Mary Schiller reflects on her father's 90-year life and single hospitalization, using his longevity to argue that even a long life feels too short. She urges viewers to speak up about what matters today, not tomorrow, and help others find their voice.
Hello. Bonjour, it's Mary. I was not planning to record a video, and I was simply out on a walk doing an errand, and then I thought, you know what, I'm just going to stop and talk about something that's on my mind. So I hope you can hear me all right. It's a little breezy, and I'm next to a street in my neighborhood, but here goes anyway. So today is my father's birthday, August 20th, 1918. That was the year he was born, and he passed away in 2009. And as I was walking around today, I started crunching some leaves under my feet, which tells me that the seasons are changing again. And I was thinking about my dad, who lived to age 90, and how he didn't retire until he was in his late 80s. I think he was maybe 86 or something like that. And the only reason he quit working was because his wife— not my mother— My mother died a long, long time ago, but his wife didn't want him to work anymore, so he decided he needed to quit working. And when I think about my dad, he was a very, very complicated man, and I won't go into all of that here, but what does strike me about him—as the clock is striking—is that He was an amazing human being in terms of his health and his mental status and all of those things, and I'm hoping that I inherited that from him because he was able to work all those years without losing much of a step at all. The last time I saw him was about a month or so before he died. He was living in a different state from me at the time, and he was just as sharp as he ever was. And the thing about my dad was I literally never saw him sick, not one time. I will never forget when he was in his late 70s, I believe, he had an unfortunate accident where he fell going down a ramp that wasn't marked and there was no railing or anything, so he just took a wrong step and fell. Went to the hospital, and I will never forget this part. Nurse comes in to take his medical history and says, so, Mr. Schiller, when was the last time you were in the hospital? And he said, maybe sometime around 1925. And the nurse was like, what? And he's like, yeah, that's the only time I've been in the hospital was when I had tuberculosis. And then he pointed out that he had some scars on his body, including one on his face. That came about from the type of tuberculosis that he had. And I remember my dad in a lot of ways, but I remember his health, his vigor, his excitement for reading. He loved sports and he enjoyed working, and I enjoy working. And as I was listening to these leaves crunch under my feet, I was thinking, you know, We always think we have so much time, but even 90 years isn't enough, is it? It's not enough to experience everything that we want to experience or do everything that we want to do. If I'm fortunate enough to live to be 90, I hope that I will have experienced many of the things that I have set out to experience. I have already done a lot of things that I never thought I could do. But my message is really that, you know, we just cannot take time for granted. We just can't. Recently I realized that a big mission of mine is to encourage people to speak up, to, as I've been calling it, find your voice, and to say the things that are important to you, preferably things that you feel deep in your soul that you want to share with the world, a message of hope, of strength, of, you know, positivity, the things that we need so much more of in this world. I think too many of us feel stifled in that way where we feel like, oh, who would listen to us? Or who am I to say anything about anything? And I am here to tell you that you are just as worthy as anyone and everyone else. To speak up for whatever is important to you, what you feel called to say. That's what I plan to spend a lot of my next few years doing, is encouraging people to find their voice and use it for good in this world, because we need it. We need you. And if I am fortunate enough to live as long as my dad did, I'm hoping I can make a difference in that regard and maybe in other ways that I can't even think of yet. So the seasons are changing, time keeps moving even if we wish that it didn't, it does. And I would encourage you to do something today, not tomorrow, but after listening to this video, go say something that you need to say in this world. Go do something that's important to you. Follow your dreams and passions because we just don't have forever.
