Composing a Further Life

explorations under hypnosis and during meditation also recall the various processes that have been developed to assist people as they grow older in reviewing and often in recording their lives, reflecting on them from different angles.
    The belief that at death one’s whole life passes before one in an instant is common, reported by a goodly number (but by no means all) of those who have had near-death experiences, and it supports the belief that one may have the opportunity to repent or affirm faith in a meaningful way in those moments. The past is active in the present, both as it occurred and as it might have occurred, whether as a source of strength or as a focus of regret. So, too, are the choices made, the roads not taken, which live on in the imagination. In a poem that I wrote for my husband on our fifth anniversary, using the metaphor of a juggler tossing possible alternative lives into the air, I grieved for alternatives foreclosed: “Those are bright spheres that fall away.”
    When Erikson speaks of
ego integrity
, however, he refers to “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions.” But then he continues, “It thus means a new, a different love of one’s parents … the style of integrity developed by his own culture or civilization thus becomes ‘the patrimony of his soul,’ the seal of his moral paternity of himself.… In such final consolidation, death loses its sting.” 12 In these statements Erikson seems to relativize experience. Instead of referring to love or hope or integrity in ways that can be read as absolutes, he refers to a “new love,” as well as the possibility of alternative versions of integrity.
    As I listened to Michael, I reflected that only a small percentage of Americans who believe in past or future incarnations were affirming that belief as elaborated in the historic traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, yet clearly there were ethical issues involved in Michael’s meditations. Many years ago I heard a Tibetan Buddhist monk, Nechung Rinpoche, preach on the “recognition of the mother”: since all souls have experienced an infinite number of incarnations, he said, it is possible to look at any sentient being and affirm that at some point in infinite time—in whatever unknown living form, human, bird, fish, insect—this being was my mother, and to feel compassion. At the same time that he was connecting all sentient beings, however, he was noticing the differences and remarking that Americans may not feel quite the same way about their mothers and should perhaps practice the meditation of the “recognition of the best friend.” 13
    The corollary, it seemed to me, is to argue that in some other form at some other point in time, this being was my child—and to accept responsibility for the care and nurture of all life. More recently, a Japanese historian of Buddhism, Yoichi Kawada, explained to me the concept of the bodhisattva, the enlightened person who has arrived at the stage of release from the cycle of reincarnation but who, out of compassion, chooses to return to serve the enlightenment of others. There are other ways of thinking of alternative lives than “It might have been.”
    The strengths (virtues) that Erikson recognizes as emerging from the resolution of crises at the different stages of the life cycle are as follows:
hope
during infancy;
will
during early childhood;
purpose
during play age;
competence
during school age;
fidelity
in adolescence;
love
in young adulthood;
care
in middle adulthood; and
wisdom
in old age. (See Figure 2 .)
    Each of these strengths is prefigured at earlier stages, and each is reshaped to address the challenges of later stages. I once saw a bumper sticker that read, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” In Eriksonian terms, this might mean “It’s never too late to learn to hope; to acquire will, purpose, skills, and self-discipline; to make commitments and learn to sustain them, and to care for others; to see one’s life in perspective.” Each of these strengths builds on the previous ones and is flawed by struggles left unresolved.
    It takes one kind of confidence to step out unsupported in early childhood, but that confidence metamorphoses repeatedly, becoming the precursor of the courage to face illness and death. Consider the cluster of terms that Erikson uses. He refers to the crisis of old age as the crisis