The oil crisis has cut down some on the driving (prices have gone up a lot for gas), and big cars are out, which is fine, but they say we may have a “crunch” in the spring or summer and long lines at the gas stations again. Now you can get gas, but it is rising in price all the time, and stations close early.
One of the reasons I wanted to telephone you was to tell you that Erin is on her way to Morocco on an exchange-student plan for about six weeks or more. She will write or call you. She is a charming, open, natural girl, with outdoor habits (she herded cows on the ranch), and also quite a bit of talent drawing.
I still remember and have kept the letter you wrote me when you and Alika managed to get a day or two at the beach last spring. That letter had so much joy and beauty in it. You should get that more often. It does revive one. Much love—I will try to call again early—
Mother
[Summer 1980]
Dear Lucia [Valentine],
You are now back in daily life which is much harder.* One cannot keep the high moments. And though physical care and quiet and routine help one to “go on,” they are dusty fare: what is the use of routine when the center of it has dropped out? The vacuum must be filled, but not perhaps immediately.
I don’t really believe widowhood is as negative as I sound, or as people say. The first stages are hideous, but slowly the ill image (of the person one has lost) dims, and the vivid image of the realer person in the midst of life comes back with greater vividness than one could believe. One does then understand one’s partner, one’s marriage, one’s life, one’s mistakes, their mistakes, etc., without remorse or pain and with a new sense of freedom or release. But not, I think, if one rushes things or gets too tired. (“Widows always get sick,” my dentist warned me. “Pay attention to anything that goes wrong—don’t neglect it”—good advice.)
I asked two widows much older than myself (in their eighties and I in my seventies) to give me some advice. One of them, elegant, intellectual and artistic, said, “I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s HELL,” practically stamping her foot! The other, squarish, midwestern, feet on-the-ground, said contemplatively, “When I was first widowed (she was widowed twice), I was told never to drink alone … I think it was very bad advice!”
I laughed and have remembered it often. How else can one get through that worst hour between five and seven in the evening? After supper one can climb into bed with the day’s mail to reread—or better still—a good book.
Much love and many thoughts,
Anne
Musical Chairs
[SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE COSMOPOLITAN CLUB, FEBRUARY 23RD, 1981]
When I was asked to make this talk, I said I could only speak on something I was working at myself. My first idea for a title was “Tasks at the End of Life,” since that is what I am working at now.
“Tasks at the End of Life” sounded too negative and, as I started to write, I thought of the game musical chairs, which seems to describe life in its different stages and at my particular stage. (If you are not there yet—you will be!) What you will hear is not so much a lecture as some unfinished exploration I am sharing with you.
Musical chairs is a game we used to play at children’s parties. When I was a child, it was not called musical chairs, but “Going to Jerusalem.” Some of you may remember those rather stiff children’s parties, well regulated by adults. All the chairs in the house were stretched out in a long line, alternating backs and fronts. There was one less chair than the number of players. The children marched around the long line to “Onward Christian Soldiers” or “Here We Go Marching to Georgia,” drummed out on the upright piano by an old aunt. The aunt would suddenly lift her hands from the keys and the music stopped; at this point every child scrambled for a chair. Since there were not enough chairs for everyone, obviously someone was left standing when the music started again and had to withdraw from the game.
I was not very fond of this game, as I was usually dropped out early. Of course, there were a few moments of fun when one accidentally sat down on half a chair or on someone’s lap. But that was against the rules, and you were always thrown out along with the extra chair.
Going to Jerusalem was a game of attrition. At the end everyone was left out except one sole survivor who had grabbed the last chair. The game, I suspect, had moralistic connotations. The title certainly came from the Bible, where the line is “Going up to Jerusalem.” The phrase refers, I am told, not only to a geographical journey but to a kind of pilgrim’s progress through life, the journey of the soul toward heaven. This concept was certainly part of my childhood, handed down by grandmothers: life was a journey toward heaven. Life as a journey has remained with me, but heaven is dimmer. I see life as a journey toward insight.
But what is insight? Not knowledge, which is an accumulation of learning. Not wisdom, exactly, which is a distillation of years of experience. Certainly not serenity or acceptance. The definition I found was the following: “Insight implies depth of discernment coupled with understanding and sympathy.” Insight, then, is not simply for oneself; it should radiate to those around you. A further illustration adds, “The ecstasy of imaginative vision, the sudden insight into the nature of things.” Quite as difficult to reach as heaven!
If the game is any indication, the journey is neither straight nor easy. It is full of stops and starts, stumbles and jerks, and sudden confused standstills. My talk is perhaps an exploration of insight and how it develops. Insight comes, I believe, with age, but does it come automatically, at the end of the journey, or does it come as we are marching along? Glimpses of insight seem to come not when we are moving ahead in the procession, but in the jerks and stops. When we pause and have to look around, there are, as T. S. Eliot says, “hints and guesses.”* There are “hints followed by guesses” in the choices we make at each new start, the paths followed and those discarded. But of course we have to keep on marching or we would never get to Jerusalem!
You cannot press the image too far, but there seem to be periods in life when we are progressing confidently. (You say to yourself, “Now I have the secret, now I know.”) All at once the music stops and you drop out of the procession—at least that procession. The pattern changes; you are left standing alone. The game becomes Still Pond, No More Moving.† It is always a surprise and a readjustment. I think both men and women experience these abrupt changes, but they are perhaps more obvious in women’s lives. Men, and women who follow one career, seem to be on an escalator mounting steadily to the top floor. But career or no career, most lives have intermissions along the way. At each halt there is a moment of hesitation, even of panic, then a re-evaluation. At each new start, there are new glimpses of insight and other tasks and rewards.
Reviewing my life lately—since I am at one of the later stages—I have been totting up the ledger. What do I mind at this stage of life, what do I enjoy? What are the limitations and what are the enrichments?
I live alone at the moment, a state I am not accustomed to. My childhood was spent in a close, cheerful family life of four children and attentive parents. My older sister and I, from earliest memory, shared a room. We had two painted white beds divided by a chintz screen covered with trellises of blue roses. The screen was supposed to keep us from playing together at night, but we found we could talk through the blue roses. In college, I had roommates with whom one discussed everything: professors, courses, books, poetry, food (potatoes and Brussels sprouts), dieting (one was always too fat), men, and love. Endlessly love—was it real or wasn’t it? We quoted Katherine Mansfield, who wrote how hard it was to tell the difference between real love and false. Much more difficult, she said, than telling the difference between toadstools and mushrooms. It took a terrible lot of toadstools, she admitted, before one found a genuine mushroom.
The year after college, I found a “genuine mushroom.” I married and leapt into a totally new pattern. Early married life, since I married an aviator, was spent accompanying my husband in an open cockpi
t plane on his survey flights, laying out air routes for mail and passengers across the country. Later trips took us over Canada and Alaska, “North to the Orient.” Another flight crossed Greenland and Iceland and circled the North Atlantic. The “Lone Eagle” was no longer alone. Neither was I, not for a moment. I was much too busy operating the radio, navigating, co-piloting, refueling, holding the funnel as my husband poured in the gasoline. I was absorbed in the day-to-day routine, packing up, moving on.
We stopped long enough to have a child. The next stage—a normal enough role, but new to me—was the bearing and bringing up of children: making a home, many homes (we moved nineteen times, I once counted, before settling in Connecticut). The house was never tidy. The children had every known childhood ailment. Someone was always in bed with a cold, or two were fighting in the bathtub. There were unexpected crises: goldfish in the toilet bowl and snakes under the radiator. Being wife, mother, housekeeper and sometimes writer (for in those days we had help), I was never alone and I longed to be. I wrote a book about the need to be alone, to find one’s core. Who was I really, aside from wife and mother? Who had I been before I gathered this menagerie around me? Who would I be when they dispersed to the winds?
And suddenly they were gone. Almost overnight, it happened. The children left for school and college and then marriage. My husband was still traveling much of the time, a role I had abandoned when the children arrived. I faced my first experience of being alone, a state I had looked forward to but when it arrived, it was difficult to use. The music I was marching to had stopped. I had a husband; I had work, a vocation of writing. So much silence and solitude spread out in pools around me, diluting my drive to write. It was too great a change, too solitary.
I had my first taste of loneliness. I discovered then that the pain of loneliness is not actually in being alone, nor is it simply the withdrawal of a companion. It is the sudden loss of a role, an occupation. The rug—or rather, the chair—has been pulled out from under you. After being the indispensable co-pilot and the indispensable mother, I was no longer needed at all. To feel no longer needed robs one of a sense of value. Much of loneliness is the illusion of lost value. Actually we are needed always, all our lives if we have children or grandchildren or pupils or friends, but we are needed only intermittently. It is not a steady occupation you can depend on.
At such times you take stock. You pick up the pieces and try to fit them together. I found mine fitted into a new pattern. I did some flying with my husband. Not to open up air routes again—that need was over, and he also had been through changes. He was now concerned with the environment and the threat to its beauty, its wildlife, its resources. We went to watch whales in Baja California, wild animals in the reservations of Africa, and eagles in Montana. Life was well balanced between solitude and sharing. I had quiet periods in which to write, and travels sharing a pursuit of my husband’s, equally vital to me. It was a good period.
Then the music stopped again, and I was a widow. Widowhood is the essence of being alone, not sometimes, but always. I could talk for an hour about widowhood, but I won’t, because you’re not all widows or widowers. But some of you may live alone, and by middle age, most people have had losses. This is universal as we go marching on. I am going to speak about some of the losses in this period and ways to meet them.
When the music stops, one looks around. There are certain facts to be faced. There are signposts approaching “the Third Age,”* announcing limits. First of all, I mind the closed door, the threat of the deadline. There is less time, less strength, in certain ways, less scope: these are concrete and measurable losses. But the deadline threat is not new. One has met it before in life: Sunday evenings with the homework not yet done, cramming for examinations at college, packing for a journey, or finishing a book. It was described by the seventeenth century poet Andrew Marvell:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
But this deadline is the end of life. How to meet that pressure? Well, not by hurrying. There is only a certain amount of time, and you have to come to terms with it as you do with space in packing for a journey or moving to a smaller house. (What to save? What to throw out?) What are the priorities?
Some of the priorities are duties: what you have to do. (“Tasks at the End of Life.”) There is inevitably some tidying up, finishing off the loose ends of your life or work. If you have lost a husband or wife, you have the task of trying to finish their projects. There is a certain satisfaction in putting things in order, but not much joy. You have all done it: redrafting the will, going over papers, photographs, possessions. Some tasks to be done meticulously, a few sentimentally, tied up in ribbons. But most clearing up is giving or throwing away. Furniture too big for a diminished household is easy to get rid of. Passing on family chairs and tables to another generation is the happiest solution. Your own home is freer and less burdened, and the children’s houses are cluttered and gayer.
But one cannot spend the rest of life in tidying up. Time is limited and must not be wasted at this stage. What is waste? I made a list of my own wasteful activities. I’m sure everyone’s list is different, and it changes in different periods of one’s life. My present list starts with getting tired. I find being tired is a terrible waste. I was brought up not to accept “being tired.” At Miss Chapin’s School we sang a hymn that started out:
Awake my soul, stretch every nerve,
And press with vigor on!—
That was fine for the eighth grade—not for the Third Age. You’d be exhausted by noon. Besides, getting tired, I find, leads to more waste, like reading the back pages of the newspaper just from inertia, or flipping through mail-order catalogues to fill the hour before supper.
Perfectionism is another waste on my list. It’s all right to be perfectionist in your special area, what you care most about: your skill, your art, your scholarship, even an important letter. But perfectionism in household tasks is a waste. I don’t try to scrub all the black off the pots and pans, and I don’t see dust any more.
Clutter is a waste on my list. A good example is what comes in the mail: letters, requests, advertisements, appeals. My husband had a rule: deal with each piece of mail, each paper, only once. Excellent, if you can make an immediate decision. Since he threw 80 percent of his mail unopened into a large barrel, that worked for him. And I have a daughter who took after him. She has two cartons, one marked “love” and the other marked “money”; she finds almost everything fits into one of these two categories. But I have a great deal of mail that is neither love nor money. When I don’t know where to file it, I put it into an envelope marked “conscience.” Clutter is impossible; it blocks out vision.
There are many other wastes on my list. Down at the very end is a big waste that underlies many of the others, a hidden leak in the bottom of the barrel. This is trying to live by other people’s standards. I remember an old aunt saying to me, of cocktail parties, I think, “I no longer put things in my stomach to please other people.” Should one put things in one’s mind to please other people? Read books to please other people? Or go to parties to please other people? By the time one reaches a certain age, one should be able, as Marianne Moore said, “to have the courage of one’s peculiarities.”
I have been talking about the tasks, the losses and the wastes in the Third Age, the limitations of growing older. These are what are noticed first—what everyone complains about. But there are also enrichments and enlargements, overlooked, particularly in the modern Western world. We need to be reminded that in other cultures and at other times, the Third Age was not regarded as a diminishment. In simpler communities and earlier times, in Europe and even in America, older citizens had an honored place and special functions, as the advisors and arbiters in times of trouble. We still keep this tradition in our Supreme Court. The ancient Chinese revered the old and in the traditional Hindu concept, the man and the woman in late middle age handed over their tasks and burde
ns to their children and retired from worldly life and its problems. This Third Age was called “retreat to the forest.” But this retreat, according to Hindu tradition, was not pictured as a closed door, a limitation. Life was not over but beginning with a new purpose: to be free to search for the meaning of life—some kind of parallel, perhaps, to insight.
The ancient Hindu concept seems too rigid for the modern Westerner. Unlike them, we have no customs or rites to guide us through our transitions. We have to explore and find paths for ourselves.
Here I might start on my list of non-waste activities. There is still work open to us, work perhaps now with fewer distractions, work one enjoys or work one has followed all one’s life: a career that can continue, even if retired, at least from the sidelines, an abiding interest that one follows, even in old age. I have always remembered Bernard Baruch saying in his eighties, “I’m just as good as ever—for two hours of the day.” I consider that a splendid statement. It does imply choice. If you have two good hours, or four or five, in the morning perhaps, you must use these hours for the most important work. Less important business or pleasure can wait for the afternoon. My choice is to write in the mornings and, when I can, spend afternoons outside.
For me, a non-waste activity is the outer world of nature, which means far more to me now than when I was young. The outer world doesn’t have to mean safaris to Africa or living in the wilderness. In my life, it is in small outdoor jobs like pruning bushes, planting bulbs, or bird watching. There are mornings when the only thing that gets me out of bed is simply that I must put out suet and seed for three woodpeckers, two nuthatches, and a flock of chickadees. It is not compassion or ornithology; it is making a connection with a realm of life outside my own. Feeding the birds is a rite that unites me to the web of life around me. I lose myself. I feel part of the pattern of the seasons. Nature can be cruel, but the cycle is reassuring—the sense of unlimited life going on. To merge with the cycle is nourishing in a very basic sense.