In her new book “Life Gets Better,” Wendy Lustbader, middle-aged, tells of being on a tour bus full of people between eighteen and twenty-four. Stepping up to the driver’s invitation to use the microphone, she astonished the young folks by saying: “Don’t worry: these are the worst years of your lives.”
Later, at a rest stop, the young travelers swarmed around Wendy to thank her for what she had said. They felt relief that someone had broken the constant praise of youth so familiar to them.
As Wendy reflects, “the myth of youth as the best time of life burdens the young and makes us all dread getting older.” Her book goes on to identify many reasons for welcoming the arrival of late life.
I count the author as a friend and colleague, a person marvelously talented and wise in the ways of aging. Based near Seattle, Wendy serves old people as a social worker and psychotherapist; she also teaches gerontology at the University of Washington.
Her book’s subtitle, “The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older,” says much about her approach to aging. “Life gets better as we get older,” Wendy maintains, “on all levels except the physical.”
Let me share with you some of those pleasures along with a brief commentary about each.
1) Self-acceptance. Later life is a time when people can learn to take themselves as they are rather than as they might wish to be. This attitude frees them to try new things without worry about how this will look to others.
2) Relationships. “Life gets so much lighter” is how Wendy expresses the way we can now find common values among family members and friends. How we differ no longer makes so much difference. Status ceases to count so much as we discover our shared humanity.
3) Reaching out. “Later life is the time when we tend to have room in our lives for generosity,” Wendy writes. That can be the product of our focusing less on ourselves and more on the people we care about. It is hard to think of anything more liberating than the impulse toward generosity.
4) Interdependence. If we have been a caregiver, we know something about the dependence we share with others. We have learned how those who receive care have something to give in return. “Life improves when we attend to our interdependence, whether we add to the available goodness or draw from it,” says Wendy.
5) Attitude. In later life, many people have discovered things to be grateful for. This contrasts with an arid focus on self that inhibits appreciation of gifts received. But, as Wendy insists, “an appreciative attitude must be developed and kept in top form.”
These are only a few approaches to later life from one of my favorite gurus. They perhaps suggest the richness of her experience and her reflections on it. Were you to hear her speak, as I have done, you would appreciate more deeply Wendy’s reasons for appreciating later life.
My only scruple in valuing the “life gets better” thesis, however, comes from contact with people for whom old age is a series of crushing trials. I sometimes feel the need to modify Wendy’s strongly upbeat views of later life with the reality of how hard it is for many people.
This reality does not nullify my friend’s upbeat approach to life in the later years. What she has written remains beautiful and inspiring. It serves as a precious counterweight to our society’s stereotypes of old age as merely a time of decline.
Let’s hear it for later life being a time of fulfillment.