Dear Friends,
Wondrous and Difficult
In our mid-seventies, Tim and I watched our peers struggle to downsize their possessions and become increasingly overwhelmed by home ownership. We began a painful but unsuccessful conversation about moving to a smaller house; we eventually dropped it. We had spent forty-plus years in our home together, and we loved the house, pond, garden, and peonies covering the burial site of our three dogs. Then, I met a woman struggling with her anger toward her mother, despite having had a good relationship for most of their lives. Her mother had died two years ago at ninety-one in the house where she’d spent most of her life. She saved all her books, clothing, and old medication bottles, and despite her serious heart condition, she refused to wear a monitor that could notify people of an “event.” One day, she fell over, lay on the floor for four days, and died. Her daughter was furious about her helplessness over her mother’s death and the two years it took to clear out the house.
Moving into our eighties, I realized that we needed to learn from others’ examples and make our aging as easy for us and our family as possible. We were fit and healthy and lived full lives, but the aging and slowing down were real. I remembered a line about the power of choosing rather than yielding from The Trouble with Angels, an old movie. In the spirit of choosing, we resumed our conversation and decided to move to a retirement community to be close to family and make our lives easier. When we got on the waiting list at Mary’s Woods, a magnificent community on forty acres in Lake Oswego, Oregon, they told us it might be a two-year wait for an open spot. A few weeks later, we received a call—a spot opened, and we had to move in three months to claim it. So, we began the overwhelming job of moving (quickly), choosing what to toss, gift, sell, donate, and pack. We put our house on the market and moved out three weeks later.
Leaving our home was wrenching. As we placed the last item in the storage pod on the final day, years and memories felt like they were being ripped from my heart and soul. Returning to the house the next morning, however, I felt something light and new—a sense of freedom.
That sense of lightness and freedom did not last. Tim, our two doodles, and I lived in hotels for weeks, waiting for October 7, when our new home will be ready. The situation has been wondrous and difficult.
I wondered if we were crazy to tear up a life that we had loved and go somewhere new at eighty. I missed our home and garden, worried about whether or not the neighbor was feeding our koi, and we couldn’t find anything—never knew if the item we needed was in a pod or in the old house or in one of the suitcases we were carting around. We spent an hour hunting for Tim’s jacket for his trip to New Zealand in August, the Kiwi winter. After he left, I moved hotels again, carrying bags and suitcases while laughing and laughing at the moving pile of bags and suitcases I’d become.
I remembered William Bridges’ book Managing Transitions, which discusses the psychological and emotional aspects of dealing with change. Bridges writes that a key part of any transition is acknowledging what we are leaving behind or losing, and what we might keep. Each beginning starts with an ending, and a bridge forms between where you were and where you want to be. The bridge is the uncomfortable, in-between time where we’re no longer in the old, but still not where we want to get to. Bridges calls this the “messy middle.”
We were definitely in the messy middle.
I visited Rancho La Puerta for a reset while Tim visited family in Wellington, New Zealand. Serendipitously, Chip Conley, the best-selling author, hospitality entrepreneur, and Modern Elder Academy founder, was also here, teaching about navigating transitions and changes. Chip said, “Change is situational and circumstantial. Transition is psychological and maybe even spiritual. When you’re going through transition, you’re doing something fundamentally inside.”
Framing our move as a choice—or as a spiritual recognition that we are moving to a new stage of life that requires new ways of living—has changed the feeling of being tossed into a messy middle into something that feels like a grand adventure.
