After the Applause

I almost gave up on a novel recently. It felt too sweet, maybe even contrived. I kept wondering why I was still reading something that struck me as flimsy and sentimental. I nearly returned it to the library unfinished. Instead, though, I kept reading. Then something unexpected happened. I stopped caring about the characters, and the novel started asking me difficult questions about myself.

One character, an eighty-nine year old woman named Joy, slowly realizes that she has spent a lifetime being the person other people needed her to be. She’d been a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother, a good friend. She was’t unhappy now but she’d spent so much of her life responding to what other people needed or wanted from her that she had misplaced her own needs and wants. Her life made me wonder a bit about my own life.

When I imagine my obituary, I think about it in terms of the roles I’ve loved in life: daughter, sibling, wife, parent, teacher, school counselor, friend, grandmother. All of these roles shaped me. I learned from each them and they gave (and, in some cases, continue to give) my life meaning. I wouldn’t erase any of them. But they also covered me up. Like many people I was focused on the roles and being who I was supposed to be. The light that is me slowly got dimmer because it was shining out there instead of in here. Or, at least that’s what I started to wonder about as I read this novel.

Last fall when the two granddaughters for whom I had been providing child care went off to school, I was left in the darkness of that dimmed light. If I didn’t have a job to do, if I didn’t have some reason to be needed, to be productive, then what was I supposed to do? I assumed that the sadness that I felt meant that I needed another purpose, another project, another tangible reason to get up every day. But now I’m not sure that’s true.

Perhaps there is more to being alive than being useful.

For most of my life, I have measured my worth by how well I managed all the caretaking roles. That’s not entirely misguided. Caring for others is one of the deepest satisfactions I know. But is that enough on which to build my complete identity? If being useful is the whole story, what happens when the story changes?

Maybe that’s the real task of old age. Maybe after all the busy-ness of growing from infant to retiree, the last third of life is about finding ourselves. Adolescent and the early 20’s are often referred to as a time when people “find themselves” but I think the true discovery might be in the closing years of life. When you’re young, the world wants to to tell you who you should be. A good student, a successful partner, a dependable employee, a good looker and even a snazzy dresser. The messages are loud and clear: watch this movie, get this pet, run these marathons, drink this beverage. Just do it. Some of these things are important but surely they are not one’s entire identity?

I wonder if the later years in life ask a different question. Instead of “What do you do?” your 70’s, 80’s, and beyond ask “Who are you when there is less to do?” As for me, I don’t know how to answer that question. I don’t know who I am. What I do know is that I don’t want to spend my remaining days assuming that the most interesting parts of my life are behind me.

I’m wonderfully curious about the world. In fact, I suspect that I am more open and curious than ever. The older I get the more I notice that life keeps inviting me to become a little less certain, a little more attentive, a little more appreciative of mystery, and a little more willing to admit that I don’t have to know everything. Life keeps giving me chances to let go and still be okay. What a miracle!

I wonder if wisdom is not so much about knowing the answers but rather about wonder and embracing that which we can’t know? There’s something comforting in that idea. I don’t know that this notion will make aging easier. There are still going to be losses. Uncertainty will be present daily. There will be limitations that I will resist. There will be grief.

But there will also be gifts that younger versions of me couldn’t have understood. I can stop marching in every parade. I can disappoint another person and the world won’t fall apart. I can take off the masks and become more fully myself instead of trying to be what I imagine the world wants me to be.

Here’s the thing. It’s not like this is another assignment in life. I don’t have to “find myself “ before I die. It’s not a project to accomplish. I think it’s a process. It is happening almost invisibly. I notice it when I’m walking in the neighborhood at dawn, when the roses seem almost luminous in the half-light. I notice it when I stop to look at an art filled sky or watch the waves fold onto the beach. I notice it when I read something that unsettles me, when I write a sentence that surprises me, when I laugh with my siblings or make art with the littles in my life.

My job is not to manufacture a new identity. My job is to pay attention. The rest, perhaps, will follow.