heart. Whether afib happens at high or low heart rates, its irregular rhythm means the ventricles cant pump blood efficiently to the rest of the body. Instead, blood pools in the heart and the body doesnt get enough blood or oxygen causing one to feel dizzy, tired, and breathless. The cause of afib is not known, but it affects men more than women, risk increases with age, and results in about 70,000 strokes per year. To put it into perspective, when I am not in afib, I walk at a rate of about 3.5 miles per hour; when I am in afib, I can only walk at a rate of less than two miles per hour and everything else slows down accordingly. I learned more about the diagnosis than I wanted to know and the pronouncement was the end of my business career.

Throughout my career, I have certainly burned the candle at both ends. Working with Compagnie Generale de Elecetricite, the General Electric of France or CGE, for the last umpteen years, I was based in New York with an office in Paris. I put about 100,000 miles per year on my frequent flier program. It was a highly stressful job that involved forming consortiums of partnerships to participate in large international projects, mostly in third-world countries. I traveled extensively, sometimes for extended periods, and being separated from Peg and the kids had taken its toll. I was never a health nut: no time for fancy gyms, no concern about the indigenous food I ate, never getting enough sleep. Without an intervention, I might have continued on that lethal track and turned up dead in some foreign country without adequate care or without Peg at my side.

My cardiologist put me on a regimen of medications to get me in cardioversion or a restoration of the hearts normal rhythm. Of course, they lectured me about my weight, my diet, and they advised me to curtail my work activities and limit my traveling if I wanted to salvage my health. I paid attention and I started to cut back, but the control freak that I am, I was still of the mind that I could whip this medical problem, get it under control, and get back to business as usual. Even though Peg never admitted it, I suspect she coached the doctors to give it to me with both barrels because she wanted to ensure that I didnt slough off their recommendations just as soon as I started feeling better. Of course, thats exactly what men do, what I would do, and she knew it.

Each year after the initial onset, the afib became worse. Id feel light-headed and sometimes Peg would end up finishing my sentences for me when I had a hard time remembering or forming words because of the lack of blood circulation to my brain. I experienced fatigue, shortness of breath, weakness, dizziness. As the medical problems became worse, I continued to cut back on my work projects.

By 1997, I was in afib more than 50 per cent of the time and it was effecting me mentally, physically, and emotionally. Peg and I sat down at the kitchen table and concluded that retirement was a sooner than later inevitability.

They say life comes at you hard and you should always have a backup plan. My plan was to work until I was 90. There was no backup plana you retire when you expire mentality.

What My Mother Told Me

So, the decision was made. I wound down my projects and within six months, I virtually had nothing to do. Gone were the fancy offices in Paris and Rockefeller Center; gone were the secretaries and staffers at my beck-and-call; gone were high-powered lunches and critical business deals; gone were the corporate perks. I empathized with the athletes who had been playing first string and who suddenly were benched, relegated to the stands just to watch others play the game.

I hadnt been contemplating my encore years at all, what they refer to as the back nine, but the facts were obvious: I was just 55 years old and my life, as I had lived it, was gone and I was faced with the cold, hard realitywhat was I going to do with the rest of it? Although I love to play golf, I knew I wasnt the kind of fellow who could play the game 24/7. I had already spent my entire adult life traveling and that way of life had long lost its charm. I didnt want to sit on the beach or go to one of those Sun City retirement centers and play shuffleboard or canasta all day, just sitting around, passing the time. When I was a young man, I had a general goal for my life: I wanted to go to college, be a successful businessman, make a lot of money, and raise a family. Not only didnt I have any goals for an unintended retirement, I simply had no direction. I recalled the famous football coach at Florida State, Bobby Bowden, who once said this about retirement, After you retire, theres only one big event.

One thing for sure, I wasnt ready to get a shovel for the last big event.

During this period, I spent a lot of time taking inventory. I had a great wife, two super children, Maureen and Erin, who had successful careers of their own, and a sense of personal achievement in what I had done thus far with my life. Although I had 30 years of business experience, I was still young with a sharp mindthat is when the afib wasnt causing my brain to short-circuit. In order to keep my acquired skills from rusting away or becoming outdated by an ever changing environment, I knew that I needed to continue to employ those skills in my endeavors. I had built a reputation as a go-getter over the years, one of dedication and trustworthiness, and I had established a network of solid relationships. All of these factors were positive and essential elements in whatever initiative I developed.

Peg understood my concern and we spent a lot of time hashing out ideas at our kitchen table. We felt as if we still had so much to offer, still so much we wanted to do. As well as assessing the fundamentals, there were the practical and the philanthropic aspects of our discussions. Two things became crystal-clear:

Whatever we did from now on, we would do it together.It would definitely involve giving back.

I was on my second cup of coffee one morning just piddling and daydreaming. Peg was sitting across from me in the cozy kitchen we have shared for so many years, the sun coming in through the window to warm the room that is the heart of our house. For some reason, I started to reminisce about my mother. Jeane Brady has been dead for over 20 years, but I can still see her kind face and hear her loving voice. Many times when I was growing up, she would tell me how she almost lost me when I was a baby. I was just one-year-old in 1943 when I contracted spinal meningitis. The doctors gave my parents the grim prediction that I wouldnt last another couple of weeks. They were devastated, of course, and began to pray.

About a week later, with no improvement in my status, the doctor told them about an experimental drug that had been successfully used on adults, but it had never been administered to children. My parents believed that they had nothing to lose and gave the doctor their permission to use this new drug. It was, of all thingspenicillin. Not only did I pull through without any lingering health problems, I served as a guinea pig for the future use of what became one of the worlds most well-known and effective treatments. Every time my mother told me this story, which she did often, she always added with emphasis, Frank, you survived because God wants you to do something special with your life. For a while, I was scared she wanted me to be a priest. I knew that wouldnt work out for me because I was rather fond of girls.

The more I thought about my parents, about how they would have felt having a baby who had been given a death sentence, about the lengths to which they would have gone to save their child, about having their backs against the wall with no solution in sight, I kept getting this tug on my heart. My mothers words kept repeating themselves in my head, do something special do something special .... Peg had heard the story before, but I brought it up again that morning and I confessed to her that perhaps my mother was trying to communicate with me. At that very moment, Peg and I concluded that doing something special was part of the equation in our undetermined future.

Doing something special loomed in the distance like a mountain range in the cloudshazy and foreboding.