Tag Archives: #family

Part 1: Stuff. . . and Change

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I rested my hand on my cherry dining room table, knowing they would soon load it on the moving truck. I’d contacted Bridging, a local organization that furnishes homes for families in need, to pick up items from our house that wouldn’t fit in my new, downsized, condo. The table was to be last on the truck, so I had time to linger.

My hand was still, but my heart screamed at my mind. “What are you doing? Remember those family dinners, ten people talking at once? Remember the times you used your china? You know, that is going to end up in a thrift shop, too.”

I saw the cards flying in bridge games with our friends, Karen and Dan. My husband, Jim, sitting opposite me, would maneuver the bidding so I’d be the one playing the hand.

Birthday celebrations—I remembered my cake for my 80th—Jim had died three months prior, so we didn’t get to share the milestone birthday. We’d shared much at that table. During COVID, endless games of Scrabble—I played to win, and he played to engage.

And my vase that I filled with questions about each other that we answered after meals. It was revealing fun.

“Don’t worry. Someone will love that table as much as you have.” The man from Bridging reassured me. I let my hand drop and they loaded the table, aghast when they started to put boxes on it.

“That’ll scratch it!” I shouted. They took the boxes off.

It was no longer my table. I didn’t want to think about what might happen next to it.

I bought the table at Dayton’s Warehouse Sale, back when Dayton’s existed. It wasn’t my style, but the beautiful wood caught my eye, and it was the right size. The legs matched chairs left to me by my second husband, Gary, who died at age 55. He didn’t value stuff, but he loved these chairs, which he’d bought in Pennsylvania, another memory. Every time I pulled a chair out, I’d see Gary at his desk, which was the dining room table.  

My table was hard to part with, but holding on felt like grasping at a life that used to be—the one filled with family, friends, careers, holidays, parties, the sad and the happy, around that central gathering place. My heart hoped that letting the table go would make room for my children to carry on traditions.

“Stop it!” my mind admonished. Stuff is work, and it takes up space. Remember how you had to store those leafs under the bed. They were so heavy, you needed help to slide them out and carry them to the dining room. Wake up! No one’s here to do that anymore. Let it go!”

My heart gave up, watching the door of the van close, the men getting in and driving the truck out of the lot. “Goodbye,” my heart whispered.

*****

What was I really grieving when I gave away the table?

Memories stay with me, whether I own the table or not. What I grieved are the roles the table signified, mother, grandmother, hostess, and the keeper of traditions. Beneath my sadness about the table was facing the problem of who I am as life shifts and changes, particularly in retirement

My husband, Jim, who was more sanguine in his approach to retirement, stayed involved, with people, sports interests, and adult education courses. He didn’t seem worried about roles, but then he never downsized as a widow either. One Easter, when our families were mostly busy, Jim suggested that we invite other people with no immediate plans for a light brunch. I look back and remember how interesting that day was. Roman Verotsko, a well-known artist and neighbor came. He spent much of the time talking art with my granddaughter, who came without parents. Other neighbors mixed with each other. The party created a new role for Jim and me. We didn’t need to be the grandparents who have everyone over. We could bring friends together.

Shortly after, Jim bought a big Bunn coffee maker and started inviting neighborhood men for coffee. He’d found his niche. My friend, Johan, used to hold what he called “musical soirees” about old jazz and Mozart. He’d invite all the people he knew who lived alone and had an interest in music. In my condo association, various people give short talks about finding and roasting coffee, astronomy, and even puppets.   

It’s not easy to find new ways of being in the world, yet the ubiquity of change requires adaptation. Roles, to some extent, are what we project to the world, but what about inside us, our personal authenticity. As I’ve aged, I’ve turned more inward to access that person.

Memories from the past, like the ones my table evokes, can cohere around life themes. Timelines of your life can also reveal these. The classic about doing this is Writing about Your Life, by William Zinsser. I participate in a church group called the Elder (wince) Gathering, and we are reading a book called The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, a book I’d already read in another church group. Soul work seems to call people my age. But that’s a big topic for another blog.

Where does this leave me about the table?

I treasure my memories ‘round that table. It’s an album of my life. But now when I feel sad about giving it away, I imagine a family in their first real home. It’s tiny, but there’s room for a table—a lovely cherry one. Children are gathered at it doing their homework. Someone nearby is making dinner.

          “Put your stuff away,” she calls.

Books and pencils and paper and laptops are put away. Someone sets the table. Everyone sits down. Dinner time.

I smile. My table is home.

Stay tuned for Part 2

Leftovers

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Phase 1 of the holiday season – Thanksgiving. I always say it’s my favorite because there are no presents involved. I’m not sure that’s true, but it suggests I have an altruistic side.

Now, with the holiday over and another approaching, I’m thinking about leftovers. Don’t you love them? The best part of Thanksgiving!

Leftover 1: Gratitude.  Last year neither of my two children and their spouses wanted to host Thanksgiving. They seemed to have caught the rest of the country’s malaise about it, too much work, with football and maybe turkey as the only reasons to get together. But, remember, I’m the person who says it’s my favorite of the holidays, so it seemed appropriate that I step up and host.

I was new in my apartment after selling Jim’s and my house, which had been the center of many family events. Could I possibly host Thanksgiving? In an apartment? I remembered a favorite movie, Hannah and Her Sisters, where Mia Farrow hosts her big family in a New York City apartment. If Hannah could do it, surely I could. So, I hosted Thanksgiving with good help from my family. And it worked. We gave Hannah some competition.

As that 2024 Thanksgiving grew to a close, we were scheduled to move to another family’s house for dessert, a tradition we started several years ago. But I was exhausted. I’d burned my wrist draining the potatoes, and it hurt. The kitchen was presentable, and all I wanted to do was sit and watch mindless TV—yes, something even more mindless than football. So I didn’t go. AND I announced that I was passing the baton—someone else had better step up and do Thanksgiving next year.

 “I am too old for all this work, and I’ve done my share!”

So, when Thanksgiving came around this year, my daughter stepped up, yet somehow, on the morning of Thanksgiving, I found myself responsible for an apple pie and the mashed potatoes. Everything that could go wrong did, and I barely finished in time to get to my daughter’s house.

During the entire time in my kitchen, I whined to myself, “I passed that baton. This is ridiculous. These potatoes are pathetic, mushed, not mashed potatoes, and the pie. Why did I agree to sit and peel apples and potatoes? And what’s wrong with my kids that they wanted mashed potatoes from Costco? Have I raised lazy children? . . . ya da ya da ya da.”

And then it hit me – sometimes the Universe does need to smack you pretty hard. I realized that husband #1; husband #2; husband #3; some old boyfriends and my sister (all deceased) would have given anything to be in my shoes: 81 and still mashing potatoes and partying with family

Who cares about potatoes or pie—I was getting to enjoy Thanksgiving with everyone I love. I was getting to make pie and potatoes for them. Getting to do this (see https://designingyour.life/), became my new mantra. My resentful, “I HAVE TO” went “puff” and left the room, leaving gratitude in its place.

Leftover 2: Intergenerational Conversation. Last year as dinner ended, we started a discussion about AI. Everyone at the table had a stake in AI. I was teaching an undergraduate writing course and struggling to convince students that you can’t learn to write if ChatGPT writes your paper.

The discussion was fast and fun; no one left the table to watch more football, which means something. We are a family of frogs, we jump into the pond quickly. Our one turtle, Luisa, is often left standing on the bank; she jumps in later, usually with great wisdom.

This year, we’d finished eating and were lingering in the kitchen, snitching bites of dressing and turkey. Elizabeth, my daughter-in-law, asked her 24-year-old son, Henrik, if he wants to have children. I don’t remember how we landed there, maybe because two of our young people are about to graduate from college. Henrik never did answer, but the question kicked off another great discussion about the uncertainty of the future, mainly the planet, and how grim it looks to Gen Z.

The future, by definition, is uncertain, but what my Gen Z grandchildren are feeling is more complicated than uncertainty. The word, “existential” kept floating up. Generation Z young people ask different questions about meaning, purpose and identity than the Silent Generation or even the Boomers did. As we talked, they hesitated to share their dreams for their futures, wary of the future of the planet and climate change.

I can’t recapture the opinions, but I concluded that young people are facing problems unique to our time with climate change at the heart of them, especially as the world responds. They are terrified, although they didn’t use that word. (Remember this is an “n” of 3, so ask your own Gen Zers). And yes, we hid under our desks because of nuclear bomb threats, but this is different.

Reflecting later, I realized we had had a family conversation that crossed generations. Gratitude welled even greater in me, couched in concern for my grandchildren. I was, nevertheless, grateful for the sharing across generations.

Leftover 3: Hope. We eventually moved to more mundane topics, but I worried that what I was hearing might be despair. I didn’t want them to throw in the towel for a life of hedonism. So, I later questioned the Gen Z grandchildren separately.

I started with Henrik, “You aren’t giving up on dreams for your life, are you? Embracing a life of hedonism—do you even know what that is?” (Who knows what they teach in college anymore.)

“Don’t worry, and yes, I know what hedonism is. For now, I don’t know what I’m doing after graduation, but you know me, I’m just curious about it all.”

Whew!

Later, in my car with Luisa, who you will remember is our family turtle, never jumping in too soon, I asked her about her aspirations. She gave me even more hope, summing her thoughts up as “I don’t want to miss my life waiting around for the end of the earth, so I’m living it.”

Upon hearing those words, my gratitude for the day swelled into hope. Yes, the situation in the US and worldwide, especially climate, looks dire, hopeless, gloomy, depressing. . . you get it. But along comes Thanksgiving, and the leftovers. We engage in meaningful conversations and emerge with hope, nurtured by connection and making meaning together.

Another LEFTOVER:

From Wendell Berry, Think Little

. . . the world is blessed beyond my understanding, more abundantly than I will ever know. What lives are still ahead of me here to be discovered and exulted in, tomorrow, or in twenty years?

Eighty Years, Eighty Letters

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Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

I have been obsessed with the minutia of aging, examining every new line, every wiry hair on my chin (prompting immediate removal), every unfamiliar ache in the morning. But when asked to write a tribute for a friend’s milestone birthday, I go whole-hog in the other direction– not just offering congratulations, but taking the opportunity to outline, sometimes in exhaustive detail, why their life has been well-lived.  I ignore tired jokes about wrinkles, slumping shoulders, or forgetfulness.

Almost as if I were writing their advance obituary.

But when it comes to my own Big Birthdays, I’ve mostly ignored them. When I turned 70, Dan planned a sweet mini reunion with friends and family, complete with a cruise on beautiful Lake Minnetonka. It was the first time since I turned 40 that I stopped to consider what another decade meant.

Looking back now at 40 – that was a downer. I was convinced life as I knew it was ending. I imagined myself turning into a wrinkled crone by the end of the week. I spent several hundred dollars on face creams that promised to forestall the ravages of age. Some of them made my eyes burn. I ended up tossing most of the unused jars when I realized I wasn’t actually disintegrating. I didn’t look that bad. I could continue to be vain!

Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash

But this summer I turned 80, and although I didn’t anticipate it, I could feel agitation building as the date drew closer. I set boundaries:

No, no reunions, no celebrations. 

No, I don’t want anything special! 
No gifts – we have nowhere to put anything! 

Do I really have to go to the Sages Lunch this year, when I helped organize it last year?

At one point I even considered writing my own obituary, not out of despair, but practicality. After all, at 80, every year feels a bit more like a crapshoot. But then I remembered – I’m not very afraid of death, although like most people, I hope it will be quick and relatively painless. So if I wasn’t especially fearful, why the restlessness? Why the resistance?

A week before my birthday, I was meditating outdoors with a small group in the clear early morning light in Boulder. Someone read a John O’Donohue poem on longing before we began, and one line stuck with me like a mantra: May a secret Providence guide your thought…”

Fifteen minutes into the silence, Providence – The Great Whatever – answered “You are supposed to write letters to 80 people to tell them how they have changed you.”

It was loud.  It could not be ignored.  It was also rather weird –so clear, it startled me. The universe doesn’t usually shout at me.

And so I began. At first I wondered if I even knew 80 people well enough to write to. But it turns out that at 80, you’ve lived a long time and met a lot of people. As I started making a list, I quickly passed 80. I began to recall how each one was memorable, and why.  Some names were easy. The memories were warm, the lessons clear. Others required more work, were uncomfortable. I had to ask: how did this person change me, even if the change came through friction rather than closeness? Some were no longer living. Some I had lost touch with. In a few cases, I already had letters written – messages I’d sent to the families of friends who’d died, telling them what that person had meant to me. I had saved copies. I added them to the list.

And then I realized something else: not all letters would go to individuals. Sometimes it was groups of people who had shaped me — a writing class, a church committee, a circle of friends. And sometimes the letter could be to a thing — a dining room table from my childhood, or a familiar object that held memory like a sponge. Always, behind the inanimate, were people. Always, it came back to connection.

Oh my.  What seemed, when Providence’s voice boomed, at first like an impossible assignment –  80 letters for 80 years – suddenly feels doable. More than that, it feels necessary. Because in uncovering the people and memories that shaped me, I am also writing something else: a quiet testimony to what I’ve always known, deep down. 

I did not arrive at 80 on my own.

I got here on the shoulders of so many who walked beside me, talked me down, saved my bacon, gave me new direction, nudged me forward when I was stuck, or simply witnessed my becoming. Big influences, small gestures, words that stayed with me — it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the accumulation of moments, and the gratitude I feel for having been changed, again and again, by the presence of others.

In this photo, I am the white-haired 80-year-old, with some of my best friends from Tappan Junior High School, Ann Arbor Michigan.  We met this summer to remember how important we have been in each other’s lives.  This “letter” is for them…and the several who were there in body or spirit but not in this picture. My friend Elsa, second from the right, describes us as a hive…that’s the way that it feels, except there is no queen bee.

“Best friends” from the past and now…

And maybe, just maybe, Providence will answer if I become sufficiently agitated and self-centered and, therefore, speak again when I need a new assignment.

Oh — maybe most important: 80 is not a boundary, just another irrelevant human marker, an indicator our of our futile attempts to corral time.

 

What Makes Me Me and You You

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Donald Earl Evans 1926 – 2012

My stepfather, Don, loved three things in this life: my mother, fishing, and tinkering, especially under a car. Don adopted my two sisters and me when I was ten. He was boyish, enthusiastic, deeply in love with our mother, home from WWII (He’d joined the army at 17.), and excited to start his life. He always had a project going. Take the worm farm he built outside our front door. What ten-year-old isn’t fascinated with a worm farm? It was my job to carry out the scraps from dinner and to turn over the dirt. When it came time to go fishing, I got to fill a can with squirmy night crawlers.

Don always planted a vegetable garden. He’d give me a packet of radish seeds to sow because radishes come up fast. I witnessed the marvel of seeds. He put me in charge of weeding. After pulling weeds a few times in the hot sun, I suspected he had tricked me into doing the hard part of gardening. But I didn’t mind. I felt important.

He built new stairs for our house. I watched him saw pieces of plywood in a stair shape and then lay planks across the cuts. He leaned them against the garage where we could climb up and down. Next he added a picket fence to our yard, drilling the post holes, another curiosity for me to see. It seemed as if he could do anything.

Don bought a Webcor turntable, and Bozo the clown records that I listened to over and over.  

He loved Glen Miller, and gave our mother a gold embossed, white leather album of Miller’s greatest hits. Music filled our house in the evening. Don also loved cars. I once got to go with him to Cicero Avenue in Chicago to buy a Packard, his favorite automobile after the Olds.

I was the one Don took fishing. He taught me, by example, to sit in a boat or on the Lake Michigan pier, not talk, and fish all day. He once took me muskie fishing. We didn’t catch a thing, but a muskie followed the lure to our boat. These experiences were magic.

North Pier, Racine, Wisconsin

But over the course of my teen years, Don changed. He stopped making things, fixing his car, and fishing. Instead, he went to night school and worked his way from a tool and die maker to an engineer. He and my mother bought a bigger house; my mother took a fulltime job to finance their American dream. The new life was stressful, and instead of tinkering with something to offset that stress, he relied on a cocktail (and maybe two or three) at night. He developed an edge, and we three sisters avoided him. More than once, I heard our mother say,” I wish we could go back to where we started. He was happiest lying under a car fixing it. We don’t need all this.”

I can’t reliably pinpoint why, but Don lost his essential self, the things that made him Don, his unique creativity. My mother died, and Don lived to be 86. He spent his last few years at the VA hospital, where gradually I watched the curious side of Don return. For him, it was too late for fishing and tinkering, but for me, it was not too late to see the cost of pursuits that deny one’s essential self.

To me, Don is everyman, especially of his generation and veterans of WWII. He’s also a cautionary tale about losing yourself and straying from the things you love. I had the lesson of seeing the changes in Don, from creative young man, to striving type A, and back to a resigned acceptance of what is. Seeing these changes taught me to seek what is authentic in myself. I remember the first time I went to a counselor in my 60’s, and she asked me what my goal was. I told her I wanted to live an authentic life (I wasn’t sure I was, and I wanted to change before it was too late.).

In retirement, I’ve aspired to live authentically. Two books that have supported me are The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of Life by Gene D. Cohen, and The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Mattersby Susan Susanka. They both argue that it’s never too late to find what you love and do it. Cohen says that creativity is built into us, not reserved for the young. Karen’s recent blog about the talents and contributions of older women highlights the ways we “elders” can manifest our creativity.

Susanka is more aligned with my personal focus, finding your essential self. I had the cautionary tale of Don in mind in early retirement, when I identified that as a child and a young married adult, I had loved to make things. At the time I was exploring my Norwegian roots, so I thought, why not rosemaling? A door opened to a latent artistic flare and to new friends.

The poet Maggie Smith has a writer’s perspective on creativity and authenticity. She advises staying “elastic” and open to surprise. When I sold our house and moved, I set Smith’s book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful front and center in my new apartment. I didn’t want to dwell on what I’d lost but rather on making my place beautiful and affirming what makes me me.

I believe Smith’s advice can be extended to our lives in retirement or at any time of life. We can make our lives beautiful in our own way. Accessing our essential selves, the things we love to do, our lifelong interests and talents outside of work, can be the foundation for surprising ourselves in retirement. What makes you you? I invite you to explore and enjoy.