Composing a Further Life

of the “older generation,” is a watershed in many lives. Even so, I continue to feel that my understanding of my parents and of their choices has shifted with each decade of my own experience, as I learned what it felt like to be fifty, sixty, and now seventy, and empathized with them in new ways. 4
    The same thing is perhaps true of social or political concerns. It seemed fairly natural to me in my sixties to comment to my feminist friends that abortion rights might not be the most important issue for them to work on as they entered their sixties and seventies—the equivalent claim for control of their own bodies could be made for death with dignity legislation. Ultimately, however, it seemed to me that, instead of either of these issues, we should take advantage of our time perspective and the experience of social change during our lifetimes to work on issues with the future of children and grandchildren in mind. It seems probable that many careers that appear continuous actually unfold according to the rhythms of the life cycle. The title may remain the same, but the novelist explores different issues in each novel and the merchant begins to look toward slightly different products and customers.
    Erik Erikson himself started his clinical career working with children and then began to work with adolescents and made his best-known contribution to the understanding of young adulthood and the identity crisis, illuminated by a study of Martin Luther’s early years,
Young Man Luther
. His next book,
Gandhi’s Truth
, follows Mohandas Gandhi into adulthood, and
Vital Involvement in Old Age
, published in 1986 and written jointly with Joan Erikson and Helen Kivnick, dealt with aging. Joan Erikson herself edited a volume titled
The Life Cycle Completed
after his death, to which she added material on late old age and on dying. 5
    One of the women I interviewed for this project, Glady Thacher, who has been an activist all her life, has taken up new projects in the sequence of her own development and the assumptions about these stages that we share as members of the same culture. Glady and I met over the telephone, at the suggestion of friends, for several interviews, and then finally, when I came to San Francisco for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, over tea in her living room, where we could look out toward the bay. It was the room of someone who loved the arts and whose imagination, like those of many Californians, had turned westward across the Pacific to East Asia.
    Glady’s early interests were in art; she studied studio art and philosophy at Smith College and, like many young women in that era, married in 1950, right out of college, and began having children. “I thought I knew what I wanted to be, and kind of
had
to be, in the tradition of the family, which was the arts. The legacy and dream were there,” she told me.
    “We moved out west in 1953, after Jim had had a little over a year in a big firm in New York. His father had started a law firm in San Francisco at the beckoning of a cousin and wanted to retire, so Jim had to make a decision whether to move out here and take over that small firm or stay in New York. By that time we had one daughter, just about a year old, and I was pregnant with a second child. We settled in San Francisco very near his parents’ house, and we stayed there while he studied for the bar and then moved around the corner, where we’ve been ever since.” Glady’s husband, Jim, had died about six months earlier.
    “That was a time when there was a lot of gestation and excitement in the San Francisco art scene at the California School of Fine Arts. Abstract expressionism was really in its flowering, so I went there, and I just loved it. It was a thrilling time. However, it was also a time of decisions. I realized I could not take care of two children when my mind was always in the studio, so I made what I thought was a very painful decision, and that was to close my studio. I felt at that time that I was giving up my personal life, my dreams. And when I found that life went on, I did the diapers, and then I just kind of gravitated to do some community work.”
    As the wife of an attorney, Glady was not primarily concerned with contributing to the family income, and she has ended up spending her life in the world of nonprofits. At first she worked for the United Crusade and then was asked to join the board of a halfway house for young people who