My close friend Karen recently delighted our group of longtime friends with unexpected news. She and her husband Joe were going to be grandparents. Of course we were thrilled to welcome them into this joyful club. It’s just that none of us – including seventysomething Karen – thought she’d ever be heading to a baby shower for either of her long-married kids.
But, after 12 years of marriage, her 42-year-old son and 40-year-old daughter-in-law proved that life sometimes offers up what one is not … expecting.
That wasn’t the only surprise. Aside from shared laughs about the dramatic changes coming to this sweetly clueless couple, Karen noted that she was, realistically, “doing the math.”
Don’t I know it, sister. What I didn’t know was that anybody else thought that way.
I hope you’re nodding in recognition at this point, but more likely you’re wondering what the dirty diaper I’m talking about. So, here’s the deal:
Until I hit about …senior-discount-day age … I never thought much about what was ahead in a remaining-years-on-the-planet sort of way. Now I find myself thinking about my shrinking number of birthdays all the time.
My precious granddaughter is 4. Will I be in the crowd to witness her college graduation (assuming anybody in her generation is still jumping on that bandwagon)?
Will I live to see her marry (assuming anybody in her generation is still jumping on THAT bandwagon)?
All right, Will I live to see her get her first tattoo?
It’s not just her I’m obsessed with. I’m paying acute attention to my own head, shoulders, knees and toes. How many more years can I run? How many more years until I can’t drive at night? What’s the likelihood at this point that I’ll ever travel Down Under?
I know I’m being dramatic. I know that I’m already luckier than many, including my dad of blessed memory who didn’t live to see any grandkids.
Desperately needing someone to snap me out of my pity party, I turned to Dr. John Brose. As I hoped, he let me off the hook — and offered a wise antidote to my self-absorption.
Dr. Brose is a licensed clinical psychologist in his early 70s and a national authority on aging and the behavioral health of older adults.
My math question didn’t faze him.
“We’re always – all of us — doing the math,” said Dr. Brose, clinical director for the Minneapolis-based Associated Clinic of Psychology. “This is a lifelong reality of being a human being.”
It’s just that we do the math differently depending on where we are in our lives, he said. Dr. Brose has young clients who can’t wait to be 16 so they can drive; to be 18, so they can graduate, to be 20something to find a job, buy a house, start a family.
They are doing what he calls “counting up.” But somewhere in our 50s or 60s, we begin “counting down.” We’re no longer in the car’s front seat looking ahead at limitless miles of possibilities. We’re staring into that dismal rearview mirror where most of our life is firmly planted.
Still, I didn’t expect the advice he suggested to me:
Stop having birthdays. Well, not in the way you think.
What Dr. Brose meant was that I stop celebrating my birthdays in the traditional way and rebrand them as annual “Wisdom Days.” Unlike birthdays, where the numbers increase as our capacities and opportunities shrink, Wisdom Days celebrate the magical expansion of gifts that only come with age.
These gifts might include a deeper sense of gratitude for small moments, or well-earned humility because we have less to prove, or more clarity about how – and with whom — we want to share our limited time and financial resources. No matter how many years we have left, we can make each year, and all the days within them, so much richer.
“You could make yourself crazy thinking, for example, that you’ll never see your grandchild’s grandchild,” Dr. Brose said. “I guarantee that you won’t see that! But focusing on what you don’t have takes the juice out of what you do.”
Heard, as the kids say. So I’m going to take his advice and move forward doing the only math that makes sense anymore:
For my first Wisdom Day celebration, will I need a full sheet cake? Or will a half-sheet suffice?
Gail Rosenblum last wrote for Minnesota Good Age about “Rethinking the Bucket List.” She is a retired journalist and author of “A Hundred Lives Since Then: Essays on Motherhood, Marriage, Mortality and More,” (Nodin Press) and co-author of the upcoming “Sea Salt Eatery: Recipes to Enjoy Year-Round,” (University of Minnesota Press). We may earn a commission via some of the links on this page at no cost to you. Thank you for helping to support our website.