Composing a Further Life

directives, clearing basements and attics, dealing with loose ends that would be burdensome and confusing for the next generation, giving things away and handing them on. Along with the attics and the basements, there are consciences to be cleared as well.
    At the same time, affirming one’s life means taking reasonable care of one’s health, using the services that modern medicine can offer, exercising and eating properly, relaxing as needed, and staying busy and engaged. Affirming death does not mean courting it or refusing to acknowledge—and potentially to treat—symptoms as they emerge.
Yes
.
    Affirming love means repairing relationships and building new ones, new experiences of empathy and reciprocity; even the closest of relationships shift as individuals take on new roles. Love for one’s children changes as they become adults or it becomes suffocating. Love for one’s parents may involve parenting them in turn as they need increasing care. Love for a partner may survive mutual aging only if it is transformed. Love for a family or a community may involve finding ways to contribute by doing familiar work in a new context, passing on skills or volunteering, or simply reaffirming friendship and helpfulness. Love for God and neighbor must change to include love for a self that is changing. Love includes both giving and accepting help gracefully.
Yes
.
    Each of these affirmations is both old and new. Old because it is built on capacities and commitments developed in earlier years, new because each will play out differently in the last third of life. Each has a practical side and a spiritual side, and each is a challenge because of the new learning involved. Skills have to be developed to express even long-established commitments, and new commitments demand even more. Many late marriages fail—because habits and preferences are already formed—and no earlier marriage will guarantee the skills needed to make a new one work.
    A long-established marriage also requires new skills in later life, new kinds of tact and support, tenderness and tolerance. Dealing with chronic illnesses is a whole new challenge. It is a challenge to engage with children and grandchildren (and sons- and daughters-in-law) without replicating earlier patterns. Experienced and loving parents need to adjust their relationships to adult children and remember that the disciplining of grandchildren is not their business; expressions of love at one stage may be inappropriate at the next, tactless advice may have an adverse effect. We cannot make ourselves into grandparents—our children do that for us, in their own time—but we can choose to learn how to be good and supportive grandparents and in-laws. As for serving others, whether as volunteers or as professionals, society is full of barriers to older people and even to their dedication, and well-honed skills need to be adapted to declining strength.
    Whatever was taking shape that early morning, that threefold
yes
has become a useful way for me to think about these necessary affirmations, none of which occurs that quickly, each of which has to be explored over time.
    When Erikson described the three stages of development that follow childhood, he set each against the pathology that results from a failure to resolve the crisis of that stage. Thus, the crisis of adolescence is identity versus identity confusion, whose emerging strength is fidelity. This is followed by young adulthood’s crisis of intimacy versus isolation, whose emerging strength is love. Then comes the crisis of generativity versus stagnation, in the era of childbearing and fruitful and productive work, with the emerging strength of care.
    Each of these resolutions needs to be reworked as old age approaches, for the dangers that Erikson described for each stage—identity or role confusion, isolation, and stagnation (expressed as a sense of uselessness)—are familiar problems of old age. What is critical in our era is recognizing that longevity creates both the need and the possibility for the growth involved in readdressing these issues, especially the reexamination and reaffirmation of identity. The new issue posed for identity is: Am I
still
the person I have spent a lifetime becoming, and do I still want to be that person? How can I affirm that identity and yet accept the knowledge that I will die? How will I learn and adapt to the new roles offered by the culture: grandmother (positive) or mother-in-law