Here, in the still-dark mornings on the East River, the first thing I see from my apartment window is a tugboat, dressed in white and yellow lights, prepared to tow and push the tonnage of garbage from a sanitation plant. Patient, stoic little dockworker. I often think it waits for me, as if it were captained by Charon at the entrance to the River Styx.
I follow the tides and welts as the river flows uptown, past New York’s big-city mixture of rich apartments and tenements, schools, hospitals, past the treacherous channel of Hell Gate near Randall’s and Wards Islands, out to realize its true estuary identity, where it disappears. Unseen by me, the river becomes Long Island Sound, then the Atlantic. It grows from the small known to the magnificent invisible.
Have I made a ripple with my life? The question every old person asks. Family, yes. Wife, children, grandchildren. Friends, yes. Work? As a writer, who knows? You send things out to an unseen public, like paper boats on water. Do you change a mind, a heart? Abdul El-Sayed, the senator-elect from Michigan, says that his religion teaches that saving one life is like saving all of humanity. The same thought is in the Talmud. That’s the writer’s creed as well.
When I was a writing teacher, I hoped to help my students see the world generously and to be available to all experiences. Open your eyes and your arms to embrace everything, dark and light. And don’t worry about a lack of inspiration. “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind,” writes the poet Richard Wilbur. “Something will come to you.”
To have been of use to others. That would constitute more than a ripple. In the 1990s I was writing an essay for The Times on Lewis Thomas, the great physician-philosopher and the author of “The Lives of a Cell” and other books connecting science, the arts and life. Lewis, a friend, was dying, and I wanted to ask him about that. He said he’d prefer to talk about living. He said he thought the purpose of living was to be useful. Me, too.
There is a special kind of usefulness in the extension of empathy toward others, especially those who may feel deserted and alone. Every week or so, I write to one or another friend who recently lost a partner. The usefulness comes from making others feel worthy of your time and attention. In the cold isolations of modern life, to help them feel love or something akin to it.
It was said of Fyodor Dostoyevsky that he had active empathy. In older age one learns the value of that gift, which takes a lifetime to appreciate and apply. Maybe that is how one assesses progress in a life. To grow from self-interest to active empathy, which gives a certain peace.
Meanwhile, as an undercurrent, the night heaps with regrets and self-recriminations. The wrong things said and done. The right things not said or done, when they ought to have been. So plentiful are such self-wrought attacks, one might wonder if old age consists of anything else. One’s compensation is that only the morally aware are bothered by such things.
Above all is an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. Live long enough, and you find yourself grateful for most everything. For the loving people around you. For the natural world, the rivers and seas. For our country, which in the recent elections has remembered and shown its true, best colors. For life itself.
In any case, it’s nearly done. One day in the sea-mist future, my tug will bear me out to open water, to a place from which one never returns. There’s a thought. In a world where one valiantly strives to know, here is something we can never know. In “Crossing the Bar” that’s how Alfred Tennyson saw it. The river was life. Once on it, one was headed for the final surprise.
When my wife, Ginny, and I were expecting our first child, Carl, I wrote my university mentor and friend John Kelleher about how excited I was. Would I be a good father? Would our son be given all he would need to prepare him for the future? John wrote back, “I’m going to tell you what my father told me when I wrote him a note as dreamily romantic as yours: You take what you get, and you do what you can with it.”
The little tug rolls with the tides the way a boxer rolls with the punches. It’s all right. Life’s all right. Not easy but doable. You take what you get, and you do what you can with it.
And life does what it can with you, teaches you, as becoming more empathic proves. Things change. You change. Life is new, at once old and new. Above the river, terns swoop and squawk, looking down on all we do here, beginnings and ends. Old man’s river. Old man’s life.
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