Composing a Further Life

experiences as dean of the faculty at Amherst College. 3
    A conversation I had with my daughter, Sevanne, drove this necessity home. I mentioned to her that I had received a letter telling me that I had not been awarded a grant I had applied for, and she looked at me in amazement and said, “But I thought you always got whatever you applied for.” If there is one thing necessary to survive as an actor, which was Sevanne’s chosen profession, or indeed as an artist of any kind, it is the ability to handle rejection. Yet parents are often reluctant to offer their own struggles with rejection or humiliation as possibly useful models, especially if they have survived and succeeded in other ways. Parents, inevitably perhaps, feed off of their children’s assumption of their omnipotence and withhold the stories that make them feel smaller.
    Thus, African Americans who grew up during the civil rights movement tell their children stories of the great demonstrations that led to change and of the excitement of encountering figures like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but speak much less of the nagging fear under Jim Crow of going out at night or the shameful anxiety about finding access to a toilet when traveling or about asking for directions.
    This set me thinking about a whole landscape of untold narrative and therefore of unshared learning, learning that might seem of little value yet had perhaps made survival possible. For those who survived the Holocaust, it was often decades before the stories of survival could be told; these were humiliating stories that included eating insects or vermin and even betraying others, or that required admitting to disabling fear or despair.
    Even on minor issues, who of us tells our children, who seem to us so extraordinarily beautiful, how we agonized as adolescents over zits or extra pounds or other blemishes, or about having no friends to join in the school lunchroom? Chances are, they are having comparable experiences and need to know they are not alone. Then there are the times when we may have behaved in ways hurtful to others but may have acted without a full understanding of the consequences, which we regret quite as much as we regret missed opportunities and undeveloped talents. Only our stories can arm our children against doing thoughtless damage.
    One thing that young people need to know about their elders is that they have not lived perfect lives, that some of their wisdom comes from the experiences they hope the next generation never has to share. These are the very stories the next generation may not have the privilege of hearing.
    When Erik Erikson spoke of “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions,” he associated that acceptance with integrity, and spoke of despair as its opposite: “the feeling that the time is now short, too short for the attempt to try out alternate roads to integrity. Disgust hides despair, if often only in the form of ‘a thousand little disgusts’ which do not add up to one big remorse.” 4
    Yet many of us do find ways to try out alternate roads to integrity, if only by articulating the problem. The years of relative health and energy that have been added to life expectancy often represent a second chance at adulthood, an opportunity to compensate for earlier mistakes or omissions, as people realize that, although time is indeed short, it is not as short as they expected. The decisions that people make about how to spend their atrium years must inevitably reflect negative as well as positive experiences, a chance to re-compose.
    In interviews I have sometimes heard people say, “I should have gotten out of my marriage years ago, but it’s too late now.” Yet there has been a striking increase in recent decades in both later life marriages and later life divorces. Grandparents sometimes speak of building a kind of relationship with their grandchildren that they missed with their own children at a time when they were preoccupied with building careers. People in their seventies may begin piano lessons or take up watercolor painting or pursue a new academic degree, turning their steps to the road not taken, however differently it lies. It has become a cliché to say “It’s never too late to …,” a cliché that, like the old promise to women that they could “have it all,” is more nearly true than ever before but still not entirely true.