The Final Quarter

Poets, philosophers, and psychologists often compare the stages of our life with the turning of the year.  If we consider the seasons of our lives, this time of year is the final quarter—an appropriate metaphor from the football season! I assume that I will live to age 92, as my mother and her sister did.  If my schedule of quarters is correct, I am more than half way through the final quarter. These years have been marked by my second and final retirement, the loss of my husband and my dearest female friend, and by the usual changes of aging. I know that the final stage of life would test the resources that we have developed over many years of life, but I didn’t expect the test to be so sudden and so painful.

My middle daughter also pointed out that, starting at age 22 when my first child was born, I had been responsible for at least one other person and sometimes as many as four or five at a time.  Now I was only responsible for myself, a situation that is both liberating and challenging.. As Janis Joplin sang, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. I am in no hurry to see my life end, but I am also accepting my mortality.

Assuming that you do not fantasize about heaven with pearly gates and a gigantic family reunion, there are two very different ways to come face to face with the final quarter and the impending end of life.  One is from poet Robert Browning:  Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made.  Dylan Thomas sees it differently: Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. There is truth in both of them.  Browning sounds like a bit of a Pollyanna, and Dylan Thomas like a grumpy old man.

In his book Aging Well, George Vaillant identifies three tasks of old age.  They are integrity, generativity, and keepers of wisdom. Those mostly joyful and meaningful tasks can make this last quarter rich and fulfilling. 

Integrity means wholeness.  It means putting the pieces of our lives, past and present, into a framework that tells a meaningful story. I have always been a storyteller, like my mother before me, but even more so since I had grandchildren with whom to share family stories. Because my story does not stand alone. It is interwoven with my great-grandmother who marched for women’s suffrage and my sister who struggled with the uprootedness of being a military wife and the ancestral faith tradition of the early settlers of New England in which I was raised. It is interwoven with my husband’s family and my children and grandchildren and the many dear friends with whom I have shared my life.    If task of the first half of life is to create a separate identity, the last half of life calls us to reconnect, to find our place in the cycle of generations and the work of the world.

Generativity means mentoring the next generation, whether it is children of colleagues or church leaders or, in my case, teaching graduate students and empowering voters.  Even if we were mentors during our working years, it is different in the final quarter.  We are likely to be less competitive, less focused on proving our competence.  The people we may be called to mentor may be older or younger than before and they may need very different kinds of wisdom and patience o from us.  More listening, less talking. Like Yoda.

In the Hindu tradition, life is divided into four stages—the child, the student, the householder, and the spiritual seeker. At the end of the student stage, one is expected to assume the responsibilities of adult life—work, marriage, children, community.  But in the words of one Hindu text, when one’s hair has turned white and one has seen grandsons, it is time to abandon he life of the householder,to turn it over to the next generation, abandon material possessions, and seek the life of the spirit.  Being a contemplative hermit would be the highest expression of this calling.  But a guru also fits this mold, a keeper of wisdom who shares it not just with selected groups like grandchildren and students and patients and clients and friends and neighbors, but with whoever turns up in need of some wisdom.  

That wisdom is evoked at least in part by giving up our attachment to possessions.  I have noticed in myself and in many of my fellow travelers through life’s last quarter a change in how we approach to possessions, not so much stressing acquisition as cultivation, enjoyment, and letting go.  Living in a smaller space, giving things away, truly practicing the belief that less is more. Approaching the end of life with an attitude or acceptance and gratitude.  This kind of wisdom is shared with anyone we encounter, not consciously or intentionally but just by the way we live our lives.

At the same times, it is important for ourselves and others to live until we die.  To be kind and caring and helpful and engaged for as long as we can.  To keep on learning, living, loving, playing within the limits of our declining physical abilities.  To accept our limitations with grace and patience, two skills that those who follow us will need to notice and acquire.  Those of us who don’t put much stock in a concrete afterlife need to continue to the last breath our work of making heaven on earth, a place where human and other life forms can flourish and prosper.