Composing a Further Life

(problematic), wise elder or cranky curmudgeon, duffer or greedy geezer, sibyl or hag? How will I find a basis for fidelity in my awareness of transience?
    Especially for men, whose sense of identity is most clearly linked to jobs and careers, role confusion is a hazard, but it is equally so for women if they are career oriented, child care oriented, or dependent on their physical beauty. Without reshaping the sense of identity, we die before our death by ceasing to be ourselves. Erikson argued that all of these issues recur in different forms throughout the life cycle but that at least a partial resolution is necessary at each stage in order to confront the next. If I no longer recognize myself and no longer know who I am, how will I love? How will I find the resources to care for others? How will I be able to act with love and conviction in the world?
    Carolyn Heilbrun wrote about the period I call Adulthood II as the “Last Gift of Time.” 15 It allows the active development of new skills and the expression of new commitments and kinds of intimacy that may have been denied during a busy adult life, but it is also a time for building on experience toward a sense of aesthetic unity, a time to recognize and complete—to re-compose—the pattern. Meanwhile, a striking number of people in this life stage joke about needing to figure out “who they want to be when they grow up,” while others seek ways of returning that gift, as if enhancing a bodhisattva oath in the same life.
    There are surely some people who can say that now,
for the first time
, they know who they are. Doctors, teachers, and even policemen enter their professions with particular kinds of work in mind and find themselves spending a lot of their time doing work that is quite different—filling out forms and writing reports, more with every passing year. These are the people who may have said in the past, “My job won’t let me do my work.” Often they cannot do what they see as their “work” in retirement either, because of issues such as insurance, but sometimes they can. I interviewed Father Cornelius Goggin, who lives in a retirement home for priests but drives several hours each way every weekend to help out in different parishes. Seventy-eight years old, he has to sit when he says Mass, and communion is distributed entirely by laymen and laywomen, but what he has to say when he preaches is always interesting. “I almost feel I’m more of a priest now I’m retired, because I don’t have to worry about the church roof,” he told me. “I don’t worry about the parking lot on a snowy night. The last parish I was in, we had fifteen hundred kids in CCD [Sunday school], and three hundred and fifty teachers. I don’t have to worry about that anymore. I just do what I was trained to do in the first place, administer the sacraments and preach. That’s what I’m doing, and I feel that it’s more rewarding now than when I was a pastor.… I feel more like a priest now than I did before.”
    As we spoke, he reminisced about studying in France, where he learned to love studying the Scriptures, and I could see him brighten with pleasure. He continues to subscribe to commentaries distributed by the Paulist Fathers, with a strong sense of the styles and emphases of the different Gospels and the awareness that many of those listening to his homilies grew up with little direct experience of these texts. I commented that he seems still to be growing as a priest three years after his jubilee.
    Because it is a period of renewed freedom, Adulthood II can be a time of fruition and fulfillment. But always there are the premonitions of old age, slowly increasing changes in the body and the first few deaths of contemporaries. Then, as health deteriorates and true old age begins, different kinds of strength are needed, and the virtues developed in childhood are challenged one after another, reprised in reverse order. At first questions arise about competence—vigor and dexterity, intelligence and memory begin to seem less reliable, especially for those continuing professional work, so that their efforts to perform echo the concerns of Erikson’s fourth stage, school age, when children have to prove themselves in relation to their peers. With formal retirement there is an echo of the third stage, play age, when the sense of meaningful purpose and responsible participation is challenged by the suggestion that retired people should devote themselves to