“My worst admission unless I admitted being a serial killer,” 84-year-old writer Doris Grumbach calls her confession about being a New York Yankees rooter. Speaking to a Boston audience she knows this addiction unlikely to win much favor. By way of easing the shock, she reveals that she has been a Yankee fan since age nine.

For fear this revelation may seem frivolous, the speaker emphasizes the importance of having passionate interests in old age. Baseball is one of hers. She knows the game intimately – batting averages, personalities, potential of players still unproven. To her Derek Jeter is a household name, along with all the other Red Sox slayers on her favorite team.

When she talks about how best to grow old, Doris Grumbach has clear convictions. Ever the imaginative writer, she uses the metaphor of a house. “I have to live in a different house in my old age,” she says, “and it has to be furnished, and what I have stored up there will serve me well.”

Some of what she has furnished the house with is spiritual activity: “I practice meditation, read the Psalms, I think a lot about Him or Her. I am in search of God.”

In fact, “life for me now is mainly interior,” she tells her audience, most of whom are people of mature years. “The grace one gets from being alive so long is a spiritual one,” she believes. This grace helps her to appreciate the value of the life she has lived.

“It’s not so important to live long as to live well,” is Doris’ conviction. Part of that involves preparing for what she calls “that long physical emptiness,” a time when the body refuses to function properly.

The arts also provide furnishings. Literature, opera, ballet, she mentions specifically. Natural scenery counts also, especially in old age: “ I have a beautiful place to look at,” she says of her seacoast site in northern Maine.

Having found this home, she feels reluctant to travel. “My own place gives me satisfaction,” she explains to justify her staying home.

Learning from others receives high marks from Doris Grumbach. Her daughters – theologian, radiologist, and arts scholar among them – have enlarged her appreciation of the world.

This woman, now so encouraging about later life, did not always feel this way. “I hated growing old,” she recalls. “I despaired every ten years,” as she detailed in her journals, diaries that became published books.

A large part of her discontent came from an ideal of physical excellence. Her idol was the great swimmer Gertrude Eberle, a woman who inspired Grumbach to relish ten mile swims.

All her adult life Doris Grumbach has been committed to social action. As a volunteer at the Catholic Worker where she came to know Dorothy Day, she served food to poor people and sold the organization’s newspaper at a penny a copy. Of this experience she says, “It changed my life.” She also much values her four years in the U. S. Navy, serving as an officer.

When she reached 80, old age set in, she says. “I substituted checks for real service and one never gets over the guilt for that.” The ideal of volunteer work on behalf of others retains its grip on her.

Doris Grumbach strongly believes that the secret of life is to have a task, something that you can’t possibly exhaust. If it is something to which you have devoted much of your life, so much the better. What matters most is that you feel a passion for it.

This accomplished writer gives examples of people who never surrendered their passion. Among them is the artist Monet who, when he grew old and could no longer hold a paintbrush, used to strap it to his hand in order to work. “Nothing ever managed to stop that passion,” she says in admiration.

Another such was a sculptor so disabled as to be confined to bed. But in that position he learned to make finger-sized figures of wax and thus he, too, continued to indulge his passion.

Someone asks the speaker whether she appreciates a different kind of humor now. “Far more things seem funny to me now,” she replies. “You take yourself less seriously because you know yourself not that important.”

Someone else wants to know how she is preparing for death. “I used to fear it greatly,” she confesses. “Now I no longer fear it, but I don’t think one is ever prepared for it – ever.”

Her faith helps, to some extent: “Though I have a strong faith, I don’t have the accompaniments.” By that unfamiliar word she seems to mean clear ideas about heaven and life there.

And about the dying: “It’s like travel,” she says. “I want to get there, but I don’t like the trip.”

Richard Griffin