Lessons at Lunch
F. Theodore Reid, Jr. MD, CGP, DFAGPA 

Note: In the April/May 1999 issue of The Group Circle, F. Theodore Reid, MD, CGP , wrote about his decision to close his psychotherapy practice and retire to Mexico. Two years later, The Group Circle invited him to reflect on his post-retirement life and to share any lessons learned.

My wife (Diane Reid, PhD, CGP ) is the gardener in the household and she engages plants and trees with a kaleidoscope of approaches that leaves me in awe. Both a nurse and a psychologist by training, she seems to incorporate both in her repertoire for plants which ranges from wordless sounds of encouragement, through cajoling and encouragement, to verbal abuse that brings Nurse Ratchitt to mind. Her zeal for pruning evokes winces from me. Her current challenge is readying the house of her friend who will arrive in a couple of weeks to live here in Mexico. Having made the design and color decisions and turned the execution over to one of our trusted Mexican friends, she and our visiting nieto (grandson) attacked the long-untended grounds with fervor.

Despite her intensity, she noted that our Mexican friend had been unhappy when she did her typical pruning job on a neglected Nocha Buena (Poinsettia). I was fortunate enough to hear their conversation at lunch as we celebrated his 34^th birthday.

“Were you angry at me when I cut back the Nocha Buena”, she asked.

“No, Senora, not angry”, was his reply.

“You see, in America, we don’t like our flowering plants to get all long and scraggly, so we cut them back so that they will get full and bushy,” she explained.

His response, with a straight face was, “But this is not America, Senora,” and the three of us laughed. Then, he went on. “Those flowers only come one time a year. I would have enjoyed them as they were this year and cut them back after they stopped blooming. I don’t know that I will be alive next year to enjoy them.”

There were many lessons in that brief conversation.

I often feel that I need lessons on retirement. Like most of my aged peers, I have no model for the life I now lead. I have chosen to “retire,” but retirement was a dirty word for me until I first laid my eyes on the fishing villages beside Lake Chapala here in Mexico a few short years ago. My models—and heroes—were my father and godfather who, like me, were also physicians. My father, a general practitioner, had patients in his waiting room when he collapsed with his terminal illness at the age of 82. My godfather, a psychiatrist, in his later years did meticulous evaluations for a variety of agencies, saw some familiar patients for medication and support, and enthusiastically attended professional meetings on “Psychiatry in the Twenty First Century.” He drove his Volvo with careful intensity each day from his condo in the Bronx to his office in Harlem. (All too aware of ageism, he told me, “I have to be careful. If you get in an accident at my age, no matter whose fault it is, it’s hell to get your license back.”) He maintained his schedule until one weekend when he went home and entered his long sleep at the age of 94.

With heroes and role models like that, I was ill prepared for my retirement. It took my wife and me a year to close our practices. Most of the time, I was impatient to return to the house we had purchased here. Some of the time, I was grateful for space to reflect on life after work. What I came to realize is that older adulthood is an important stage of adult development. I remember that when I came to this field, Freudian developmental theory, which was core to my learning, stopped with adolescence. Adulthood simply stretched out from there, unmapped. Given our culture, it is not surprising that older adulthood has been the last phase to be charted developmentally. As Frederic Hudson has noted, for those of us in our sixties and beyond, this is a time for reflection, a time for making peace with who we are, with our families and friends, a time for honoring what we have accomplished—and relinquishing regret for the many things we had hoped to but failed to achieve. It’s also a time that offers the opportunity to explore and address what a good friend has called, “the flat sides of our otherwise well-rounded personalities.” Above all, unlike our parents, it is a time of choices. The conversation that I witnessed served to remind me of several of my own “tasks in progress.”

The first is that for the first time since I entered kindergarten, I am free to learn and explore following my own curiosity and the opportunities that present themselves. Because I have been an avid reader all of my life, much of my learning still comes from books. However, there is also a “juicier” learning opportunity, a chance to learn in practice what I taught in another context. For many years before retiring, Diane and I led courses for psychiatric residents on cultural diversity. I now have the opportunity, since “This is not America” to learn, from my luncheon companion and others, another way of being with family, with friends, with life, death, and the universe. I have become engrossed with learning the history of Mexico and find the culture and the people a source of ongoing stimulation and learning. (Unfortunately, the language remains a struggle.) 

One of the things that I am working to learn is summed up in my friend’s statement, “I may not be here to enjoy the flowers next year.” I recognized that that was not a statement of a 34-year-old’s pessimism, depression or fatalism. It was his acknowledgement that death is an integral part of life and can come at any time. That’s a hard lesson for a North American doctor like me to learn. America’s culture is death-denying, and I learned in medical school to treat death as an enemy that must be defeated. I now realize that to live the rest of my life fully, I must learn what my friend, reared in a different culture, already knows. I must face, grapple with, and make peace with the reality that I, too, will die. I am still learning to accept the fact that there will be no cosmic exception made for me. Only by totally accepting this can I reclaim the energy now bound up in denial and then be able to fully and deeply appreciate and enjoy the flowers of this year, this month, this minute. This is a struggle with which I helped many of my older patients when I was still in practice and it is a task that too many of my contemporaries try to avoid.

At the same time, this is also the first time since I was a child when I am free to simply play, to ally what transactional analysis terms my adult and natural child ego states. I cheerfully admit that my current play is different from the games of my childhood and—surprise—a lot less strenuous. I have found wonderful new playmates. In fact, this is the part of my current life that visitors, who knew me in a different life stage, see most clearly. The playful child that still lives within this aging body was delighted with my Mexican friend’s humor, “This is not America, Senora,” indeed. 

This is also a time when I am enjoying mentoring—another life task and opportunity of older adulthood. I make regular trips back to Arizona to share with senior group therapists what I have learned from my 40 years of practice. I am proud to model a different style of aging than most of them know and I am pleased that I can help them address some of the issues arising with their aging clients, as well as help them anticipate their own aging. I can speak to them, in the first person, about the importance of forgiving myself and others, about the importance of community and community involvement, about utilizing the available time for the things postponed (like writing) in the press of an active professional life, of the importance of concepts of spirituality and the search for meaning of what it has meant to live a life. I regret my ignorance earlier in my career and my resulting inability to be more helpful to older patients I saw then.

These lessons I am striving to master have been summed up in the admonition “Be here, now.” It sounds so simple and yet, it is so hard for me (us) to live. How often I have sat at a wonderful meal either in someone’s home or a restaurant and found myself joining others in talking about other meals in other settings and in that process, lost the chance to truly savor that unique meal. 
However, as for this today that I have had, I savored my lunch and the conversation of my companions. I also enjoyed the flowers in the garden.

This article was published in the August/September 2001 issue of The Group Circle.