Composing a Further Life

the approach to early childhood education developed by Loris Malaguzzi in the schools of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy. Visiting with Ellen, I was totally enthralled by the sense of a school that reflected a world with something to discover and explore in every direction, a gentle unfolding of delighted curiosity and collaboration. Since then I have met with Ellen whenever I get to Colorado or she gets to the East Coast, read her current work, and become reengaged through her with trends in early childhood education.
    Ellen is a slim, energetic woman, intensely focused on the issues of childhood development and their relationship to society. The daughter of first-generation Eastern European Jewish parents, she has developed her school as a place of learning for interns, teachers, and parents as well as for the children, studying, for instance, the children’s concepts of their own rights or their empathetic relationships with pet animals.
    When we first met, Ellen was married to a slightly younger husband and had her mother living with her, in a separate apartment designed for someone in a wheelchair. Ellen has had three children, two from her first marriage and one from her then-current marriage, which ended in 2008 after twenty-eight years. Ellen urged me to look at the dilemmas of men and women who find themselves single in their sixties not because of the death of a spouse but because of divorce.
    “It’s important for us as we age in the twenty-first century to know others feeling the same way,” she said. “It’s very different from becoming a widow or a widower. When I talk to friends who have had a spouse die, they talk about their happy memories. Someone like me who’s divorced doesn’t have that consolation. There is a whole culture of people my age, some looking for another marriage, some for another kind of lifetime commitment, or maybe just wanting someone to hang out with or travel with, maybe with no commitment at all.”
    In terms of life stages, Ellen is in Adulthood II. Her children have grown up, she has begun to delegate more of the management of the school she created, and she is focusing increasingly on writing and teaching about the approach to education that it represents. But to be alone at this stage of life is a violation of her mental model of how lives unfold. “Why aren’t we sitting by the fire, talking about children and grandchildren and when and where we want to retire, looking back on our lives together? It’s unnatural—inorganic. And dating seems inauthentic and awkward. At this point in the story you think you’d be enjoying the fruits of your labor. If there are worries they should be about the grandchildren and the kind of world they will inherit. To be alone is not for me a happy place to be. I have wonderful children and grandchildren and many amazing friends and an amazingly successful professional life. I should feel lucky, but I still feel an emptiness because when I wake up in the morning there’s no one there and when I go to sleep at night there is no one there.” Ellen’s model of the shape of a human life, like that of Dan, who married in spite of his growing awareness of being gay, because “everyone marries,” includes marriage as a matter of course.
    By the time Ellen and I discussed these issues, she had turned away from seeking possible relationships through the Internet, troubled both by the sense of having been rejected and by having rejected others—sometimes in alternation. This may be a feminine point of view, but it struck me that a lifetime of different kinds of relationships with the opposite sex—as colleagues, teachers, friends, and parents of children in her school—made considering another human being as a possible “date” uncomfortable almost by definition. Meeting through a dating service makes it impossible to have a simple conversation without categorizing. Indeed, most of us learn early on that a friendship that has progressed to a romantic or erotic relationship cannot easily be restored to a more casual basis, which is one of the best reasons to be cautious about romance in the workplace.
    Ellen also spoke about couples who stay together even though the relationship is imperfect, hoping that nevertheless they will “make it” to an “end-of-life companionship.” But when trust is gone, and the future includes the possibility of being dependent on the other, that may become impossible. “It seems to me,” I said,