Prime Time - Jane Fonda [108]
An elderly widower told me he had been suffering from depression when a friend urged him to come to the center and volunteer. “Depression isn’t contagious, you know,” the friend had told him. “It works the other way.” “He was right,” the man said cheerily. “When I started volunteering I got over the depression. It’s a whole new life.”
The men and women volunteers, all seniors themselves, have been able to replace the lost social networks they had at work or through marriage with a new network that includes their clients and their fellow counselors.
A retired school psychologist loves her work as a volunteer. “I had all that background and thought I should use it for something,” she told me, adding that the greatest part for her are the new relationships she’s formed with the people she works with. “It’s just so wonderful. We’re not just chatting; we have such meaningful exchanges.”
Lois has been a counselor at the center for twenty-two years and believes that this is what she always wanted to do. “I was very busy my whole life helping my husband with his real estate business,” she said. “I had no choice. I felt obligated to my husband. So this was like getting a second chance at a new life.”
I met Jake, who volunteers with the center’s Friendly Visitor Program and brought with him his ninety-five-year-old client Karl, who lives in a nursing home and can’t get around on his own anymore. Karl has bonded with Jake. Karl is the man I quoted earlier who, when I asked how old he was, replied with the playful humor that seems so characteristic of the very old: “I don’t know how old I am, but I was around when the Dead Sea was only sick.” I hated to think what life would be like for Karl if he didn’t have Jake to talk to. “We see eye to eye on so many subjects—politics, humor,” says Karl of Jake.
Evelyn Freeman, the beautiful ninety-one-year-old founder of the Peer Counseling Program, says, “If I were going to look for one word that describes what goes on here with the counselors and the clients, the word would be ‘joy.’ The joy of being productive. The joy of doing something meaningful. The joy of knowing that you can enlarge your life at a time when many people think it gets smaller. The joy of knowing that each of us has the potential for change for as long as we live.”
Another wise woman practitioner of Generativity is my friend Dr. Johnnetta Cole, about whom I wrote in Chapter 13. A vibrant woman, Johnnetta said her Third Act well-being has to do with her sense of purpose and her active engagement with living. “Let me tell you about my fiftieth reunion at Oberlin College. I’m very close to one of my former roommates, Chitie Edgett, and her husband, Dick. Well, Sister Jane,” she said in her characteristic style, “there were a few folk at our reunion who, whether in wheelchairs or not, seemed to have lost eye contact with living. But I’m happy to say that the majority of my classmates were clearly moving through life in a very different way. What was the difference? Despite the health challenges that Chitie, Dick, and I, along with many of our classmates have, we are not only looking at life straight on, we