Responsibility Helps Women Age Gracefully

On the day her husband died, Genevieve Burke had an experience of profound collapse. “A foggy spiral emitted from me and swirled into the room where he was lying,” she told me. “The sensation was so strong I clutched my center to hold myself together. It left me feeling weak and empty.”

For almost the whole decade of her 50s, Genevieve made it her job to keep her disabled husband alive. Now, having “failed,” she felt she had nothing more to live for.

The life that doesn’t have a sense of responsibility to something broader than oneself is not much of a life. But to practice it intelligently, we need to understand that we can be responsible only in matters open to our control - our own choices and actions, no one else’s.

One of the meanings of living responsibly is knowing what we are and are not responsible for and drawing boundaries. Women like Genevieve, who suspend their own lives indefinitely in order to nurse spouses or relatives, may unconsciously be tying themselves up so they don’t have to face making the next passage themselves.

The reality was she had to support herself now. Genevieve was, of course, dubious that anyone would hire a 60-year-old woman; nevertheless, she applied for a secretarial position at the state university. “Somehow I found an assertive streak in me,” she said, “and within a few days I was hired and began my new life.”

The shock of being in the working world quickly galvanized Genevieve into realizing that her real responsibility was to find out who she was, not merely an extension of her husband or her children. She took credit courses at the university and self-help classes at the community center, and within a few years she progressed from being a secretary to a business manager to an administrative director.

Now, along with two part-time jobs, she is a columnist for a new local magazine and is exhilarated by learning to express herself in prose at the age of 72. Her sense of time is altered utterly. She loves being with friends and family but also cherishes being alone. She is not afraid of dying; rather, she finds it imperative to live life. It is useful to look ahead to the most vital women of age and see how they have met the challenges of later-life passages. Cecelia Hurwich did a study over time on women in their 70s, 80s and 90s for her doctorate at the Center for Psychological Studies in Albany, Calif. The women selected had remained active and creative through unusually productive Second Adulthoods and well into old age. What were their secrets?

“They live very much in the present but they always have plans for the future,” Dr. Hurwich said. They had mastered the art of “letting go” of their egos gracefully so they could concentrate their attention on a few fine-tuned priorities. They continued to live in their own homes but involved themselves in community or worldly projects that they found of consuming interest. Close contact with nature was important to them, as was maintaining a multigenerational network of friends.

Surprisingly, these zestful women were not in unusually good physical shape. They had their fair share of the diseases of age - arthritis, loss of hearing, impaired vision - but believing they still had living to do, they concentrated on what they could do rather than on what they had lost. Over the 10-year course of the study, most were widowed. Like so many other hardships they had endured, they turned this one into a source of growth rather than defeat.

Every one of them acknowledged the need for some form of physical intimacy - not, of course, just with a male. It might be with women friends, grandchildren, young people, but they found it was essential to have someone to touch, to hold, to share affection with. They found love through sharing the most natural of pleasures: music, gardening, hiking, traveling. Several spoke enthusiastically of having active and satisfying sex lives. One woman, asked how she felt about the automatic assumption that women in their 70s and 80s lost all interest in sex, answered after a long pause:

“This is how it is for me. I’ve become a vegetarian, but every once in a while I want a piece of red meat. And I go out and get it and eat it and enjoy it.”

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate