The Happiest Man I’ve Ever Known

For many years, my favorite New York neighbor was a debonair, white-haired old Frenchman named Armand Chene. Monsieur Chene died quickly and apparently painlessly a few years back when his great heart simply gave out at the age of 99. He called out to his wife, fell to the floor, and by the time she got there he had lost consciousness. It was an exit strategy that neatly matched the way he lived — no whining, no big regrets, no neediness, no fuss.

Unlike some of my neighbors, Armand was not famous or fabulously wealthy but he was something much more important than that–he was a genuinely happy man, grateful to have lived nearly a century so amazingly free of the debilitating diseases that reduce most of us to pain and bitterness and confusion in our later years. The mischievous glint of the professional boulevardier that sparkled in his eyes to the end brought a smile to everyone he encountered.

He was born in Paris at a time when men with horses came around in the evening to light the gas lamps. Before he was 10-years-old, his mother died when a careless doctor left a scalpel inside after an operation. His father was a vagabond who had disappeared. Too proud to beg, without a coat or underwear, he survived by doing odd jobs for fellow residents of a poor Jewish quarter of Paris and sleeping in basements.