Finding Peace In the Last Third of Life

The following excerpts come from the Introduction and Chapter 1 of Paul F. M. Zahl’s Peace in the Last Third of Life: A Handbook of Hope for Boomers. Speaking from personal experience of aging and decades of pastoral care, Zahl articulates the questions posed by the last third of life with an honesty and perceptiveness that is unequalled on this topic — then speaks into them with genuine, honest-to-goodness hope. Along the way, there is plenty of wisdom for those of us in the “second third” of life, too. If you’re a Boomer, fan of PZ’s Podcast, thirty-something in a premature midlife crisis, or just looking for a good book to read, check it out! Oh, and today is the last day of our summer sale — 25% off everything with code JUNE25. -Ed.

The spirit of most Eastern religions would probably say that the transition to what this short book is calling “the last third of life” involves a process of dis-attachment from emotionally important entities from your first two thirds of life. I agree with that. In a way, your body’s decline forces you to detach from certain things or interests. You can’t see very well; and if I misplace my reading glasses one more time, I think I am going to scream. Then there’s your hearing aids, which get left at the barber shop every time you have a haircut. Or you forget to take them out when you’re taking a shower, and they are destroyed forever. Moreover, the simple passage of time takes your children away from you, and your career, too—whatever that was. (My friend Arbus, who had a big job in journalism for many years, now refers to his“so-called career.”) And “Who,” to quote The Who (1978), “Are You?” That is still a good question.

On the other hand, some people in the last third of their lives don’t dis-attach at all. They are as bound up in older age with their children’s lives or their original career aspirations or just their search for outside validation as they were in their 30s and 40s. We have known some high-profile successful men who spent the last third of their lives literally waiting for their next honorary degree to be awarded them from a major university. And a few of them succeeded at that. I would call this attitude a form of anachronistic living. These hypnotized people are not in due season. Eventually, though, illness and death wrenches one’s fingers of close attachment away from every visible object. Sometimes, this does not happen until the moment of death. It is not a pleasant way to die…

The last third of life witnesses a felt decline in the quality and number of the things that mattered to you when you were in your second third. Ironically, the emotional and derivatively intellectual interests of your first third of life probably mean as much to you now as they did then, though in the softer light of age and recollection, and loss. But the things that stressed you—and caused divorce, disruption, and dismay—in your second third of life, those things are fading. “Pictures of Matchstick Men” (The Status Quo, 1968).

What things about your life do not fade? What features of the way it has gone are still sharp?

The pain of early loss does not fade.

The pain of early rejection does not fade.

The pain of early (and to the child, inexplicable) disruption does not fade.

Those things, those sufferings, stay with you. In fact, they are almost more powerful now than when they actually happened…

Do you remember seeing the classic Ingmar Bergman movie Wild Strawberries (1957)? The elderly professor, on an ‘accidental’ road trip down memory lane to get to the city where he is to receive an honorary degree, passes inwardly through every single disjunction of his long personal history. But when he gets truly to the end of the road—the viewer is to understand that he is dying at that exact moment—all he sees is the ravishing vision of a scene from his early childhood—of his parents, his siblings, and their contentment. That, at the age of 85, is all he sees at the point of death.

The purpose of this book is to try to describe the last third of most people’s human lives as accurately as possible, being especially true to the emotional vantage point of middle and old age. The inward and actually driving concerns of this later period, which have certainly caught up with the author, cannot be denied. They require a response. They cry out for an answer, as “deep calls to deep” (Psalm 42:7).

The outcome of many persons’ lives turns out to be not pleasant. I am often with middle-aged acquaintances who are looking after their parents in extreme old age. It is rarely a pretty picture. Severe physical symptoms, coupled with wrenching, awkwardly expressed emotional unhappiness, makes their parents’ departure memorable but only as an unsettling memory, and sometimes even a shocking memory. People will say afterwards, “I prefer to remember my mother before she got really sick. I try to forget that part.”

There are exceptions, however. I hope that you, dear Boomer, will be one of them. It is possible to get to the end of your life, its outcome and its great transition, in hope and peace.

That is why this book is entitled Peace in the Last Third of Life. I hope that reading it will help you find some.

The plan of the book moves from diagnosis of Boomer discontents to the hope of release from them in the interest of better life-endings with children, husbands and wives, and one’s own past. There is a chapter on the ‘mechanics’ of gratitude. Then the interest shifts to the question of life after death—its possibility and even its shape. The concluding chapter describes what peace looks like ‘in practice’, or rather, in actual experience, during the final fragile third of one’s life…

In July 1941 a group of Quaker, main-line Protestant, and incipient ‘New Age’ thinkers gathered at LaVerne College in southern California to discuss in religious terms the prospect and implications for Americans of a coming World War. The informal convenor of this “LaVerne Conference,” as it came to be known, was Gerald Heard. Heard, whose full name was Henry Fitzgerald Heard, was an Englishman of Low-Church Anglican patrimony who sought insight from a variety of spiritual traditions, and especially from Quakerism, first, and later, from Eastern thought.

Something that Gerald Heard said at LaVerne, as recorded by the novelist Christopher Isherwood, who was also present, made a big impression on me as I began, against my will, I have to say, to ponder what it meant to be entering the last third of my life. Heard said, “If you want to find God, go back to where you lost him.”

The speaker freely admitted that this wise counsel derived from the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1328). But I heard it first from Heard, and Heard for me is an unimpeachable source.

“If you want to find God, go back to where you lost him.”

What does that mean? I think it means, first, that you probably lost the authentic voice of your true self almost the moment you started attaching significance to the ‘static’ of the life around you, i.e., the supposed goals of life you established for yourself and also for those you love. Those goals could be financial security, outward affirmation and credit for yourself and your performance, and control or power (authority) in relation to the outward circumstances, challenges, and obstacles of life as they come at you from almost anywhere at almost any time.

The Classical, i.e., Greco-Roman, way of putting this was that everyone who has the least ambition for themselves seems to want Power, Money, and Honor. I have already said that these perceived ‘goods,’ i.e., Power, Money, and Honor, are typical of the things for which most people strive, to one extent or another, during the second third of life. They absorb our conscious attention from our 20s, and sometimes earlier, through our 60s, and sometimes later.

Yet Power, Money, and Honor inevitably pale during the last third of life. They fade in conscious importance and feel increasingly anachronistic. They are superannuated by physical and mental circumstance.

You lose Power, by definition, as cancer or heart disease threatens you, as your bodily control over yourself loses ground, and as you become physically, like it or not, ‘a mere shadow of your former self.’ You can barely remember the name of one person over whom you used to have ‘power’, let alone the many who now have power over you!

You lose Money, or you are bound to eventually, because the markets fluctuate even in the best of all fortunate worlds. Holding on to money for the duration is very hard to do. COVID-19! Or is it true that ‘the rich get richer’ – that ‘deep pockets’ are shielded from loss and fluctuation? That is not my experience. Guess I have just known many individuals who once had money, or access to money; but who find themselves living now in a basement ‘guest-room’ dependent entirely on one of their adult children’s generosity. In my parish experience, at least, something like that has been the rule rather than the exception. Your money can disappear within one bad day.

And you lose Honor, because fewer and fewer people are still alive out there that have even heard of you. Remember the scene in Tender Mercies (1983) when the faded country music singer, played by Robert Duvall, is walking down the street, and a lady stops him and says, “Hey, Mister, weren’t you Mac Sledge?” He replies, “Yes, Ma’am, I was.”

In sum, you lose, lose, lose.

But you have got to find! You have got to find something. You require something onto which you can lay hold, something solid. If only because you are gradually skidding down an increasingly steep plane, which invariably and inevitably leads to the edge of an abyss into which death throws you no matter what you think you’ll find, if anything, on the other side of your radical, invisible fall. Will it be an instantaneous crushing on the rocks below? Will it be the strong hands of angels, holding you up? Will it be a trampoline, bouncing you stunningly up and back? Will it be the opening (and widening) scene of What Dreams May Come (1998), in which the just-expired Robin Williams walks through Grand-Canyon “gates of larger life” (Book of Common Prayer, 1979)?

If you die with nothing solid on which to hold, and if everything you used to have you no longer have, then you are, as St. Paul said, “of all men most to be pitied” (I Corinthians 15:19).

Gerald Heard said that if you want to find Solid Ground, go back to where you first got off the paved road. Like Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, you have kept deviating from the stated way that is right; and every time you have, you have had to re-trace your steps. To make serious progress in the inward life, and I believe you could also say in the spiritual life, you have to keep going back. In order to go forward you have to go backward.

This is not what everyone wishes to hear. Or at least, it is not what one usually hears…

Intimations of Mortality

What this chapter began by calling the “unease within the last third of life” is more than a sense of diminution, though it is that. It is more than a Sword of Damocles, consisting of a general anxiety before the pressing fact of death, though it is that, also.

The unease inherent in the last third of life is a prompt which hangs over your whole outlook and is expressed by the phrase “intimations of mortality” (play on William Wordsworth, 1804). And one’s clearest “intimations of mortality” consist not of a vague anxiety concerning a coming “end of the world as we know it” (R. E. M., 1987), but rather a dark field of unresolved, unfelt pain from the first third of one’s life. That dark field, which is the weight, burden, and stress of memory, is the center and circumference of this first diagnostic chapter, the aim of which, when you see it and feel it, is to heal you in relation to it and deliver you from it. Remember that Wordsworth’s complete title for his inspired poem is “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”

In 1983, right about the beginning of the second third of my life, I wrote my first book. It was called Who Will Deliver Us? I stand by that book today and its conclusions. But the book you are reading now, entitled Peace in the Last Third of Life, is its sequel.

Who will deliver us now?—from stubborn and inhering bad memories, inward unease and regret, unstanchable wounds, and holes—pot holes!—that were never repaired. Those inward scars and disabilities have been there a long time. It is time to get out from under them. Or die trying. They need to lose their defeating and vitiating influence over you. And whether you try to get out from under them or not, you will die in any event. Therefore, the matter is “Urgent, urgent, emergency” (Foreigner, 1981).

For more, pick up Peace in the Last Third of Life here.