Composing a Further Life

daughter, her husband, and first one and then two grandchildren.
    My father, Gregory Bateson, remarried when I was in graduate school and started another family—he had in the end three only children, one from each marriage, but his third wife, Lois Camack, had a son from a previous marriage, and my half brother joined the household for several years before Gregory and Lois had their daughter, Nora. After he married Lois, Gregory decided he was ready to deal with his roots, and they went to England and brought back the Bateson family possessions that had been in storage for decades—books, furniture, and artwork, surely a symbolic statement of settling down on Gregory’s part. Yet Gregory and Lois continued to move around, spending time in the Virgin Islands and in Hawaii on research projects and taking a group of students on a round-the-world educational voyage.
    When Gregory’s health began to fail, they had settled in a big old house in Santa Cruz, but after he died, Lois moved to a small apartment near Zen Center in San Francisco and then gave that up to spend time at an ashram in India. When she came back from India, she decided to settle in North Carolina, where she had grown up and where her parents were living, initially so that she could look after them as they aged, but later she moved into a retirement community there—and out again, partly so that she could afford the flexibility of spending summers near her grandchildren. Twice she has set up housekeeping near them, only to have them pull up stakes and move elsewhere.
    Ruth Massinga, a social worker and foundation executive who had twice moved far away from her family of origin in Louisiana, first to the East Coast and then to the Northwest, took a different tack, remodeling her Seattle apartment so she would have a more inviting guest room for her son and his family.
    The Goldsbys, both tenured professors, had earlier followed career opportunities from place to place but eventually built in Maine and remodeled in Massachusetts, partly because selling their company suddenly gave them the financial flexibility to do so.
    James Morton, dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and his wife, Pamela, lost their home of twenty-five years, the deanery in the cathedral close, which went with the job, when Jim retired, and now live in an apartment in the same New York neighborhood.
    Jane Fonda owns a ranch near Santa Fe, which she seems to be developing as a long-term home base, but she still keeps a base in Atlanta. Last time I saw her, she was living in New York and performing on Broadway, beginning to look again toward Los Angeles.
    Of the people described at length in this book, only Dan Jepson and Michael Crowe have not made significant changes, continuing to live in the house that Dan inherited in a suburb of San Francisco.
    One of the emerging emphases as Americans reach old age is on making it possible for them to remain in their homes in spite of frailty or disability, but during Adulthood II, there is a lot of shifting and building as location is less determined by employment and people try to find the place that will make long-term sense for them. Some of this is simply the American pattern. We move constantly, shifting homes and replacing spouses. We are increasingly skillful at constructing new circles of acquaintances but often without real closeness.
    In 2007, I started a discussion group on aging at the library in the small town of Hancock, New Hampshire, and many of those who joined it were newcomers, looking for ways to meet people. One of the themes the group pursued for weeks was the search for old friends with whom they had lost touch—we gave ourselves the homework assignment of reconnecting with at least one person and came back with stories of search and reunion. As many friendships are lost or attenuated through retirement moves as through death, but the loss, although just as real, is not specifically mourned. The human cost is also often unconsidered when retirees think about relocating, sometimes trading friendship for sunshine.
    Moving is both liberating and debilitating. Undertaken too late, it is a very stressful process, one that sometimes seems to catapult people into frail old age, and undertaken too soon, it may preempt other possibilities. One of the topics that came up again and again in a group of women in their sixties that I belonged to was the problem of clearing out the accumulation of years of living, either