Composing a Further Life

columnist for
The Boston Globe
, then sixty-one years old, invited me to a small, informal conference with a group of women that she and Patricia Schroeder, who served for twenty-four years in the House of Representatives from Colorado, were organizing, to discuss the approach of retirement age and how they—we—felt about it. We met that December in Celebration, Florida, over a weekend, a group of seven women, all of whom had had careers and all of whom, somewhat to my surprise, were currently married and had grown-up children. We were all in our sixties, each with a range of degrees, books, and titles to her credit. A novelist. A psychotherapist. A college president. An entrepreneur. Women who had been active in different ways in the liberation movements of the twentieth century, and who had struggled for the right to work outside the home, now looking at retirement. Women who had “had it all.”
    Most important from my point of view, everyone there had already once in her lifetime had to reject ready-made answers to the questions of purpose and identity and think them through as women in a new way. We recognized that we had been struggling with similar dilemmas and decided, even though we came from different parts of the country, to continue to meet semiannually and to invite two or three others to join the group. Because all of us were busy and engaged on a number of fronts, we agreed to concentrate on developing our common understanding rather than undertaking any new form of activism.
    The two comments that I remember most vividly from that first gathering were Pat Schroeder’s, that in the women’s movement “We thought we had won a war but in fact we had only taken a beachhead for women’s equality,” and Ellen Goodman’s, that all of our obituaries were already written, neatly on file in newspaper offices, so that in a real sense we had nothing to prove. But there we were, wondering about how to be productive, how to contribute to a positive future for our children and our grandchildren, how to continue to make our lives meaningful. This last is a new question for healthy people in their sixties to be asking, for through most of human history elders have been treasured and have had established roles that only they could fill, and much less time in which to fill them.
    One of those who joined us six months later was Ruth Massinga, an African American woman who lives in Seattle, Washington, then approaching retirement as president and CEO of Casey Family Programs. This foundation, one of a cluster started by the Casey family, works to provide and improve foster care and to prevent the need for it. Ruth also chaired the board of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, an independent grant-making organization where she and Pat Schroeder had become friends, and cochaired the board of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative.
    Ruth has spent her career on different aspects of social welfare, concerned with children and with the elderly. Her career has included service as secretary of the Maryland Department of Human Resources and president of the American Public Welfare Association. She has a son, Irving, and two grandchildren, Ben and Madeline, who were six and four when we first met.
    It was Ruth who got us discussing the importance of grandparents to the well-being of children, and the connections between longevity, health, and the availability of grandparents. Ruth grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her own parents had in fact lived with her maternal grandparents in the kind of community in which relatives and neighbors all took a role in child rearing—the kind of community in which “it takes a village to raise a child.” Ruth was the oldest, the first grandchild on either side, and described herself as spoiled and overprotected, spending summers in Lafayette, Louisiana, and returning to Baton Rouge for school during the winters.
    “We lived in a very communal fashion. I can still see the faces of the neighbors who watched me and my friends on the way to the Catholic school, three or four blocks around the corner, and would report to my parents and my grandparents what I had or had not done appropriately. ‘Ruth,’ they’d say, ‘Ruth, I see you taking off your sweater. Your granny’s not going to like that, ’cause it’s too cold.’ That was the routine. Every house along the way was inhabited by somebody who was a part of the extended family in that fashion, which is very southern. It