“Sarah lived one hundred years and twenty years and seven years.”
Genesis 23:1
Why does the Torah split up the tally of Sarah’s years into three parts [“one hundred years,” “twenty years,” and “seven years”]? To tell us that every day of her life was the equivalent of them all. At the age of one hundred years she was like age twenty in strength, and at age twenty she was like age seven in modesty and purity; at age seven she was like age twenty in intelligence, and at age twenty she was like age one hundred in righteousness.
Midrash HaGadol
The Torah describes Sarah’s life in three stages. We know few details, but we are told that she lived a long first stage as a courageous journeyer and a beautiful, dutiful wife and partner; a shorter second stage, in which, very late in her life, she bears a child and guides the destiny of the Jewish people as a protective mother; and a third stage, in which she is an old and doting mother who suffers a terrible loss of power and love. According to the midrash, the shock of Abraham’s taking Isaac off to be sacrificed actually killed her.
The midrash also teaches that every day of Sarah’s life had the same inner quality, reflected the same soul. Every day mattered—the last years as much as the first.
We, too, live our lives out in stages. We are children, adolescents, and young adults, adults with children and with complex family relationships, careers, and serious interests. Then what? Most of us fear the next stage. We give it the generic label of “old age” and see it as decline—as our youth-obsessed culture has taught us to do. We see loss, pain, and loneliness, the burden of caring for aged parents or of being dependent on children. So we try to avoid aging by struggling not to change: striving to look young (even with economic and physical costs), claiming that 70 is the new 50, working as hard as we can at what we have been doing, sticking to our opinions.
Now is the time to pick up these threads, to make new choices.
I imagine that many of you know what I am talking about. I kept dreading those big birthdays—40, 50, 60. But I didn’t really panic until I turned 69: “Oh, no, there is the horizon! I can see it clearly, even though I don’t know exactly how far away it is.” I mentally piled creaky joints on top of irretrievable names on top of forgetting to turn off the oven—making towers of imminent senility. My friends and I would laugh at ourselves, but the shadow of fear grew darker. One friend said to me, short of breath, “Time just keeps going faster and faster—like the end of a roll of toilet paper. It will run out before we know it!”
Opportunity for Growth
And yet I also knew there was a way to view these coming years as a rich opportunity for growth in all dimensions of mind, body, and soul. When my husband died young, I found my direction in the Torah’s command to “choose life.” I affirm at Yizkor each year that there is a “time for everything under the sun.” And I have always found this verse from Psalm 90 to be powerful: “Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
My first step of exploration of the future, natural to a Jewish woman, was to read. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s book The Third Chapter reinforced my intuition that I was entering a new chapter in my life, rather than dwindling away:
For men and women in the Third Chapter, the process of learning something new feels familiar and strange, exciting and terrifying, mature and childlike, both in character and out of body, like returning home and setting out on an adventure to an unknown destination. That is true whether we are talking about learning a new skill, craft or art form—like learning to speak a foreign language, play jazz piano or become a playwright—or whether we are learning to express a broader and deeper emotional repertoire—freeing us from the bondage of rigid requirements of decorum forged in our childhood—or whether we are learning to grieve for the death of a loved one—learning to make ourselves vulnerable and not retreat from intimacy—or whether we are talking about shifting the focus of our energy and priorities from solitary, individualistic, and competitive, to community-based and collaborative; from making it up the ladder of success to making an imprint on the lives of others.1
It turns out that a lot is known now about the elements of “successful aging.” Among the findings in Dr. George Vaillant’s Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development are that:
It is not the bad things that happen to us that doom us; it is the good people who happen to us at any age that facilitate enjoyable old age … that healing relationships are facilitated by a capacity for gratitude, for forgiveness and for taking people inside … that learning to play and create after retirement and learning to gain younger friends as we lose older ones add more to life’s enjoyment than retirement income . . . and that objective good physical health was less important to successful aging than subjective good health. By this I mean that it is all right to be ill as long as you do not feel sick.2
Vaillant calls success “the ability to live with joy past 80.” This “second adulthood”—when we have energy, experience, wisdom, and more time—presents much possibility. To learn, to discover our deepest authentic self, and to begin to do things—big and little—that we have always wanted to do. Most of us have lived lives of caring for others, supporting others, making choices that, of necessity, limited possibilities for personal growth. And mostly, we are glad we made those choices. But in the process, we have inevitably denied important parts of ourselves.
Now is the time to pick up these threads, to make new choices: Do we have to keep working? Do we want to keep working? What relationships would we love to cultivate and nurture? Which ones would we like to let go? Are we spending too much time with our grandchildren? Or not enough? What have we always wanted to know how to do? What risks did we not dare take? Are we caring well for our bodies? What injustices do we want to tackle? What has happened to our relationship with God?
Making Changes
With this perspective, I have made a lot of changes. I realized I could retire from my job—for my sake and for the sake of the organization. I decided that I could be brave enough to attempt some kind of memoir writing. I can spend more time in nature, take more photographs. I have chosen the two communal boards that I care about most, and let the others go. I make more time for meditation, prayer, and study. I can go to movies and museums during the day on weekdays. I exercise more. Above all, I have begun to learn to say no to things I don’t really want to do!
A wonderful new part of my life is the Wise Aging groups I have helped bring together—people my age who are trying to figure out their path through this stage of life now that we have reached 60, 65, 70, or 75. We study Jewish and secular texts, we meditate, we share stories, we protest, we laugh, and we eat. And each of us cries at some points. For sad things happen, and more frequently now. What we are learning about loss is that intimate, trusted community makes it easier to bear. And that, although we cannot control much of what may happen in our future, we can strengthen our spirit—becoming more loving, more generous, more grateful, more forgiving, more patient, and more joyful.
As older women, we have wisdom and experience to contribute to our communities and our world. In a youth-dominated culture, we may feel invisible at times, but we are truly powerful and have much to teach. We need to take our place—as souls, as individuals, and as role models. And as Sarahs, making each day count.