Henry Jefferds Wheelwright – 50th Reunion Essay

Henry Jefferds Wheelwright

246 Kern Ave.

Morro Bay, CA 93442

jwheeljr@gmail.com

805-441-7734

Spouse(s): TMI

Child(ren): Emma, Henry, Divna

Grandchild(ren): Ruth, Olivia, Bluma, William

Education: Yale, BA, 1969; Columbia Journalism, MS, 1971

National Service: Conscientious objector but did not perform national service

Career: Writer; jeffwheelwright.com/author

College: Silliman

I’ve been entertaining a new thought lately, which is almost pleasing. It’s that my body is beginning to separate from my spirit.

When you’re young, your vigorous body and inchoate spirit are mixed up together. They’re inseparable, if only in the sense that you don’t consider them separately as they power your life. I remember catching a football in 1969, a long pass, after a sprint across the Silliman courtyard. John Ricotta was watching and said something admiring about the catch. Shyly, I felt a sense of physical prowess and, less shyly, of spiritual ebullience. The two feelings were close to one. I was happy and took my happiness for granted.

At 70, my body is expressing curious harbingers of failure, quite apart from any illness or injury. For example, I noticed the other day that if I press down hard on something with my thumb, the depression in the area of the thumbprint takes a few seconds to disappear. That’s new. My body has become something of an object that my spirit (or soul) can regard from a little distance.

That distance will only grow. I am leaving my body behind, like a weaker soldier who can’t keep up on a vital mission. It doesn’t depress me, not at the moment. I look back on my body kindly—it’s done really well to take me this far. Just last year it brought me to an 11,000-foot crest in the Sierra Nevada range.

Especially when I’m in the mountains, I look ahead, tentatively, to the time when my body drops away altogether and liberates the lighter part of me.

I just made that up. I’ve never had that thought before while in the mountains, although I will try it out during my next backpacking trip. St. Simeon Stylites had a similar idea when he climbed up on his pillar.

What I’m saying is that I believe in an afterlife. I wouldn’t have known what the concept meant in 1969, when I could run like the wind across the courtyard, my spirit in chase of my body.