Composing a Life

settlement with the conviction that what was most important was to make sure their sons could visit either parent and find them in a situation of some dignity. This was more important to her than who got what money and how much.
    My mother used to boast that she maintained friendships with each of her three ex-husbands and, most of the time, with their wives. The discontinuities associated with divorce and remarriage are becoming more and more common, partly because there is more time for growth and change in a lengthened life span. Gradually, we are learning to include them within the framework of a life, to say of a marriage that has ended that it was good while it lasted. “I have this theory,” Alice said, “that if one has nontrivial relationships, it isn’t wholesome just to write them off, it leaves a hard sort of thing. So if one can just transform them into something else ... I think friendship is a possible sort of thing. I don’t think it’s ever possible to lose a long-term relationship. You can’t remove it from your brain, so you have to deal with what remains. Paul is an important part of my life even though we’re divorced. We were married for thirteen years. So the best thing is to transform the relationship, not to assume it’s dead. There are a lot of opportunities people have to transform things, but one has to work at them, and it’s not always easy. Like becoming a virtuoso, you have to practice a lot, and the same thing with feelings. And it’s not logical.”
    It was interesting that Jack’s wife, Jean, tried to maintain positive relations with Alice for some time, even after Jack’s death, but they didn’t hold up once the lawyers were in the picture. “Terrible things happened. Jean’s side was very uncool,” Alice said, describing the last-minute changes in the terms of the settlement. It seemed clear that the suit had become a matter of personal hostility rather than straight business law. “So I say to the lawyers, ‘look, guys, forget it, who gives a rosy?’ Anyhow, December 16, 1985, everything is settled. Raw nerve endings notwithstanding, we’re into a new stage and negotiations on the representation of the estate on the company board were resolved. I have never felt so much hatred, and that really disturbed me. The thing I feel is most important is to keep one’s head straight, and one of the things that does a job on you is negative emotion like hatred. It’s taking a long time to dissipate. It’s one of those issues that probably will never get resolved. I understand that most people fall prey to negative behavior because they’ve never practiced. When things are hard you don’t necessarily rise to the occasion. But you have to start somewhere. And if one learns from an experience, one is careful in other situations from the beginning.”
    At one time I would have interpreted Alice’s story in religious terms, in terms of the necessity for forgiveness. At another stage in my development, I would have been concerned to affirm that anger too has its place and that it is not healthy to bury it. Today, I am more concerned with the issue of putting the painful and the joyful parts of a life together and convinced that resignation is not the only positive way to do so. Most of the women I worked with on this project share affirmations of unity, of natural beauty, of human interdependence, affirmations that the wholes to be guarded and the goals to be striven for cannot be specified in a fine positivistic mesh or accounted for as dollars and cents, but may be trapped in the vaguer mesh of poetry, like the moon in the boughs of a tree. When the only achievements permitted are those of humility and poverty, you turn them around, echoing the Sermon on the Mount, and say that somehow, somewhere these pains of the present are worth something. But when achievement and satisfaction are a part of the whole, pain can be included also, even in the present.
    The word “wisdom” has been part of the Eriksonian formulation of the life cycle from the very beginning, but as Joan and Erik grow older, they have become increasingly interested in the last stage of the life cycle, whose distinctive strength they called wisdom. When Joan sat down to consider the epigénesis of wisdom in relation to artistic creativity—its gradual emergence at every stage of the life cycle—she found herself pursuing the way the term has been used in other times and places and she was struck by