Prime Time - Jane Fonda [60]
I have become a much more inviting and optimistic person since I entered my Third Act. Whenever someone tries to make me feel dopey about it, I remind myself of the findings of a 2002 study, the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement, which revealed that older people with a more positive attitude toward old age lived seven and a half years longer!
CHAPTER 10
Actually Doing a Life Review
It’s never too late to be what you might have been.
—GEORGE ELIOT
The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this: that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one had gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, Mrs. Dalloway
I HAVE INCLUDED DOING A LIFE REVIEW AMONG THE INGREDIENTS of successful aging because, in my experience (and to paraphrase George Eliot), doing so may help you become what you might have been. You may discover your essential self … that you are not who you think you are.
We all needed our parents to have loved and respected us independent of how we did or didn’t perform in the world. A good number of us didn’t have this. Some of us look back and feel as if our lives are failures, or less than they might have been. Perhaps we still feel the pain of an early disabling psychic wound or we haven’t had closure in our relationships, and so we don’t feel entirely finished. As the psychologist Terrence Real has written, “Our areas of immaturity always represent unfinished business, incomplete conversations, with one or both parents, because it was they who should have steered us toward the relational maturity we now lack as adults.”1
One way of finishing up the task of finishing ourselves is to go back over our earlier lives and, if it is called for, work to change our relationship to the realities—the people and the events—that composed them. A life review, as discussed in Chapter 2, assists us in doing this. The author and psychologist Stephen Levine calls it a “going-out-of-unfinished business sale.” It is easier for us when we have some mileage, some experience, under our belts, when the conflicts and traumas are less affect-laden, and time and adulthood have rounded some of the sharp edges.
Simone Scharff is an attractive, petite, seventy-eight-year-old Frenchwoman I knew during the 1960s, when I was married to my first husband, the French film director Roger Vadim, and we all hung out together on the beach in Malibu. I ran into her again after almost fifty years at WISE & Healthy Aging, a senior center in Santa Monica, where she is a member of a group of twelve women who meet weekly to share their writings. Ethel Schatz, now a dynamic woman of ninety-three, started the group twenty years ago as a way to encourage older women to write about themselves and then discuss what they’d written with the group.
Simone said that her first reaction to the idea of joining the writing group was that she couldn’t write. She’d grown up in France during the Nazi occupation and had received only what she called “street schooling.” “Not being good enough was a theme of my life. It was always so strong in me,” she said in her lovely French accent. “But writing my life, all the things I have been through, gave me a certain kind of respect for myself. You know, ‘Wow, I did that, and I did that, and that and that!’ But I would have never done it if it wasn’t for the light that Ethel gave me, the permission to just express it, to write it, to think about it, not to be embarrassed. It gave me a freedom, made me flexible. My whole attitude has changed.” Simone had always been too shy and embarrassed to tell her children about her life, but now she is giving them what she’s writing and they are interested, as are her grandchildren, and she feels it is helping them.
While being in a writing group isn’t exactly the same as writing a life review, it can jump-start the process, as it did for Simone.