Composing a Further Life

“that the Internet service was a first stage in your transition out of the marriage, and that now you have left it behind. There is surely a process of development going on that will change over time.”
    Another pattern that has emerged, however, is one in which a couple do not take up joint residence but go on vacations together. As with marriages of couples who have lived together for long periods, legal factors enter in, since an actual marriage establishes obligations that may interfere with promises made to children, who anyhow regard their parents’ romantic relationships with suspicion, and marriage tends to involve one or both partners giving up familiar relationships. If you have a life of your own, it is easier to take a vacation from it than to close it down. Here sex differences seem almost as powerful as in youth, with women looking for stable relationships and many men preferring to remain uncommitted, and these differences seem to apply regardless of sexual orientation.
    Generativity, the third of the crises resolved earlier in adulthood, also recurs. The children may have grown up and moved on, but the parents are still concerned to take care of them at a distance, to take care of the community, and to take care of the future, and still needing to find ways to contribute meaningfully to society. Continuing on the job, volunteering, engaging in social activism, and building new careers are the new resolutions to the recurring need for engagement.
    The challenges that lie ahead at fifty and sixty are those that we encountered at sixteen and twenty-five: discovering who, finally, I am, who and what I am able to commit to, how to sustain that commitment, and how to invest my energy and my caring. Wondering whether I am still the person I have spent sixty years becoming and whether that is the person I want to be. Amazingly, after the passions and commitments of a lifetime, we have reached another threshold that calls for new or reaffirmed commitments, a new and more contingent sense of self.
    One early morning when I was in my mid-sixties, I was alone in the house. I had been sitting in wordless prayer, watching the sun rise, when I stood up in a sort of trance and walked into the next room, where I had hung a cross on the wall, put my hand on it, and said out loud, “Yes, and yes, and yes.” No more. And then a few minutes later I was wondering, What on earth was that, what have I said yes to? Joking, I told myself I had just handed three blank checks to God. And why three?
    Repetition is more than emphasis. Three and seven are numbers that have had sacred meaning throughout the history of our civilization. Everyone can think of examples of their importance in scripture, myth, and fairy tale. Among other associations over the next few days, I thought of the angelic cry
kadosh kadosh kadosh
in Isaiah 6:3, which becomes the Sanctus of the Mass and echoes through all of Western music, and then of the words “What I tell you three times is true,” which turn out, as I discovered when I Googled them, to be from Lewis Carroll, spoken by the Bellman in Carroll’s poem “The Hunting of the Snark.” But the particular meaning for me of these words that emerged from my unconscious is part of the larger question of what commitment means in the last third of life and why it reemerges as an issue, whether renewed or newly discovered.
    Perhaps by coincidence, it seems to me that as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. Each can be recognized as related to an earlier affirmation, but the issues change and the earlier affirmations must be understood in new ways. We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received. As I write, I am uncertain of the order in which to discuss them because the relationships between them are so complex, but the logic seems to start with death, because if we live in denial of death, the other affirmations are undermined.
    To affirm one’s own death means to know and accept that it could happen at any time and to approach it with the sense of trust developed in infancy, recognizing that death is real and essential to the human condition, and perhaps beyond that with the hope of something more.
Yes
. Coming to terms with the idea of death involves practical steps like making wills and preparing health-care