Unfinished Business

Our unswept deck is littered with rain-soaked catkins and tulip tree petals. My inbox entices me with fascinating genealogical insights and well-written articles on current politics, while lilting poems offer to lift me above mundane daily concerns. I cannot catch up; I will never finish these—or the myriad other projects that bring me joy.

“Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun,” wrote Christina Rossetti. Indeed, any project started is a sign of hope. Buying a bag of 100 tulip bulbs and planting 40 is infinitely better than buying none at all. Worrying about completion is entirely misplaced for those of us over eighty. Instead, the inspiration to begin is a welcome sign of engagement with life.

It is easy to linger in the warmth of an easy chair. It takes courage and energy to engage with the world each day—to start a book or a project with no guarantee of reaching the end. Grace Paley offered perhaps the finest advice on the art of growing older: “The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.” Maya Angelou echoed this, noting that “life loves the liver of it.”

If you watch enough news, it is easy to lose hope. For us elders, death draws closer each day; reminders of our mortality are inescapable as friends and family slip away. The pains and irritations of aging are constant prompts that life is fleeting. And yet, hope is fundamentally human. We realize hope simply by getting up, by buying groceries for the coming week, by starting puzzles, and by making appointments months in advance.

Hope is not a passive waiting for time to pass. It is planning, starting, and doing. Recent psychological studies assign hope as a factor in improving mental health and increasing self-esteem. Other studies suggest increasing hope can improve daily functioning and is a protective factor against posttraumatic stress disorder.

None of these activities grant us control over our fate, nor will they delay the inevitable. But life is opportunity, engagement, reflection, and joy. How miraculous it is to have lived long enough to truly savor it!