I found a page of responses I wrote down a number of years ago when I was thinking about my Age Book that became Endings. I’m not sure where they came from or whether some of the words were answers to my questions or to someone else’s. Here, for your thoughts.
*Give yourself permission (this can be hard, depending on how you were brought up).
*Face your choices (or make new ones).
Who would you like to have dinner with? At that time, whenever it was, I replied Isaac Dinesen and Caryl Churchill. I don’t feel the same way now. Now I would like to have a martini with Douglas Coupland, and a Scotch on my balcony with my friend and mentor, Richard Teleky.
*How do your feelings about death influence the way you lead your life? That is not my kind of question. Why is it there?
*Does anyone listen to old people—or young ones? (I mean very young.)
* “Women are not given names they can grow old with.” (Marilyn French) I mean, look at mine. Betty Jane (Betty-Jane; Bettyjane; Bettijane) is a cute name for a six- or even a nine-year-old but not for a mature old dowager like me.
* If you knew you were going to die suddenly, would you change anything about the way youi are now living? I think that’s from The Book of Questions (Gregory Stock, Workman Publishing, 1987; revised, 2013)
* Make a list of things you want or need, and write the reasons you want them in 25 words or less (fewer).
*How much do you try to live now as you think you will one day wish you had lived? This is sort of a variation on an idea in Viktor E. Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning (Simon and Schuster, 1959) Live your life as if you already had—something like that. I wrote about that in Endings. So something did make its way into a later form.
How do know what I mean until I see what I say?