INTRODUCTION to Mindful Retirement

If you walk into Barnes and Noble looking for books on retirement, you’ll find most of them in the Business section. They focus on financials, with advice about investing and keeping enough cash for a successful retirement. And there is nothing wrong with this approach to a point. After all, Americans struggle to save for our golden years. More than eighty percent of us invest in 401(k) or similar plans, but one in three have withdrawn money due to emergency or hardship. The median savings for Americans in 2019 was just $5,300. These are good reasons to focus on finances.

However, allowing the retirement conversation to be dominated by money often drowns out non-financial worries that are just as important. The financial focus frequently leaves the impression that money is the only authentic matter of retirement, when the reality is that even a well-funded retirement may prove fatal. The impacts are particularly hard on men. Harvard Health reported from a 2015 study that men who continued working past age 65 were about three times likelier to say they were in good health than men who had retired, and half as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, or cancer. The article goes on to celebrate the benefits of work for brain health, combating depression, and keeping a positive outlook. The only problem is that this Harvard Health article comes from a school of thought that says the best way to retire is not to retire.

The book you are reading now assumes there is an alternative to staying at work in order to stay alive. We start by defining retirement as withdrawal from the workforce. (The word “retirement” comes from a French term meaning to withdraw to a place of seclusion or safety.) The way we see it, everyone who remains in the workforce and continues to sell their labor as a commodity is not retired. Retirement is the part of life when we cease to sell our labor.

That said, our book makes no objection to retirees staying active. We advise everyone to do some physical work—you could volunteer for charitable organizations, or join other retirees in group projects, especially where these efforts help people. Learning a new skill keeps retirees younger and livelier. But there is no reason for otherwise financially stable people to make more money, unless money remains the only way they know how to keep score. And since “You Can’t Take It with You,” as Frank Capra’s 1938 movie said, whoever keeps score that way is destined to lose the game.

The essence of our approach to successful retirement lies in turning away from money, on the assumption that the retiree has enough of it to last. We recognize that when it comes to an abundance of cash and free time, many people start feeling giddy and viewing things at the extremes. Some envision a beach house, a chaise lounge with an ocean view, a cocktail in hand. Still others cannot see past the moment of retirement at all, visualizing nothing but a blank wall, a terrifying void without shape or meaning. 

The turmoil and fears and anxieties brought on by the prospect of retirement are the subjects of this book. We think everyone would do well, in the beginning stages of retirement, to retreat to a place of safety and seclusion; once there, to do some work of a new and different kind. 

The retiree we have in mind is free from financial obligations and blessed with time and liberty. Yet it is also true that some retirees end up alone in a chair, in a quiet room, with no one to keep them company except themselves. We talk to those retirees, too. Assuming we have enough food to eat, medicine to stay healthy, caretakers to keep the windows clean and the roof watertight, then a final question always remains: How shall we pass the time? What might we talk about with ourselves? What if the self we discover in those long, quiet afternoons turns out to be boring, or cranky, or bad company?

The question becomes, how can we prepare not just our bank accounts for retirement, but also ourselves?

Fortunately, no one has to answer these questions alone. A long tradition of thought stretches back through our collective past, offering answers that have endured. These answers used to be passed from one generation to the next; in recent centuries, however, we have been taught to view traditional answers with suspicion. Americans in particular are told to go our own way, to declare our independence from outdated customs. We are very intelligent to reject old habits whose usefulness has worn out. But are we wise to cast aside the old habits that still serve some good?

In Defense of Wisdom

The word we use for the long tradition of thought stretching back through humanity’s past is “wisdom.” This book assumes that wisdom has value. Put it this way: If a hundred different people in a hundred different places thought deeply about the same problem, and the majority of them came to similar thoughts and conclusions, wouldn’t you want to know what they found? And if a hundred different people across a hundred different centuries kept reaching similar conclusions about the challenges they faced in their own times, wouldn’t you be interested to know? And if people have lived essentially the same way for thousands of years, wouldn’t you assume that what they were doing was worthwhile?

We understand why people are skeptical about wisdom. Times change, and reasonable people change with them. Heck, since the 1600s times have changed more rapidly than ever before, usually for the better!. Technology produces all manner of wonderment and promises a fix for every problem. For instance, water treatment plants solved the very real, ongoing problem of illness from bad water, which still haunts much of the non-industrial world. Antibiotics and vaccines have all but eliminated diseases that used to kill us in great numbers, like tuberculosis and smallpox. And computers can take us anywhere we want to go, virtually, while bringing troves of knowledge and entertainment to our fingertips.

In the 21st century, we often fail to acknowledge something else. Every technological development has also brought new problems. Water treatment plants are vulnerable to sabotage or malfunction or mismanagement, which troubles our dependence on them. Antibiotic-resistant viruses and bacteria are blooming all over the world, and vaccines only work where there is trust between the governments offering them and the citizens who need them. Computers and social media have all but destroyed our capacity to get along with each other in person, in a room, as people rely more and more on  their phones.

Technology might eventually deliver us from all evils. In the meantime, researchers and scientists keep rediscovering old truths that offer refuge from the storm of change. This collection of old truths, of the kinds of questions asked and the ways of answering them, is what we call the “wisdom tradition.” It has been recorded in our religions, as well as stories recited and written down as folktales, myths, poems, songs, and novels. It is a form of knowing that we rarely encounter in colleges and universities, which have adopted a hyper-analytical view of things that is all but completely disconnected from the world where wisdom grows and thrives. To be sure, schooling is important. Intelligence has its place, especially the kind of intelligence that we call knowledge. But it is important to recognize the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Anyone who has played Dungeons and Dragons may already know what it is.

Both intelligence and wisdom are ways of knowing, so both produce knowledge. But intelligence produces the sort of knowledge that is fixed and stable, that can be packaged and moved intact from one person to another. You can memorize a list of facts and take a multiple-choice test on it, where there is only one correct answer to each question. The problem is that all such tests are fundamentally disconnected from real life, for their knowledge can be removed from real life without any effect. But pretend for a moment that you could memorize every fact in the known universe, that you could walk around with all this portable knowledge inside your head at once. How would you know which piece of knowledge was most important at any given moment? How would you know which facts to focus on right now, or which to ignore? How would you decide where you should use your knowledge to change the world and where you should let the world be? What allows us to know those things is wisdom. Wisdom shows us how we should use intelligence in the present moment. 

What is more, there is scientific evidence that the path to wisdom is open to every human being with an intact brain. The latest research into neurobiology shows that the human brain has two hemispheres, each of which perceives the world in its own way. We describe these as “left-brain thinking” and “right-brain thinking.” One of the early books to describe these two ways of thinking was Iain McGilchrist’s excellent The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In our book, we will connect McGilchrist’s ideas with newer research by the neuropsychologist Chris Niebauer, whose discoveries led him backward to the insights of Buddhism. We also look to the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, whose sudden stroke led her to rediscover her right-brain consciousness. Taylor’s description of right-brain thinking echoes many of the observations made by the great novelist Aldous Huxley after he took mescaline and journeyed into his own right brain.

In addition to science, our book draws upon themes and patterns that can be found throughout a wide range of arts, from films like The Shawshank Redemption to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille. We believe that the truths held in common by all these people are part of the wisdom tradition. We believe the wisdom tradition aligns with right-brain thinking, whereas intelligence aligns with left-brain thinking. Like many other researchers, we believe American culture has become imbalanced in favor of left-brain thinking. This book is an effort to restore the balance by pushing readers toward wisdom. We believe these lessons will provide valuable insights for anyone who is planning retirement or is newly retired. 

Unfortunately, we cannot promise that all of these truths will be easy or pleasurable to learn. Wisdom can have a hard edge. For example, wisdom shows us that each and every one of us is mortal. On the other hand, our intelligence focuses on how to put off death as long as possible. For instance, in Silicon Valley you can find billionaires who swear they are going to live forever. They plan to upload their consciousness to a computer, or they take vitamins and supplements while disciplining their body through meditation and exercise. Some of these same people believe that all of us are living inside a computer simulation, as in the film series The Matrix. All of these people are hyper-intelligent. But so far, no one has managed to live forever. Wisdom advises that it’s better to make the most of the time we are given.

Rather than trying to innovate our way out of every problem, wisdom puts us on a path toward accepting our problems as unfortunate but plain, simple facts of existence. Wisdom is what moves people to say, “A problem you cannot solve is just an inconvenience you have to endure.” Or to add, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.”

We intend for this book to fill the gaps in advice about how to prepare for retirement. While most books on the subject say a lot about money, very few discuss what all the money is for. They advise retirees to find “meaning” or “purpose” in post-work life but offer almost no guidance on what meaning and purpose are, or where to look for them, or how to recognize them when you find them. Too many of these books suggest you should just keep working. We believe that answering the challenges of retirement requires work, but not the kind that focuses on money. It is work on the self, or even work on the soul. The work is doable with guidance, and completing this work can make the years spent in retirement the richest, happiest time of life.

To complete this work, you may need to confront life’s harder edges. Retirees who prove resilient and tenacious enough to confront the worst facts of life will enjoy the highest, most intense pleasures afforded by the best facts of life. A successful retirement results from completing the work of retirement. We call this “meaningful retirement.” Before you join us in making meaning of the last third of life, the authors would like to introduce themselves.

About the Author, Bill Adler

I feared solitude. At age 54 I started asking myself, “What will it be like when I’m 75, or 80, or even 85?” Ironically, at the time of my inquiry I was engaged in a solitary activity—hiking the Appalachian Trail. When I wasn’t walking or asking questions, I was reading books in preparation for a lecture on the retiring lawyer. One author, an English professor named Willard Spiegelaman, discussed the increasing isolation of old age in his book Senior Moments. Intuitively it made sense. Absent the socialization and challenge of work life, as one’s hearing diminished and one’s eyeglasses got thicker, interactions with the physical environment would become incrementally more difficult. The growth of aloneness is directly proportional to awareness of mental noise. As western civilization mandates, overcoming this mental chaos is necessary to harness the mind’s focus just like we harness electric power from Niagara Falls. I wanted to learn how to harness this energy as a defense against solitude. My mission, now twelve years old, was launched. 

Upon returning from the Trail, I unlaced my boots, cleaned up, and that week enrolled at a community college in World Literature I in the middle of the semester. I had the idea that during the solitude of old age I would at least enjoy the companionship of literary greatness. Even though I had graduated from law school and practiced law for decades, the insecurity of illiteracy plagued me in the classroom. Reentry into college ignited a smoldering flame. While still practicing law, I took just one course per semester in order to dive deeply into the subject matter. Each of the courses I enrolled in mollified my insecurity—Creative Writing, World Lit II, American Lit II, Native American Lit, Philosophy, Literary Theory. The more I studied, the closer I came to my literacy goal. But I never quite got there, and I never will. (This theme will become a leitmotif throughout our book.) Paul and I spend time with Shakespeare and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Arendt, and other famous thinkers join our conversations. I have never been more deeply engaged in thought. I now fondly anticipate long drives as opportunities to contemplate ideas. I consider this a significant milestone in preparation for solitude.

The Covid-19 assault wrenched us from family, friends, and colleagues. Solitude became an international crisis. Nursing facilities became psychological jails without visitation. Zoom entered the vernacular. We watched our distant relationships refresh 120 times per second on our computer monitors. Coincidentally, Paul and I had been studying 100 Years of Solitude. The retirement lecture series I had been planning was reborn.

The lectures meshed with my elder law practice, which was complemented by my 35 years of service on a Jewish nursing home board. The significance of the concept that started me down this road expanded. The lectures I originally delivered had focused on maximizing monetary return on a lifetime of legal practice. The content evolved into an exploration of psychological aspects of retirement, but I started to realize that the lawyers’ anxieties about withdrawing from practice prevented them from making meaningful plans. I read whatever I could find on retirement and aging. It provided a menu of possibilities to offer to the attorneys, such as healthful living, forethought in planning, and the call to find meaning. But no universal instruction manual on the topic existed. In the initial lecture I only fleetingly mentioned these themes, as none of the books I’d found had much to say on them.

Meanwhile, I threw myself into my favorite hobby, ballroom dancing. For those who are not familiar with ballroom dance, it includes routines relegated to a bygone era such as cha-cha, rumba, east- and west-coast swing, waltz, Viennese waltz, and the foxtrot. I had dabbled in ballroom dancing for years, probably due to the genes passed from my grandmother to my aunt and her daughters and also to me.  Over the last ten years, my wife Janine and I have taken a deeper dive into dance, with regular practice, lessons, and social mixers. The Sunnybrook Ballroom in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, was a favorite dance spot—a cavernous hall most active during the WWII era. We also belong to a Cotillion Dance Club in Allentown that has been around since the 1950’s. 

I refer to ballroom dancing regularly throughout this book. Dance is memorization and synchronicity. Each movement has to be learned by both partners. When Janine and I dance, I give the cue and she responds. My lead must be clear for her to read. It must fit the rhythm and geography of the dance floor. Learning and perfecting these movements requires constant growth, and there is always more to learn. In the intimacy of dance, two people move with the slightest inclination of arm or torso. To learn each move requires breaking it down to its smallest parts, learning that part, then putting the parts back together into a single fluid motion. We learn one move at a time. On the dance floor, we string multiple moves together, but not in any prearranged program—more like a body-to-body conversation. I cannot think of any place where more communication occurs than a ballroom dance floor, though no words are spoken. As with any conversation or good lecture, I never know exactly where the dance will go. If I make the mistake of trying to design a dance routine ahead of time, it always gets too tense. I have to memorize the routine in order, which kills all the spontaneity and creativity. On the social dance floor no two dances are the same.

It seems to me that all the lessons I’ve learned from ballroom dancing apply to the subject of this book. I also see connections to the subject of this book in one of the great joys that came from researching this material. Every Tuesday afternoon Paul and I met at the Waterfront Bar and Grill in Marysville, Pennsylvania. The restaurant is famous for its expansive deck overlooking the Susquehanna River. We ate lunch as we spread books and paper all over the table. At first it was Shakespeare and Marquez, but eventually the focus turned to the source material for this book. We assigned each other readings and interpreted them together. We applied the ideas we’d discovered to politics, philosophy, literature, the law. Sometimes we stayed until the lunch shift departed and the dinner shift arrived. Time disappeared until we realized we had to get home for the next meal. The Blue Mountains in the distance seemed to shelter us, the wide river sliding slowly through the water gap and gently past our feet. The leaves changed spectacularly. These afternoons were joyful, challenging, rewarding, difficult, and thoughtful. 

The more we continue to study and think about the material, the more connections we make in our minds between past, present, and future. Many times, while making these connections, we experienced what William James and Sigmund Freud called an “oceanic” feeling of drifting within a vast, cosmic order. I have found that such activity can become a purpose, which is bigger than a goal.

Our research books and articles have revealed anxieties and stumbling blocks to overcoming retirement challenges, primarily growing out of a culture devoted to science. I have discovered an alternative to the beliefs that were dictated by the Enlightenment and now dominate our data-driven culture. Western civilization’s logic and reasoning are not sufficient to navigate what may feel like death to some individuals—the loss of the work life. Money is an idol for too many of those seeking a satisfying retirement, for so much of western culture is commodified and packaged and sold. All we understand is utility. In our book, Paul and I attempt to get beyond the bonds of commodification and utility in order to reach the source of human motivation and need, to find what is truly important after the necessity of work has ceased.

About the Author, Paul Cockeram

After twenty years of teaching English Composition and Literature, fourteen of them spent at a single college, I resigned my post as a tenured Associate Professor. I walked away from a guaranteed income, from work I was good at and could complete with less and less effort. I had no plan. It must have driven my poor mother crazy.

All I have ever wanted, professionally, was to say true things to people who need to hear them. When I started teaching, the fashionable classroom was “student-centered,” where lessons were given as conversations between students and professors. I learned what students needed to know by listening to them, then I taught them through dialogue. Back then, many professors saw truth as being inseparable from a community. As Parker Palmer puts it, truth is “an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.”

Times have changed. The No Child Left Behind Act exiled Palmer’s notion of truth from high schools by creating a curriculum based on standardized tests. Soon teachers nationwide were teaching for the test. A similar poison began seeping into higher education through “assessment,” which measures everything about the educational experience except what really matters. Soon colleges and universities valued only what they could measure. It was impossible to focus on truth as a conversation. Students started falling into silence, wanting only to hear the correct answers so they could fill in the correct bubbles on the test. When they realized that my classes required them to write papers rather than multiple choice tests, and they were graded on whether they could have thoughts of their own rather than regurgitate facts, they grew sullen. It was time for me to go.

Leaving a two-decades career felt a bit like retiring. I peered forward at a blankness that sometimes looked like an endless expanse of thrilling possibilities. Other times it looked as fearful as dying. A burning weight settled in my stomach. Every morning the weight asked how I planned to make a living. My mother suggested I unload freight in a warehouse or stock the shelves at the state liquor store. What had I done, I wondered, but jump out of an airplane with the plan of making my parachute on my way down?

A friend called it my “life sabbatical,” which sounded better than “unemployed.” I had just decided to catch up on my reading and some writing projects when a virus suddenly shut down the world. The colleges where I might have taught in the fall shifted to online-only classes in the most chaotic manner possible. Hospitals began overflowing until patients in beds were lining the hallways, and refrigerator trucks were called in to warehouse the dead. Jobs disappeared day by day, until the only work left was done from home on a computer, or else from the front lines by “essential workers” who risked their lives to sell us groceries and pizza and bleach. Friends met each other exclusively on video chats. I was jobless, without health insurance, at the start of a global pandemic.

Farther than ever from my community, I also found myself far from truth. I roamed through Harrisburg, Pennsylvania until I reached the ends of streets I thought were endless. In time, however, I began to discover another part of that winter—the part I find hard to discuss for fear of getting myself in trouble. How can I talk about the affection I started to feel for our Covid year? I believe others felt it, too. Albert Camus’ The Plague shows how a pandemic forces “inactivity upon” the city it strikes. The comedian Marc Maron enjoyed a relief from the pressures of career and success. He noticed that he didn’t feel bad about doing nothing with his life because nobody was doing anything with theirs. There was no reason to resent other people’s accomplishments or to condemn his own sloth. The frozen world gave us time to figure out what was truly important. 

Then, out of the blue, one of my former students named Bill Adler started emailing and texting and calling. Bill had been a solid writer and careful reader in the three classes he took from me, always ready with perceptive insights and clever comments. He was also a bit strange. Foe one thing, he worked twice as hard as the other students for no class credit. He was also three decades older than most of them. He came to my office hours as frequently as anyone despite not really needing the help. He just seemed to enjoy talking about ideas. He was a successful lawyer who wanted to study Shakespeare.

So we met during the fall pandemic twice a week, always at a restaurant, always outside. Two-hour lunches became four-, then five-hour dialogues. After the weather turned cold, we huddled in his open garage at a table under which he’d placed a heater to warm our legs. My feet were always cold, but after enough discussion of Othello or King Lear, the cold didn’t matter. That winter, Bill and I found our way back to truth.

Whenever I asked Bill about his work, he mentioned a series of lectures he was giving to lawyers on the subject of retirement. At first his lectures concerned money. “There’s a lot more to retirement than money,” I told him. A year later, we had written more than half of this book. The twice-weekly conversations shifted to the subject of meaningful retirement. The transition from Shakespeare to meaningful retirement proved surprisingly easy, as so many of our insights from reading the plays and poetry applied to the worries people have about leaving work. When we looked at our country, we saw record numbers of people leaving their jobs in 2021, many of them opting for early retirement. It seemed, suddenly, that Bill and I were in a position to say true things to people who needed to hear them.

What Are the Lessons?

Researching this book provided both of us with a great deal of purpose during a dark time. It also surprised us. After we finished the first draft of this book, we realized that our effort to help people prepare for retirement had led us to the same old questions about the meaning of life that have been asked for all of human history. Bill showed Paul what people needed to learn, and Paul showed Bill where and how to find answers. Please be advised, these answers are not permanent. Humanity keeps inquiring about the meaning of life because every new age needs new answers to its old questions. This book offers the lessons most urgent for today’s final Act.

The first chapter recognizes retirement as an individual’s transformation from a successful professional into non-working person. We start with Nietzsche’s parable “On the Three Metamorphoses.” The parable shows retirees three stages of change to expect as they enter retirement, with advice about some challenges specific to each stage. We include strategies for meeting these challenges, as well as advice about what emotions to expect. The popular film The Shawshank Redemption illustrates characters who either succeed or fail to transform, shedding light on what retirees can doto transition successfully into retirement.

The second chapter turns to our need for two different kinds of relationship with other people: community and solitude. We survey some American intellectuals to see the important role a healthy social life plays in meaningful retirement. We also define relevant characteristics of a satisfying community. Yet we acknowledge the deep need for solitude shared by every person, to greater or lesser degree. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau teach us the healthiest relationship between solitude and community.

Of course, changes in technology have enabled people to adopt new ways of being in a  community. More people than ever are maintaining relationships through text messaging, email, social media, and video chats while isolating themselves physically. Chapter three examines the role played by digital media in overcoming physical limitations and maintaining relationships with friends and family. We discuss the good and bad afforded by disembodied communication, especially its advantages and threats. We make a case for staying connected with your environment, and maintaining  physical contact with the people you love. 

Chapter four examines questions about wealth and legacy. Successful professionals will have an abundance of money, and most will plan to leave as much of their wealth as possible for their family. This chapter explores various definitions of legacy beyond wealth, including the sense of legacy and honor afforded by what scholars call the “gift economy.” We examine the tensions and potential problems surrounding wealth, especially where money is exchanged for caregiving services or used to convey gratitude to children for caregiving. We offer a view of legacy that is rooted in honor culture and gifting.

Where some books on retirement might include a few lines about the importance of finding “meaning and purpose,” we devote two chapters to the subject. Chapter five defines purpose using the latest research in psychology and outlines several pathways to purpose. We also connect the difficulties of finding meaning to a centuries-long “crisis of meaning,” as defined by Viktor Frankl and other thinkers of the twentieth century. We acknowledge that the crisis of meaning confronts us all, even though none of us caused that difficulty. We are its victims. Chapter five discusses some resolutions to the crisis of meaning. We reveal strategies to find and create meaning.

Since meaning is not easy to find or create, however, chapter six addresses the enormous responsibilities faced by every retiree to do the work of retirement. We look into the relationship between the freedom enjoyed by retirees and the responsibilities that such freedom always imposes on us. We offer alternative definitions of freedom that might surprise and instruct people who view freedom as synonymous with choice. We suggest that some portion of freedom is only accessible through submission.

The penultimate chapter of this book offers insights about the ultimate form of meaning. We explore what is sacred. We give a history of this important concept and explore some of the ways it appears to us. Since every human life is destined for an encounter with something sacred, we teach retirees what they can expect from what is sacred and how to prepare to meet it. Those preparations are an important part of a meaningful retirement.

The final chapter of this book addresses the final fact of human life: its end. We look at our tendency to deny death, discuss alternatives to denial, and reveal a more appealing vision of the final fact. Death and wisdom converge in the last work we are called to do, which is the work of dying well. We look at examples of people who died well and offer practical advice for how to follow them. We try to recover the ideal of a “good death” in order to reacquaint the living with the dead, so that by remembering how to die we might also remember how to live.

As your authors, we have spoken both separately and together in this introduction. But in the body of the book we found it challenging to speak either separately or together. The question of how to refer to Bill or Paul proved to be a constant, ongoing distraction. We decided to combine our voices into a single “I,” a single “me,” who is a composite of us both. This solution represents our conviction that what matters most at this time in history is focusing on the things all humans have in common with each other, not the things that divide us.

As you read, then, please understand that both Bill and Paul are “I.” This composite narrator affords the book some wonderful surprises. The composite “I” gets to have two fathers and two mothers. I get to have the experience of a multi-decade, successful law practice and a decades-long, successful teaching career. I get the benefit of experience from walking two diverse paths, and I get to share that experience with you. In exchange, all of us have to relax about details like whether it was Bill or Paul who drove to Florida and back. Both of them worked over that chapter, and they exchanged stories and analysis of the experience until it may as well have happened to them both. I hope this narrative voice doesn’t confuse or alarm you. 

Likewise, I hope the lessons learned and transmitted in this voice prove valuable as you prepare and enter your golden years. I’ve tried to say nothing in this book that a minimum of two other, smarter people haven’t said before. In many cases I’m only repeating the insights of Shakespeare and Huxley and Equiano and Sontag and Aristotle and Heaney and others, along with the beliefs that each of those luminous souls adopted from their own experiences in their own time. The whole pack of them, like you and I and the rest of humanity, are “the same but different.” That’s how the poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch describes the human race. We are the same as one another but different. These days there is no shortage of reminders about our differences. I want to focus on the sameness, in the hopes that one of life’s most fearful and thrilling transitions can be enriched with the greatest possible meaning from people who are not so different, in the end, from you and me.