I hate the term “senior moment” and have taken a private vow never to use it the way others do. Why employ a phrase that fixes on something negative as characteristic of later life? Doing so seems a surefire way of lowering morale by calling attention to a deficit rather than an asset in one’s mature years.

To be sure, the phrase enjoys widespread popularity. Every time a person of a certain age hesitates and gropes in memory for a word or name, then you are likely to hear that person offer the excuse “I’m undergoing a ‘senior moment.’” Often this excuse comes with a nervous laugh, perhaps indicating a mixture of embarrassment and fear.

Instead of taking a merely negative stance toward the expression “senior moment,” however, let me suggest salvaging the term and making another use of it instead. Besides the largely negative experience of forgetting, later life features the positive recalling of people and events from our earlier life that carry rich meaning for us.

I will not soon forget hearing a speech by the prominent American artist Ellsworth Kelly when the new federal courthouse on Boston’s waterfront was dedicated. Then 75, Kelly recalled how he had been a student at the Museum School in Boston back in 1946. He used to bike down to the harborside area where the courthouse now stands. There he bought his canvas and other art supplies.

As he recalled this early experience and contrasted it with where he had eventually arrived as an artist, Kelly choked up and had to pause for a few seconds. Others may not have noticed, but I recognized in this moment an experience that I myself have often felt.  Kelly had suddenly felt the events of his earlier life to have taken on a new stature, meaning, and poignancy that surprised him. Surely this merited the description “senior moment.”

There are times when I feel myself to be acting the way my father did. I recognize in myself traits learned long ago from him and I thus become aware of his presence. It’s uncanny the way I feel myself to be talking like him, though he died almost 50 years ago. That, too, seems to me to merit the name “senior moment” since usually it does not occur until later life.

When I returned last week to my high school for the 55th anniversary of my graduation, memories of my school days flooded over me. As it happened, I was the only member of my class to show up for the celebration. Standing as sole representative of the 21 who graduated in 1947, I felt myself to be what the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes called “the last leaf.” Again, an event worthy of being dubbed a “senior moment.”

On the day when I first wrote these words, I heard a Harvard Square church bell tolling at noontime the ancient prayer called the Angelus. Listening to it, I was swept back to the time when I used to say this prayer every day and my life took its direction from church tradition. Yet another senior moment.

My friend Frederick Buechner has written: “Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep within us somewhere whether we like it or not, and sometimes it doesn’t take much to bring it back to the surface in bits and pieces.”

Senior moments I value flow from memories of the people, places, and events that have figured in my life. My parents, grandmother, aunts and uncles, friends, and associates who have taken leave of this earth play a large part in my psychic life. I think frequently of them, much more so than I did when younger.

So, too, the places where I have lived – Peabody, Cambridge, Belmont, Watertown, Lenox, in Massachusetts; St. Asaph in Wales; Paris, Brussels on the European continent – all of them continue to provide me with senior moments in my sense of the word. The physical features of these places often flood me with memories, some of them downbeat, but most resonant with beauty and depth.

And events – millions of them, it seems – that have enriched my life or, at least, provided reason for reflection. Falling in love, the birth of my daughter, the death of my father, stand out among many that have shaped my life in ways that I still mine for meaning. The imaginative replay of these events truly deserves to be enshrined under senior moments.

So much of growing older is psychic and dramatic in ways that others cannot see. The senior moments in which I recall the richness of my world and my life are what make later life so precious. These moments live on with us and enrich our spirit, turning growing older into an inner adventure.

Richard Griffin