“If you have your health, you have everything.” So was the credo of my grandmum, Bridget Sheely. 

As a young boy I considered that assertion absurd. Back then, having my health certainly wasn’t like having “everything.” It wasn’t, for instance, like having a mini-bike, go-cart or a swimming pool behind your house — I would have loved to have one of those.

But from my grandmother’s perspective, all that stuff was incidental compared to being healthy. She came from a world where if you weren’t healthy, you could not work and you could not survive.

She came from Ireland alone at the turn of the century when she was 13 years old. She married young, had three children and was abused and abandoned by her first husband.

The parents of the man who deserted her agreed to take in her children — their grandchildren — but there was no room in the house for Bridget. It was not a situation she wanted, but at least she knew her children would be warm and fed.

She got a job in a factory and was allowed to visit her two sons and a daughter on weekends. She would walk the two miles to her in-laws’ home in order to save trolley fare to spend on treats for her kids.

She lived a hard life in a world where immigrants were exploited and valued only as long as they were able to provide cheap labor.

Her salvation came in the form of a man named Frank McLaughlin, a stunted, ugly man with a crooked back and twisted hands. Frank first cast eyes on Bridget in the early 1900s at the Brockton Fair. For him, it was love at first sight. Bridget was too young to look past the unsightly exterior into the soul of a beautiful man. Instead, she married a handsome man name John O’Malley who impregnated her three times, treated her poorly and left her to fend for herself.

Twenty hard years later, Frank reappeared at Bridget’s doorstep and said, “Do you remember me, Bridgy?”

I’ll never know if Bridget was finally able to look past Frank’s less than appealing appearance into his beautiful soul, or if she had simply run out of options. But the result was a short courtship and a long marriage. After Bridget died in her 80s we found misspelled love notes, written in pencil, to her from Frank.

“If you have your health, you have everything.” My grandmother would say that when she groaned while getting up from a chair or her arthritis made walking painful. 

“If youth knew, if age could,” said Sigmund Freud. 
Or — “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself,” said Billy Noonan. 

In 1965, Bridget and Frank were well over 70. They had been collecting a small Social Security stipend for a few years, since Frank was forced to retire when his back gave out.    

It was 1965 when Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Medicare bill which provided health care to the elderly. Bridget had been living with a lung condition caused by years of chemical inhalation from her work, and Frank suffered from a weak heart and bad back.  

Between the time they were too feeble to work and the creation of Medicare they sometimes had to choose buying medicine or paying rent. Their visits to the doctors were few. After Medicare, they could at least get basic health care and still have enough left over from their Social Security to occasionally take me out for a cheeseburger.

It is funny how your perspective changes as you age. For most of us, when we were younger, health was taken for granted. Now, one of the first things asked to someone you are catching up with is, “So, how’s your health?” Of course, here in the mountains, most of us have had the luxury of healthy food, regular exercise and preventive medicine.

When you were too old to work in Bridget’s era, the little luxuries had to be eliminated. For that generation, health care was a luxury. 

 “If you have your health, you have everything.” Bridget and Frank, due to genetics and good fortune, lived long and died quickly. Their twilight years were made more bearable by a government program that saw the value in those too old to work but too young, content and healthy to die.  

We take might now take that program for granted, but Medicare is something America can be proud of.

Jeffrey Bergeron’s column “Biff America” publishes Mondays in the Summit Daily News. Bergeron has worked in TV and radio for more than 30 years, and his column can be read in several newspapers and magazines. He is the author of “Mind, Body, Soul.” Bergeron arrived in Breckenridge when there was plenty of parking and no stoplights. Contact him at biffbreck@yahoo.com.