Aging,irony,and wisdom: On the narrative psychology of later life

The physical level

Contrary to Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, human beings are embodied selves. With advancing years, however, and the conditions they carry with them on the physical front, the bond between body and self can undergo a shift. A gap can open up between them. Less readily will our bodies do our bidding. We dream of parachuting from a plane, braving rapids in a raft, or doing any other of the daring deeds we’ve added to our bucket list, yet our jittery joints and weakening limbs assure us this will never be. Increasingly, our ailments and impairments render our bodies uncooperative—our nemesis almost, the antagonist (versus protagonist) in the story of our life. “Nothing in us works well,” complains Florida Scott-Maxwell (1968), writing in her 80s; “our flagging bodies … have become unreliable. We have to make an effort to do the simplest things” (p. 35). Such impairments, especially those affecting our sex lives, often figure in the humor which aging can inspire. While it is true that many aging jokes are blatantly ageist, many are enjoyed—if not generated—by older adults themselves. Such humor supplies them with a welcome chuckle and puts things in perspective. It helps them rise above their situation by mediating the message that age is not the unmitigated tragedy which, physically, it can seem. As such, it reaffirms their dignity by affording them an affectionate detachment from their infirmity and mortality.

The social level

With age, the gap can grow greater in our minds between our immediate concerns and those that drive the wider world. With spouses, friends, and others dying off, we experience a gradual disengagement from the society we’ve identified with to date (Achenbaum & Bengston, 1994). The world story continues on, so to speak, while our own role within it grows ever more minor. With this can come a growing sense of alienation—a sense exacerbated by diminished independence and (eventually perhaps) relocation to an institution. Awareness of disparity can also come as aging pushes us to step back from the lives we’ve lived till now and discern our several roles along the way (sibling, partner, parent); to appreciate how “one man in his time plays many parts” (Shakespeare, 1623/1993, Act II, Scene VII).

For some of us, the ironic stance arises as we assess our various assumptions about ourselves, or Life, or Love—a theme with added relevance given that over 50 percent of older adults display a “dismissive” attitude when asked about the importance of intimate relationships in their lives (Webster, 1997). It might even be argued that older persons from impoverished populations are inherently more practiced at experiencing life ironically, given their lifelong awareness of disparities between the have-nots and the haves. Such a possibility bears considering in connection with studies of exceptional “resilience” among members of minorities (Becker & Newsom, 2004).

The developmental level

Development in general, it can be argued, is fueled by awareness of the gaps between the realities of our lives and the illusions or assumptions we’ve embraced along the way. For psychologist Roger Gould (1978), development is “a [lifelong] process of shedding a whole network of assumptions, rules, fantasies, irrationalities, and rigidities that tie us to our childhood consciousness” (p. 11). Specifically, it involves moving beyond “four major false assumptions” (p. 39)—four grand narratives, as it were—namely: (a) we’ll always live with our parents and be their child, (b) they’ll always be there to help when we can’t do something on our own, (c) their simplified version of our complicated inner reality is correct, and (d) there is no real death or evil in the world.

Even though “by the time we enter adulthood,” says Gould (1978), “we know that these assumptions are factually incorrect, … they retain hidden control of our adult experience until significant events reveal them as emotional as well as intellectual fallacies” (p. 39). Such a view is pertinent to development in later adulthood too, when the losses and declines that aging carries with it on the physical front can disabuse us of a further two illusions: “my body will always be my friend” and “I will live forever.” For Gould, development goes hand in hand with disillusionment. “Disllusion is the chief characteristic of old age,” notes Schopenhauer in a somewhat darker mood, “for by that time the fictions are gone which gave life its charm and spurred on the mind to activity; the splendors of the world have proved null and vain; its pomp, grandeur, and magnificence are faded” (cited in Cole & Winkler, 1994, p. 43).

Jane Loevinger (1976) proposes that what she calls ego development is characterized from stage to stage (though progress is by no means automatic nor linked specifically to age) by a widening gap between self-centered orientations on our lives and more other-centered ones instead. At these more altruistic stages, we can accept that the storyworlds of other selves are as intricate as our own, and can view our lives more easily in the context of those who preceded us in the past and will succeed us in the future. Working with Loevinger’s model in researching the “narrative complexity” of people’s self-accounts, McAdams (1988) has found, for instance, “a significant relationship … between ego stage and irony” (p. 125). Both “men and women at higher ego stages,” he says, “construct more complex (differentiated) life stories” which “reveal more variety in plot forms, typically integrating a number of disparate actions” (p. 128). Similar to Loevinger, Lawrence Kohlberg (1984) speaks of moral development as a process of progressive “de-centering.” And in terms of faith development, the developmental journey traces a similar trajectory from lower stages to higher ones in James Fowler’s (1981) six-stage schema, with Stage 5, in particular, marked by “the rise of the ironic imagination” (p. 198).

Erik Erikson, speculating on the later stages of psychosocial development, captures the kind of ironizing trend—the awareness of paradox and contradiction, of unanswerable questions and uncloseable gaps—that I’m arguing comes as second nature in the second half of life. In Vital Involvement in Old Age, the book he wrote with his wife Joan and colleague Helen Kivnick near the end of his life, this is expressed as follows:

Burdened by physical limitations and confronting a personal future that may seem more inescapably finite than ever before, those nearing the end of the life cycle find themselves struggling to accept the inalterability of the past and the unknowability of the future, to acknowledge possible mistakes and omissions, and to balance consequent despair with the sense of overall integrity that is essential to carrying on. (Erikson, Erikson, & Kivnick, 1986, p. 56)

It is Erikson et al.’s definition of wisdom, in particular, that captures best the essence of the ironizing trend: “Wisdom is detached concern with life itself, in the face of death itself. It maintains and learns to convey the integrity of experience, in spite of the decline of bodily and mental functions” (pp. 37–38). In the final pages of his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Carl Jung gives expression to the complex state of heart which this definition envisions:

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. … There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. (p. 358)

The cognitive level

Fueling the emergence of an ironic stance in later life, and impelling our movement through the stages of development (ego, moral, etc.), may be changes in the wiring of our brains themselves. Shifts in the functioning of our left and right hemispheres, proposes gerontologist Gene Cohen (2005), are responsible not just for a better balance between our thoughts and our feelings over time, but for an increased capacity for “postformal thought” (pp. 36–38).

Paralleling the rise of postmodern consciousness on the societal front, postformal thought (sometimes called “dialectical thought”) is a mode of cognition we grow more capable of in later life. To an extent less natural at earlier stages of development, such a mode enables us to tolerate the contradictions and ambiguities that run through our lives, to appreciate multiple sides to any issue, and to hold the yin and yang of things in tension (see Ardelt, 1997). It also equips us to accept the relativity of our knowledge, including our self-knowledge. At the same time, it renders us more open to myth, metaphor, and story, and to the multiple interpretations such ways of knowing inspire. Based on her research into “how younger and older adults interpret text,” psychologist Gisela Labouvie-Vief (1990) observes, for instance, that the older reader “construes text not only logically but also psychologically and symbolically” (p. 69). Thus her conclusion that, in later life, “the symbolic emerges … in a uniquely mature form,” and is accepted “as an independent source of knowing in its own right” (p. 74).

The spiritual level

The view of wisdom as “detached concern with life itself in the face of death itself” (Erikson et al., 1986, p. 37) speaks to the role that is played in the evolution of our consciousness by awareness of our mortality, by mindfulness of the gap between the limits of our aging body and the yearnings of our “ageless self” (Kaufman, 1986). This view of wisdom suggests a further level on which the ironizing trend pertains: the spiritual level. Again, I draw from Florida Scott-Maxwell, whose musings in The Measure of My Days (1968) reflect an ambivalence that is similar to Jung’s. “Age,” she begins, “is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high. If it is a long defeat it is also a victory” (p. 5). And in the closing pages, she voices the sense of possibility amid uncertainty, of adventure almost, that later life can bring. “We [older adults] are people to whom something important is about to happen,” she writes. “All is uncharted and uncertain, we seem to lead the way into the unknown” (p. 139).

Lars Tornstam (1996) proposes the term gerotranscendence for what Scott-Maxwell is describing. He sees it as a stage of development which emerges in very late life especially in which the boundaries between Life and Death become increasingly ambiguous, as do those between Self and Other, Past and Future. We experience ourselves as living in “the centre of the moment” (Waxman, 1997), taking one day at a time. And we sense that we are living on the edge, before a horizon that broadens out beyond our personal concerns to take in those of past and future generations, indeed of the planet as a whole. We feel ourselves to be living in a cosmic context even, in which the very atoms of our bodies are as ancient as the universe itself. “We are all billion-year-olds, no matter when we were born,” notes biogerontologist Leonard Hayflick (1994), “and celebrating birthdays is absurd” (p. 18).

Concurrent with gerotranscendence—hard evidence for which, admittedly, has yet to be provided—is the trend observed among many older adults to become disenchanted (if not disillusioned) with the grand narratives of organized religion. Even if they continue to participate in religious observances and find meaning in the symbols of their home tradition, they develop a more “take it or leave it” attitude to particular teachings (Bianchi, 2005). In short, they are drawn to spirituality instead, which is seen to be broader in scope, as concerned with “the universe story” (Swimme & Berry, 1992). With greater interest in spirituality comes greater openness to any number of enduring questions to which the pat answers of religion can seem increasingly restrictive. There comes a greater capacity for “living the uncertainty and celebrating it” (Blanchard-Fields & Norris, 1995, p. 116).

The biographical level

On several levels, aging prompts in us an ironizing trend. This trend is pivotal to adapting to the challenges of later life, pivotal to growing old and not just getting old, and pivotal to wisdom. It is on the biographical level, however, that the roots of this trend run the deepest. If selves are embodied, then they are storied too, and amid their storied complexity lies ample opportunity for irony to emerge.

A narrative perspective on aging is centered on the conviction that human beings are hermeneutical beings. Compared to other species with which we share the planet (or so it would seem), we are forever employing language and imagination to make sense of what is going on, which is of course where irony enters in, for irony and meaning are intimate companions (Prickett, 2002, p. 221). With each meaning we glean from a given event, a dozen others can be gleaned in hindsight (Freeman, 2010). Awareness of the unfixedness of meaning is ironic by definition. Given, though, that a principal mode of making meaning is through spinning stories, big and small (Bamberg, 2006), then the potential for ironic awareness is woven ever tighter into the fabric of experience.

My thesis in this article is that, though a potential within us all as storied creatures and though instilled on other levels besides the biographical, ironic awareness can be—should be—nurtured even more. Indeed, its intentional cultivation in later life, when we tend to have more time to commit to it anyway, not to mention more texistence on which to reflect, can enrich our relationship with ourselves, as with others, in important ways, contributing a quality of resilience and openness to our experience of the world (Randall, 2013).

The activity of telling our story—which is to say, getting it outside ourselves where we can more easily examine it—is central to furthering the ironizing trend that aging will be seeding in us anyway. The more intent we are on living the examined life, the more ironic our sense of self will grow. That said, “telling our story” is scarcely a straightforward endeavor, nor one which all of us will have the energy or encouragement to undertake. When we do, however, the experience affords us a bigger picture of our life, a deeper appreciation of our achievements, an affectionate acceptance of our defeats, and a compassionate assessment of ourselves as having done the best we could with the hand Fate dealt us and the conditions in which our lives were shaped. In the course of facilitating “ego integrity,” to use Erikson’s term, it permits “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions” (Erikson, 1963, p. 268).

In telling our story—whether orally to a therapist or friend, or in writing, as a memoir or a life review—the ironizing trend is intensified, for it makes us mindful of what author Sharon Butala (2005) calls “the memorist’s quandary.” The memoirist’s quandary “begins with choosing the story the memoir is going to tell” (p. 47) and “includes the discovery of all the many selves, all the many possibilities of stories, from which one has to choose” (p. 49).

Kate de Medeiros’s research on life-writing groups with older adults (2007, 2011) sheds light on Butala’s quandary, and points to the positive possibilities it holds for healing and growth. Members of the group are invited to write about particular experiences—especially poignant ones or painful ones, for instance—using a range of literary genres: first-person narration or third-person story, a poem or a letter. “Using different forms [to explore the same episode] opens up different possibilities for the narrator and allows different types of stories to be told” (de Medeiros & Lagay, 2000, p. 14).

Exercises of this type exploit our capacity for postformal thought, for looking at things from multiple angles and not being troubled by the open-endedness of the process. Quite the opposite: They can excite us with the thrill of narrative freedom and entice us to go deeper. They constitute what Sally Chandler and Ruth Ray (2002) call “dynamic reminiscence,” or what researchers in the Netherlands call “creative reminiscence.” Creative reminiscence encourages older adults “to create and discover metaphors, images, and stories that symbolically represent the subjective and inner meaning or their lives” (Bohlmeijer, Valenkamp, Westerhof, Smit, & Cuijpers, 2005, p. 302), the result often being a reduction in depression and improvement in their sense of mastery (see Bohlmeijer, Kramer, Smit, Onrust, & Marwijk, 2009). In a similar vein, programs of “guided autobiography,” like those psychologists Jim Birren and Donna Deutchman have pioneered, invite participants to employ “creative metaphors and poetry” to “express … indirectly that which might be difficult to express directly in more conventional ways.” In the process, “a person can gain distance from the emotionally difficult and develop an increased sense of mastery” (Birren & Deutchman, 1991, p. 81).

Strategies such as guided autobiography, creative reminiscence, and life-writing with different literary forms allow us to expand our stories and examine them, to tell our lives and read them, more or less at once. As with any text, literary or lived, the activity is intrinsically ironic (Randall & McKim, 2008, p. 86), given the intricate “transaction” (Rosenblatt, 1978) between author, text, and reader, and the potential for multiple meanings that’s involved. Such strategies amplify awareness of the narrative complexity of our inner worlds and accelerate the ironizing trend by sensitizing us to a range of intertwining matters:

Thickening our stories

Even if the process of aging itself pushes us to be increasingly ironic, that push can be resisted. Many older adults can arrive in later life with an impoverished self, a thin inner story, a restricted range of themes, a narrow sense of narrative identity. To that extent, they are narratively foreclosed. They reach retirement, for instance, with little real sense of where to go from here, or of who they are, beyond what they used to be or or used to do. The task of turning inward and taking stock of their unique life-narrative can thus be somewhat daunting. When asked to tell about their lives, the result can be a too-neat, too-consistent, too-formulaic tale with little by way of “differentiation” (McAdams, 2001, p. 663); little apparent sense that things might have gone differently instead, that alternative interpretations of pivotal events always lie between the lines. “That’s my story,” such versions announce, “and I’m sticking to it.”

Processes such as dynamic reminiscence, guided autobiography, or life-story-writing through multiple genres can widen out our stories and take us deeper into our inner worlds. They can sensitize us to the unexplored complexity within: the various characters, subplots, and meanings that run through memory’s messy text, or lie beneath it in our narrative unconscious … or our dreams. And amid this complexity, we discern the unresolved themes, untold stories, and unlived lives we carry around inside us. We realize how intricate and intriguing we really are, how thick or “textured” are our narratives (Terrill & Gullifer, 2010), and the wealth of “narrative reserves” (Freeman, 2010, p. 123) on which we are able to draw. This realization, I am suggesting, is a key ingredient in the personal resilience with which to greet—and grow through—the challenges of later life, not be beaten down because of them nor driven to despair (Randall, 2013).

Opening our stories

The realization of how intricate we are from a narrative perspective is an antidote for the “narrative of decline” (Gullette, 2004) that our inner stories of our aging selves can frequently reflect. It is thus a remedy for narrative foreclosure, the conviction that though our life continues on, our story is all but over. By deliberately developing our ironic sensibility, permitting us to engage in textual play as regards our own life stories, the hold of the parsimonious narrative we may have been living by to date is progressively loosened. We get outside the story, and thus outside ourselves, in the process experiencing a measure of “re-biographing” (Rotenberg, 1987), “restorying” (Kenyon & Randall, 1997), “re-versioning” (Gearing, 1999, p. 51), or re-genre-ation. As gerontologist Harry Berman (1994) writes, reflecting on the role of keeping a journal in our development in later life, “our horizon of self-understanding shifts.” As it does, “it may become apparent that we were not in the middle of the story we thought we were in the middle of.” For instance,

perhaps we thought our life was a tragedy and all along, unbeknownst to us, it was a romance. Or perhaps we thought our life was almost over, at least in terms of the future holding anything new, and it turned out there was a lot more to it. (p. 180)

In such a case, we press past the perception of aging as unmitigated tragedy—as a cruel joke played on us by indifferent Fate—and catch a vision of “age as adventure” (Friedan, 1993, pp. 571–612).

By thus opening our stories up, the cultivation of an ironic stance positions us to appreciate “the mystery in my story,” as a student of mine expressed it once, and allows a glimpse of later life, for all its limitations, as fraught with possibility. Scott-Maxwell (1968) again: “I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery. If they say—‘of what?’ I can only answer, ‘We must each find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be discovery’” (p. 142).

Lightening our stories

Another feature of an ironic stance is that we experience our lives within a grander narrative frame. As hinted already, we begin to experience our stories as humble sub-plots in the broader cosmic story. Such a story encompasses the generations that stretch behind us in the past (a sense acquired through genealogy, or researching our “roots”) and those that will follow us in the future, whose fortunes we hope, in some small way, to impact for the good—the sense of generativity (see McAdams, 2006). It enables us to “place [ourselves] in perspective among those generations now living, and to accept [our] place in an infinite historical progression” (Erikson et al., 1986, p. 56). In this way, an ironic stance releases us from the illusion of indispensability, of the all-importance of our personal concerns or contributions. “It’s only life,” irony lets us say. As such, it helps prepare us for the final stage, when we can let our stories go (Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 272–281).

Linking our stories

One of the members of de Medeiros’s memoir groups noted that the act of reading to the others a piece she had written about her past was as important in her healing as writing it in the first place, and that “the sharing” which ensued was key (Cole & de Medeiros, 2001). When we share our stories deeply, the process opens us not only to the complexity of our own internal worlds, but to that of other’s worlds too, and so facilitates a quality of connection that is uniquely possible perhaps in later life alone: a soul connection, made all the richer for the thickness of our respective narratives. Once more, Ruth Ray (2000): “‘[W]ise’ people watch themselves tell life stories, learn from others’ stories, and intervene in their own narrative processes to allow for change by admitting new stories and interpretations into their repertoire” (p. 29).

Elsewhere (Randall & Kenyon, 2001, 2002, 2004), I have called such story-to-story connections “wisdom environments.” Though hardly a new idea, wisdom environments are any sort of narrative environments in which we can expand upon our personal stories and have them listened to respectfully by others, environments in which we learn from others’ strategies for storying their lives and evolve thicker, more substantive versions of our own. We can develop “multiple fluid narratives” (Bateson, 2007) to keep on growing through the challenges of our latter years, accepting the ambiguity, celebrating the uncertainty, and living the questions.