This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
What Chapter Are You…
Leaving:
The work world.
In:
The over-sixty crowd.
Entering:
The “senior citizen/retired” chapter.
My husband kisses me goodbye as he heads to the office. These days, it often lands on my cheek.
We met when I was a junior in high school, outside the United States, on the eve of his mandatory military service. We quickly realized we were soulmates. But our romance came to an abrupt and unnatural end when, just five months after we met, my parents moved our family home to New Jersey.
We only saw each other twice over the next five years. While we tried to maintain our connection through written letters, even those eventually dwindled. In the interim, I graduated from high school, finished college, and had another serious romantic relationship. He completed his four-year army service, worked, prepared for college, and dated with abandon.
That should have been the end of it, but I was drawn back in. After college graduation, I returned to the city where we had first met to try my hand at international living. He and I reconnected and committed to giving our relationship a try, part two.
Three years later, we got married. Two years after that, we had twins. We moved back to New Jersey. My seven-year experiment with living abroad ended, while his life in the United States had just begun.
My husband and I have now been married nearly thirty-eight years. We’ve raised three children in a small, northern New Jersey community just miles from New York City. We’ve put all three kids through the public school system, college, and graduate schools in medicine, public health, and business. They have found their professional passions and married. Collectively, they have blessed us with three grandchildren.
We both have had long-tenured careers, been active members of our community, built close friendships and busy social calendars, and traveled to destinations near and far.
But like anyone, we have had our challenges. We have grown unevenly, wanted things differently, and often communicated awkwardly, or not at all. At times, it felt like we had moved away from that common space between our two different cultural backgrounds. Yet we are lucky enough to still have what it takes to weather these challenges together.
And here we are on the precipice of a new chapter. My husband still works full-time, and the stress from his corporate job follows him home at night, while I am, somewhat reluctantly, transitioning away from a career that peaked with my own consulting business. As a couple, we have one foot in this chapter and one foot in the next.
Naturally, we talk frequently about the future: the obvious joys of grandparenthood, the worry about our children and grandchildren and aging parents, and, of course, the inevitability of our own aging. Like so many of our peers, the aches and pains have started to creep in, and the doctor’s visits are more frequent. Memory and hearing are not what they used to be, and the kids are checking in on us more often.
We face a future that has no script, no guardrails, and few guidelines, but a finiteness that scares us. In this chapter, we face our own mortality.
While I have a tendency to allow worry and irrational fear to sideline me, I know I can pull myself back to that morning kiss, which bears witness to years of collective memories and still offers the promise of a wondrous future. A future with beautiful grandchildren growing before our eyes. A future with plans to travel to Nepal, Japan, and other faraway destinations. A future with RV trips through the American landscape, with hobbies and passions pursued both together and separately, with friendships we treasure and new ones we cultivate. A future with new memories, with love we continue to nourish and share, and with a legacy we are still building.
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