Prime Time - Jane Fonda [10]
If we are not burdened by a debilitating disease, this is the time when we can begin to assume our essential personhood.
Freed from being so strongly defined by a uterus or penis or a taut body or a job or our relationships to our children, to a partner, to a firm or a profession, we now have at least a third of our life span still to go. In that time, we can explore life’s new potentials and deepen what we already are and what we already know.
Becoming Whole
When I wrote My Life So Far, I called the section about Act III “Beginning” because that is what it felt like then. Now that I am a decade into this act, I think a more fitting title for this stage would be “Becoming Whole.” To see Act III in this way, to see it as continued human development, represents a revolutionary paradigm shift. Ours is the generation to make this shift, to reinvent the last third of life, and we will do it not just for ourselves. It will represent a seismic shift for the world around us, and particularly for our children and young friends. Whether we like it or not, we have become the first role models for the younger generations of how to prepare for the last third of life. Here’s to being good role models!
The next chapter is about why doing a review of my life has changed everything for me now.
Vadim and his mother with baby Vanessa.
Grandma Sophie Seymour with baby Troy. Behind her is a wood bust of my half-sister, Frances, carved by my dad.
Holding baby Malcolm in 1999.
Vanessa trying to get a tuxedoed Malcolm to look at his grandmother presenting an Oscar in 2000.
CHAPTER 2
A Life Review: Looking Back
to See the Road Ahead
He is the happiest man who can see the connection between the end and the beginning of his life.
—GOETHE
Dad’s father and mother, close up.
ONE OF THE SMARTEST THINGS I EVER DID—AND I CAN SAY this unequivocally—was a life review. I examined myself and my life in Acts I and II as carefully and honestly as I could, as a way toward wholeness and to prepare for a good Act III. By doing a life review, I gradually began to see myself, as well as certain events and people in my past, with new eyes. It wasn’t the facts of them that changed; it was the meaning they held for me. I was able to see my younger self in a new way—with both more compassion and more objectivity. The quality of my relationships to certain people and events in my past—my mother and father, especially—was also transformed, as was how I feel about myself now. In a way, I discovered the feisty, strong girl I had always been.
The Meaning We Assign to Our Lives
Only recently, while reading Man’s Search for Meaning, by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, did I understand why my personal life review had such an effect on me. Frankl, who spent many years in a Nazi concentration camp, came to the conclusion that everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to a situation. That, I now believe, is what determines the quality of the life we have lived—not whether we’ve been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or ill. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities: what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind they trigger.
Act I: Me at age three.
Act II: Me with Vanessa, speaking at a rally in 1972 when I was pregnant with my son, Troy.
© VINCE COMPAGNONE
ACT III: AT THE GOLDEN GLOBES, 2011.
FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES
Beginning a Life Review
It was the day of my fifty-ninth birthday—December 21, 1996—when it first hit me: In one year I will turn sixty, and that will be the beginning of my last act—the final three decades of my life. “Last”s and “final”s had not been featured in my prior vocabulary, and, frankly, as I faced the looming six-oh, I felt a knot in my stomach.
I was leaning against