“When I first retired, I was a lost soul. I would have gone right back to work if I hadn’t gotten so sick. With all that time, on my hands, I started wondering what I had made of my life. What was the point of it all? Did I accomplish anything worthwhile? I started picking everything apart.”

“If you stay with it, though, you start to figure things out. Maybe some of your mistakes weren’t so bad after all. Maybe they were part of your finding your way. Maybe you were heading somewhere all along, but didn’t know it. Eventually, it hit me – – Charlie, this is your work now. It’s just a different kind of work, that’s all, and there’s plenty of it to do.”

These words were spoken by Charles Robertson, age 69, to Wendy Lustbader, the author of a new book called “What’s Worth Knowing.” A geriatric social worker based in Seattle, Lustbader has summarized in this small volume her conversations with some two hundred people, most of them in later life.

At the recent New Orleans meeting of the American Society on Aging, I had the pleasure of hearing the author talk about the elders whom she has encountered. With rare skills as a public speaker, she kept the audience of professionals in the field of aging rapt, at times even moving us to tears. As I now read her book, I recall how animatedly she brought to life people like Charles Robertson.

About him, Lustbader provides this background information: “Shortly after Charles Robertson retired, a sequence of illnesses chipped away at his freedom. He was forced to give up driving, which meant that his range of activities shrank to what he could do at home. He became despondent to such a degree that his wife considered taking his shotgun out of the house. Once he identified his spiritual vocation, his range of inner activities became truly boundless.”

Charles never actually says what his new work is. However, Lustbader helps explain it by writing of “his spiritual vocation” and “range of inner activities.”  He has discovered his later years as a time for taking care of his soul. And this is what turns his life around.

Incidentally, Charles makes no mention of his wife’s role in this transformation but I suspect that she had something to do with it. Knowing how women have greater insight into such matters, I am prepared to credit her with a major part in bringing her husband along to see what really counts.

About her own work with older people, Wendy Lustbader says, “I feel genuinely that every elder has something to teach me.” The question is how we can evoke the wisdom of older people. That is what she has done in her new book, one that follows two excellent volumes on care of older family members.

The author worries that too many older people have themselves internalized ageism, the prejudice against aging. It happens often that an older person speaks of himself or herself  as a “nothing who does nothing.” But for Wendy Lustbader, the attitude behind those words is all wrong. If you know how to listen, you will discover that everyone has gained some wisdom from living.

That applies even to Harry Nichols, another gentleman who appears in the book. About marriage he says: “You’re supposed to compromise. You’re supposed to talk things over. I just waited for things to blow over.  All six of my wives had the same complaints. I got sick of it. I’m better off single.”

When Wendy Lustbader quoted the words about the six wives, all of us in her audience broke into laughter. Of course, we laughed despite knowing that here was a man who lacks self-knowledge to a painful degree. He can say some of the right words about compromise and talking things over, but he cannot put them into practice enough to save even a single one of his marriages.

His social worker must have felt challenged by this man’s refusal or inability to face the reality of himself. “I had enough of women messing around in my house,” he told Lustbader defensively amid his debris-strewn, incredibly messy home.

But she believes of social workers that “if you practice with an open heart, the healing that you give elders multiplies.” In listening to her talk, I found it easy to believe that she has become a source of healing for many. Harry will be fortunate indeed if he gets any more opportunities to talk with Wendy Lustbader.

Charles, by contrast, has found a true path to take him through old age. Like many others, he has had the wisdom to redefine work and develop an agenda suitable for discovering a deeper identity as he matures further.

Richard Griffin