Composing a Further Life

that she felt “useless.” Over the days that followed I found myself meditating on the ways in which aging often strips us of whatever has made us feel valuable and lovable. It struck me that taking responsibility and getting things done to meet the needs of others—being useful—had been central for her. Women often feel that without youth they are no longer attractive. Men feel the ebbing of virility. All of us feel a loss of energy and stamina, the need to attend to gradually increasing chronic conditions, and both men and women may find memory, concentration, and intelligence less acute.
    I thought of reminding Helen of God’s love and realized that because she felt useless she felt unlovable. She was assuming that others, including God, loved her for her busyness, her competence, her conscientious good works. I knew that her theology would have asserted, with Luther, that justification is by faith and not by works, but years of devoted service had somehow led her to feel that love has to be earned.
    As I was praying for Helen during the following week, it occurred to me that living into late old age, living beyond the age of active wisdom into an era of passivity and helplessness, is the door to a wisdom of humility, the discovery that we are loved by God and by our families beyond the loss of those traits we value in ourselves and even beyond the point of active contribution.
    But then it struck me as inadequate to speak about God without asking who—or perhaps which—is the Helen that the God she puts her faith in loves, for her unhappiness was flowing from a sense of herself as unacceptable. Eventually it occurred to me to say that although He surely loves her as she is in this moment, quite regardless of any work she might be able to do, He also loves her beyond time, in eternity—Helen is present to Him as an infant, as a serious schoolgirl, as a blooming bride, as a young mother, in her giving and in her discoveries and in her service, and is present to Him also as she will be when she dies, whenever that day comes.
    This theological musing is congruent with the way memory works. Whether we look at ourselves or at others, we often layer the present on the past, but after a period of time, the deeper past comes to predominate. Thus, I have noticed that my memory of my parents has gradually shifted from my latest contacts with them, as death approached, to earlier periods of their lives and to images I remember from my childhood and youth. Today when I am asked for photographs of them, I provide photographs taken in middle age or earlier, at the times that connect with the work they became known for. If I develop dementia, I will lose the later memories first. In the meantime, I discover that I am still getting to know my parents and learning from them as I revisit their images at ages at which I am only now arriving. I know them better with every passing year.
    Then I was reminded of couples I know who had had a youthful romance, met again twenty or thirty years later, and fell in love a second time, each seeing in the other both the present and the remembered beloved. I read a short story once about a woman who gives her husband a blue sweater to match the bright blue of his eyes as they were forty years before, never noticing how clouded his eyes have become, while he gives her a shawl to go with her red hair, which has long turned gray. In one way or another, each person I have interviewed for this book has affirmed earlier life stages as continuing to be present, not lost, not left behind.
    An Israeli folk song started playing and replaying itself in my head, words from the Book of Jeremiah (2:2) set to music, in which the Lord says to errant Israel, “I remember for thee the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown.”
    It’s not easy and perhaps not very useful to wonder about the details of an afterlife—better to engage with this life as fully as possible. But it seemed to me that I had understood something useful to pass on to Helen, something that might take her beyond the self-disgust and loss she was feeling. The Helen whom her family love includes all of their memories of her, a radiance that surrounds her more vividly than her present distress. Artists imagining scenes from heaven paint men and women with “glorified” bodies—healthy and beautiful young adults. But perhaps in God’s eyes we