Table of Contents
In memory of my mother and father
MARJORIE HERSCH, 19302002
IRWIN LUSTBADER, 19272002
Acknowledgments
Writers need places to go where they can roost undisturbed. The Whiteley Center, a refuge of beauty and silence administered by the University of Washington, gave me a period of concentrated work on the book unlike any other. Kathy Cowell was an enthusiastic and thoughtful host. The Antique Sandwich Company allowed me to take up the table in the far back for hours on end, and I was always cheered by the welcome I received from the proprietor, Shirley Herridge. The Continental Restaurant has let me occupy the back corner table for thirty years and five books. Owner Helen Lagos has been unfailing in her warmth.
This book would not exist without the elders who told me their stories and who participated in our Tuesday afternoon discussions, one at Elderwise and the other at Heritage House. Trenchant remarks, deep observations, provocative exchangesall of this enriched my understanding of later life, week after week. One participant, Tom Kugiya, died before I could tell him I included one of his tales in the book. He would have been delighted, and I name him here to honor him. Each one of the elders made an imprint on the text, either by voicing insights or helping me sustain my spirit for the project.
My agent, Jane Dystel, believed in the book from the first mention of the idea and urged me to bring it to fruition. I appreciate her vision and her sense of what the audience for this book would most value. My editors at Tarcher, Gabrielle Moss and Mitch Horowitz, were passionate in their encouragement all the way through. Their grasp of the books themes, from the obvious to the subtle, gave me the impetus to keep peeling back the layers.
My gratitude goes especially to my manuscript readers who scouted out confusing paragraphs, repetitions, and sentences in need of renovation: JoAnn Damron-Rodriguez, Rich Goldman, Lauren Grosskopf, Linda Hermans, Chaz Hill, Irene Hull, Kathleen Sullivan, Valerie Trueblood, Jeff Welker, and Carter Catlett Williams. They saved me from embarrassment and challenged me to clarify my thinking, all while giving me fresh heart for the revisions they inspired.
My husband, Barry Grosskopf, read the manuscript twice with great care. His edits were characteristically sensitive, persistent, and accurate. Above all, I thank him for enduring my disappearances with loving support for what writers must do.
Introduction
Dont worry, I called out to a bus full of world travelers, all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. These are the worst years of your lives. Relief spread across the rows of faces at this stark and unexpected pronouncement. We were on a Kiwi Experience bus excursion, exploring North Island, New Zealand, and our driver had asked each of us to step up to his tour microphone and say a few words to break up the monotony of the sheepfilled landscape. My husband and I could have been the parents of everyone else on the bus, including the driver. Everything gets betteryou just have to get through your twenties, I emphasized, urging them to be patient with these years of struggle.
At the next rest stop, I was swarmed by the thankful. One tall, skinny fellow from Holland told me, I dont know how to love, who to love, if I am gay or straight. Ive been torturing myself over iton and off, thinking of killing myself. Lady, youve given me hope. A 19-year-old blonde from England said she had been utterly depressed since leaving home for this journey, and that my remarks were like being shaken awake. She realized it would take time to arrive at the answers to the questions that were nagging at her. One person after another declared gratitude, each marveling at having never heard anyone say this before. Praise of youth had been pushed at them constantly, from all directions. If this is really the best, said a 20-year-old from Denmark, I dont even want the rest of it.
I saw the need for this book in the vehemence of the thanks I received that day. The myth of youth as the best time of life burdens the young and makes us all dread getting older, as though there is only diminishment of lifes bounty as the decades pass. I realized a book would be welcomed that proclaims the opposite: Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical.
Ten years have passed. I have been gathering my own life experiences and that of friends already a few decades into the richness of being elders. As a social worker, I have been listening to older peoples stories for almost thirty years, hearing them attest to later life as the source of ever-expanding inner and outer discovery. Now in my mid-fifties, I see that my personal and professional lives have combined to give me a broad vantage point. This book merges my personal testimony with a vivid sampling of elders voices garnered from diverse sourcesinterviews, therapy sessions, conversations with older friends, research articles, films, blogs, books, radio vignettes, and chance encounters on buses and in cafs.
Life Gets Better is a counterbalance to the negative and stultifying stereotypes about aging that constrain everyones spirit. Using elders personal accounts, I show the worship of youth to have been a colossal error. I depict the ways we grow in self-knowledge as we get older, how we derive valuable insight from our mistakes and misadventures, and how we gain confidence with each difficulty we surmount. The book is adorned with colorful portraits of the inner freedoms that come with getting older, especially those that stem from feeling less constrained by other peoples judgments and expectations.
People in their twenties and thirties may particularly value this chance to satisfy their curiosity about what it is like to grow old. Later life can seem to them like another universe entirely, and thus they want to know what really goes on. Having seen at least a few radiant older people, they hope to become privy to the secrets of aging well and a life well lived. Those who are struggling with questions of identity and meaning will grab hold of what older people have discovered in their own quest to construct good lives.
People in their forties and fifties want to feel the animation of viewing midlife as part of a grand progression, rather than a sorrowful dwindling. Having already tasted new liberties in leaving their youth behind, they crave the chance to have these gains defined and clearly articulated. The elders depicted here affirm for middle-aged and older people that the personal flourishing they have experienced actually comes with getting older and thus can be sustained.
It is time for all of us to discard our negative assumptions about aging, individually and collectively. Too often, we see that old lady over there, rather than a woman who has gotten older. When it comes to ourselves, we feel both distinctive and ageless inside. We each want to be seen as an individual, rather than one of them. We find it offensive to be thrust into a category called the elderly, simply on the basis of how long we have been alive. This book is full of whimsy and idiosyncrasy, the myriad ways we come into our own, as well as the universal truths that unite us across the lifespan.
A woman responded with enthusiasm to an article about the emotional benefits of getting older:
