What Really Counts are Relationships, Family

Time is racing by at breakneck speed. In 18 months, if I live, I will be 80 years old.

That would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.

Now, it’s going to be just another day. I look back and think constantly about what I would have done differently if I had my scores of years to live again.

There are a few money-related ideas — especially that I would have bought more Berkshire Hathaway stock when I first learned about it 30 or so years ago.

Likewise, I should never have sold any of it.

But money is trash.

What really counts are relationships, and especially family.

God has given me a glorious life.

But it has had one catastrophic event that was like throwing a hand grenade onto my pillow while I was asleep; that was our son’s premature death about one year ago.

My wife and I miss him like the cut of a knife and the cut never stops hurting.

I wish I had ordered, begged, commanded, bribed him to get him to live here in Beverly Hills with me and my wife.

But he didn’t and I didn’t and now he sleeps in the arms of the Lord, and we suffer insanely. I was given the gift by the Lord of the absolutely best father there ever was.

He never raised a hand to me.

He praised me endlessly.

When we were both at the Nixon White House together we had lunch at the White House Mess at least twice a week.

Paradise.

Surrounded by the power elite.

Eating steak and ice cream sundaes while people of consequence passed by and lavished praise on my Pop.

I only recall one day ever in my youth when my father criticized me, and that was for first daughter Tricia spending too much on a radio.

I recall in glowing letters etched across the sky when, back in 1974, I walked up to his palatial office in the Executive Office Building and asked him to find me a statistic.

"But only do it if you have nothing more important to do," I added. Pop took a deep breath on his Kent cigarette and asked with lovely brown eyes, "What do you think I have to do that’s more important to do than helping my one and only son?"

When he died in 1999, my life basically went permanently into low gear.

My mother was a hard taskmistress, but she wanted me to be happy.

For all four years I was at Columbia, she wrote and mailed me a letter every single day.

When a teacher at Blair High School blackballed me from the Honor Society because I correctly told the class that she was a Communist (I said it as a joke but it turned out to be true), my mother made her life hell.

My sister is a saint.

The first time I ever got drunk, I threw up in my sleep.

My mother showed absolutely zero sympathy. "Let him sleep in it," she said.

Rachel, three years older, wordlessly cleaned me up and washed me off. She is still a saint 65 years later.

The best woman in my life is my wife, Alex. The most beautiful. The most forgiving.

The most unassuming.

By far the most forgiving.

We have been married since 1968 and the Lord Jesus was not more forgiving than my wife.

I stare at her all night to make sure she’s alive.

Thank you, Lord.

You gave me a chip off the old block. Every day is a miracle. I let her know every hour. Every minute. She’s everything. God bless her.

Ben Stein is a writer, an actor, and a lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes hired him as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." His latest book is, "The Peacemaker Nixon: The Man, President, and My Friend." Read more more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.

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