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I don’t want to give up being my best self, which, as all the arbiters of well-being and self-affirming achievement agree, is a worthy goal. We all want to try to be our best self, whoever she might turn out to be. I don’t want to come to the end of my life having remained stuck like tires on a muddy road, going over the same ground again and again, asking the same questions, and colliding with the same answers.

I have been in psychotherapy twice: once after the death of my mother and again after a shattering breakup. My first therapist listened well, by which I mean she didn’t interrupt me with questions, interject enthusiastic “say more,” or take notes while I was talking. As a result, with her guidance, I could hear myself unpacking and examining my history with my mother. She made some valuable connections, some associations I hadn’t seen, but she mostly left me to my own devices. She was professionally neutral, so I could be myself. When our sessions concluded, the best parts of my mother, and my relationship with her, resided comfortably within me. The parts I struggled with were buried along with her. The experience was a gratifying success.

My second therapist was less formal and more engaged. She was my age, both of us then in our seventies, and had a tastefully decorated office, the working environment of a well-read and well-traveled woman. Our work together was an active and engaged collaboration. She was innovative, agile, and patient enough to encourage me as I explored the reasons for my ending a significant relationship.

I’m very grateful to both of those therapists. My work with each of them alerted me to the endlessly compelling specificity of the unique me and the unremarkable and inevitable nature of being a person. Loss. Death. Meaning. Connection. That’s the landscape we’re all trying to navigate. The Buddhists remind us that suffering is at the heart of being alive. The Jews, on the other hand (Jews always seem to have at least one more hand than everyone else) advise us to use our time here to live in a way that leaves the world just a bit better for those who follow us. These are only two of the numerous religious, philosophical, political, and spiritual frameworks we might follow. Still, in the painful moments of my life, the psychological approach was always the most compelling.

Why am I who I am? How did I grow from the rocky soil in which I began? What stories and behaviors did I create to protect myself against re-experiencing those injured places of my childhood? How have I recreated them in my adult choices? Have I papered them over or healed them — just a little? How would I know? And on it goes. Deeper and deeper into my suffering. My autobiography is a narrative in which I play the lead, and everyone else is somewhere between a co-star and a bit player. Oneself is endlessly riveting subject matter. Until it isn’t.

My storage unit contains three bankers’ boxes filled with journals, letters, dreams, and odd, once-meaningful objects. I think about the me who recorded her life as she lived it, searching for clues to who she was and why, and I want to put my arms around her. The young me, the middle-aged me, casting around for the key to unlock all these unfathomable mysteries, providing answers that would finally free me.

Did my mother want children? She told my father clearly and decisively that she didn’t when they were courting. He said that people would think he was “funny” if they didn’t have kids. Do I think my father might have been gay? Probably. Did his worldly success compensate for his choice to live a conventional life? No. His alcoholism is proof positive of that. Did my mother sink into a massive post-partum depression after my birth, the first of two children she never wanted? She did. Did we ever bond when I was an infant? We didn’t.

Are those the roots of my early formative years? Or do I need to go back to my father’s youth, when he was the only successful son with two ne’er-do-well brothers? And what of my mother? She’d been hungry to have more education, to work in an office and have her own desk, to leave the domestic life in which she was raised and for which she was trained as far behind as she could. Yet she became trapped in a more affluent replica of the life that echoed the one in which her mother and sister had flourished.

There are endless threads to unravel. What about the me that had the advantages of whiteness, a middle-class upbringing, and good health—balanced, of course, with the gender expectations of a girl growing up in the 1940s? The goal was marriage, ideally with a skill to fall back on, just in case. The “just in case” part wasn’t articulated, but it was preparation for one’s husband losing his job, or leaving, or some catastrophe requiring the wife to provide for the family. The choices for fallback skills were limited to teacher or secretary, represented in those days chiefly by women who were then called spinsters, among whose ranks I am sure were a significant number of lesbians who never intended to marry at all. At least not to a man. Women marrying women was, at the time, unimaginable. The path to what was considered successful adulthood was very narrow then.

After my adolescent and young adult period of wanting desperately to belong and fit in, I made a series of choices aimed at becoming the best iteration of a bohemian outcast that I could achieve. By middle age, I was finally centered in a life as an activist, a lesbian feminist, member of a community of women who, like me, wanted to create a world that did not yet exist—one in which women were safe from violence and had access to healthcare, education, and housing. We were each focused on different aspects of this world-changing project. I wrote, then taught, and then wrote some more, the role that best suited me.

Then, after the deaths of both my parents and my brother, when I was all that was left of our family, I yearned to acquit myself in their dead eyes by becoming the person they had always hoped I’d be: less judgmental about my brother’s choices, kinder and more patient with my mother’s striving, less stubborn, more open-minded, echoing my father’s best qualities. They’d never get to see the upgraded me, but I would strive to become that woman as a way to honor them.

Those became my goals, both to give myself a second chance and to accede to the cultural encouragement that women focus their efforts on continual self-improvement. If all we can control is ourselves, then re-invention and an enhanced future remain a continuous option.

All these decades later, I’m not much less judgmental, but when I notice my judgmental tendencies, I bat them back. Sternly. I’m less stubborn and more curious because being right no longer has the same urgency as it had when I was younger. Making mistakes, not understanding, being confused, and forgetting come with the territory in one’s late eighties. I continue to be a work in progress.

Have I peeled enough onions, explored my psyche deeply enough, read enough books, and had sufficient conversations to have fulfilled my efforts to improve? Is more emotional labor required? If so, in what direction should I move?

No: I’ve concluded that I’ve developed as much as I’m going to. This is the best me I will ever achieve; there will be no more unpacking and investigating.

Having arrived at full-ish acceptance of my psychological self, there remains the issue of what happens next. At the end of this chapter of my life, I’m going to die. That’s what’s next. My final task is to confront my end. It’s not like I’m dying next week, but it will be soonish. I have a couple of years to go. That’s why I’m living in Tucson now. To have the best life I can with my daughters until I’m done.

While I was paying attention to my interiority, it seemed that dying became a form of accomplishment—like doing your taxes or learning to throw pots. I’m now contemplating what has been described as a “good death.” And therein lies the next self-improvement hurdle. It seems like a worthy ambition, but who decides what that is? Are my daughters going to assess my death after I can no longer join the conversation? Mom seemed peaceful. Mom felt anxious. Do you think Mom knew what was going on? I hate the idea that I won’t be a part of the conversations that will concretize their story about Mom’s death. It was mine, and I should be the one to tell it. But it doesn’t work that way.

Since I moved to Tucson, my daughters have urged me to think through all the details that will, of necessity, accompany my good death. I’ve made all the medical decisions, which are now summarized on an orange laminated sheet attached to my refrigerator door with charming Parisian magnets. They’re there for EMTs who may need instructions in the event of, or the inevitability of, an emergency in the middle of the night, when most emergencies occur. Whatever takes me out, no one will ever sadly murmur, “She died too young.” I’m way past that marker.

Then there are the legal papers, which were also uncomplicated because I don’t have much of anything, and whatever I have will be divided between my daughters. I have a list of my doctors, medications, passwords, and credit cards. And I intend to identify everything jumbled in boxes in my storage unit down the hall, and determine what I want done with them. Finally, I must decide where I want to be at the moment I’m leaving (should I have that choice) and who I want to be there. My afterward is left to them. Whatever ceremonies and rituals comfort them are OK with me.

My initial attempts at deflecting this exhaustively pointillist set of tasks and conversations were: “Let me think about it.” “We’ll see.” And “When the time comes.”   

None of them worked. Those with whom I had those conversations skillfully but firmly batted my hesitations away and moved on to the tasks at hand. And there were so many tasks: papers to be reviewed, rediscussed, and notarized; questions to be considered; wishes to be expressed. Wasn’t it enough that I was going to die? Why did I have to have all these conversations about it? But they persevered. What did I want?

Well, the main thing I wanted was not to die before I had a chance to create a life in Tucson. But other than that, when I am dying, do I care what music is playing, with what scents I’m surrounded, whether the window is open or closed? I’m dying, and I doubt I’m paying attention to my environment. Maybe I’ll try for a couple of final words or a tender smile, but beyond that, I don’t think I’ll be up for much of anything except the task at hand. Yet I yield to what they need. All the details are complete now, and I’ve expressed my wishes:  John Coltrane, eucalyptus candle, open window, friends visiting for individual goodbyes.

Then there is the last part: the final words, the deathbed whispers, the moments when the dying mother finally says what her children have waited for all their lives: I’m proud of you. I love you. Even though your choices were hard for me, I see how brave you have been—something like that. Books and movies revolve around these pivotal last moments. I always thought such scenes were both corny and manipulative. Why wait till the very last second?

Instead, I have had a series of what my daughters call “mom’s deep talks” more frequently than they might have wanted. I’ve always preferred to talk through my life, and I don’t want to wait till the end to murmur a declaration or two. In the past, we’ve talked about what it was like for them to be the daughters of a young mother trying—and failing—to attend to her own longings and ambitions and still provide the stable domestic life they deserved. I offered them my guilty regrets about the mistakes I made and wounds I had caused in those years. As they moved into middle age and I became old, they found it within themselves to forgive me my trespasses, and I became better able to forgive myself. Mostly.

Now, accompanied by my increasing physical and mental diminishments, I try to calibrate the precarious balance between my prideful need for autonomy and my lifelong yearning for dependency. (Back to the early childhood part of my explorations.) I’m patient with my daughters’ overprotectiveness. But for now, the overstuffed folder marked “My Death” has been filed, and I turn back to this final period of my life. It will not be examined. It will simply be lived the best way I can.

Leaving Home at 83

by Sandra Butler

    Leaving Home at 83 is an intensely personal story yet one shared with thousands of aging women who are wondering whether to move closer to their children and leave their friendships behind or stay in their communities. Readers will see their own questions on these pages and recognize their own fears, insecurities, and uncertainties. Butler examines the often-unspoken struggle to sustain our autonomy as we age and our conflicted longing for dependency as we become more vulnerable. Both longings are embedded in the desire not to be a burden to those we love. With its sharp humor and refreshing honesty, this wry account brings a welcome and necessary perspective to the inevitable moment when we end one chapter of our lives and begin whatever comes next. “...The ensemble of characters is hilarious, jaw-clenching, at times worthy of a Jack Russell Terrier head tilt. Butler’s writing is tender, funny and unequivocally relatable.” —Karen Lee Erlichman, D.Min, LCSW, psychotherapist, spiritual director, writer and mentor. Available from Amazon and at www.sandrabutler.net.

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Now What?
Notes from the Frontline of Old Age

by Sandra Butler

Now What? is a revealing, witty series of reflections on living while old. Butler offers the reader a welcome glimpse into the richness, foolishness, limitations, bravado, and freedom of a vividly lived 88-year-old life. From balky knees and balkier institutions to late-life friendships, continuing resistance against fools and knaves, and gratitude for each new morning, Butler writes the truth of old age exactly as she lives it: vividly, imperfectly, on her own terms. These clear-eyed observations refuse syrup and sentiment. Instead, they offer the relief of recognition—and the freedom that comes from naming what we’re not supposed to say out loud. For every person who is old, becoming old, or loving someone who is, “Now What?” is a companion and a dare: keep telling the truth, keep choosing your life, and keep going. Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or your favorite independent bookstore.

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