LIFE LESSONS

My Thumb Found My 40-Year-Old Leg

She thought she had it figured out. I’ve got the news.

She thought she had it all figured out. Author’s canva image.

I ran my thumb across my phone and stopped on an old photo. There was my leg. My 40-year-old leg. Smooth, tan, sure of itself.

Trouble is, I'm 71.

The leg in that photo belongs to a woman in Tucson, 1995. Five years into husband number two. Running shorts, good tan, dead certain she's got the whole thing mapped out. New town, new man, a plan for every year coming.

She doesn't have it mapped. I do.

I'm 71 now, up on Vancouver Island, in a town called Qualicum Beach. Husband number three, five years in. But that's a story for another day. Today I want the woman in the desert.

So I sat her down.

Here's what she's working with in 1995.

She and husband number two just pulled out of western Washington. Wet, gray, trees crowding in from every side. They wanted sun and a small city where two people could land good jobs. Tucson handed them all of it. She got hired as an addictions counselor at Sierra Tucson. That job changed everything. He picked up building inspector work. Money coming in, sun overhead, the two of them set.

One thing sits heavy on her. She's decided she won't be a mom. Made her peace with it, mostly. But the grief still turns up at odd hours. I can see it on her from here.

So that's where I started.

"Sit down," I told her. "I've got news, and some of it's hard."

She crossed her arms. Forty-year-olds do that.

"You think you know how this goes. You don't. Husband number two? He lasts. Thirty years. From where you're standing that's the whole rest of your life, and you can't see the end of it. That's fine. I can."

She wanted to argue. I kept going.

"The kids you're grieving. The ones you decided not to have. I'm about to tell you something, and you won't like how I prove it."

Then I gave it to her straight.

Your brother's only son doesn't make it to 40. He's gone, and his sister is an only child now. Kyle, your best friend, pours everything into her boy. This year he moves to Italy with the grandkids. An ocean between them, right when she reaches for him. She's wrecked over it. And your 17-year-old stepson. Diagnosed schizophrenic at 21. His health takes him before 50.

Three kids. Three people who did the very thing you're grieving not doing. Your brother had his son. Kyle had hers. Your husband had his boy. Not one of those children stuck around to hold a hand at 71.

I watched it land on her. Wet eyes in the desert heat.

"So the grief you're hauling around," I said, "it's grief for a promise nobody ever had. Not your brother. Not Kyle. Not one of them. Kids were never the guarantee you think they are."

She got quiet. Then she asked the only question that mattered.

"So what did I do with all of it? The love I had to give. Where did it go?"

Good question. Here's the answer.

It went to other people's kids. Not as a mom. As something else. A woman with time, and real curiosity about who a young person actually is. Not so-and-so's boy. A whole person, worth knowing on his own. Parents are busy and worn out. They can't always see the kid right in front of them. You can. You've got room for exactly that.

So you give it. You let them reach for you, and you reach back. Some of that love is soft. Some of it is hard and honest, the truth a kid doesn't want to hear, said out loud anyway. You love him that much. That counts too. Maybe it counts most.

Then there's Virginia. Twenty-five years older than us, and right about near everything.

"Make friends of every age," she said. "The young ones especially."

She told us our own people start dying off as we get old. Same-age friends, family, they go. The young friends are who's left standing next to you. A blessing, she called them. She saw it coming for us at 71 back when we were too green to picture it.

She wasn't wrong by an inch. I've got those young friends now. I didn't collect them to get anything back. I just needed somewhere to put the love. So do you. So go do it.

Here's the whole thing, plain as I can say it.

Forget convention. Be real with yourself, all the way down. Know who you are, and let the hard calls come out of that. The ones that scare you before you make them. Make them anyway.

Live what you love, as much as one body and one life can hold. Feed your mind. Move this body. Look after your spirit. Keep your boundaries, the kind that let love pour out instead of locking it up inside you.

That's it. That's the news.

I'm back in Qualicum Beach now. 71 years old, thumb still on the glass. And I feel it shift, right now, writing this. The stuck places I still land in, the ones where I forget all of it and go small again, they loosen a little. Turns out I needed to hear this as much as she did.

So I'll send it back to Tucson. To the woman in the running shorts who thinks she's got the map.

See you in 31 years, kid.