Change and Continuity
Personal Identity, Revisited and Renewed
Some things stick in your mind. I recall a comment that a friend made fifteen or twenty years ago to the effect that after your spouse dies you shouldn’t make any major changes for at least twelve months. Why he said that I don’t know, but in my experience so far the comment doesn’t ring true, at least not for me.
Talking with another friend over lunch today, I reflected on the strangeness of adjusting to my new life without Elisa. My personal identity and my day-to-day life have been so intertwined with Elisa’s presence for over thirty years that the scale of the adjustment is enormous. Inevitably, I find, my very identity is changing in ways that can be hard to fathom.
As one example, Elisa was fairly cautious and analytical about spending money or changing our investments. I’m pretty much that way, too, but I can also be decisive. Over the last year or so I’ve become comfortable with a modified investment strategy that weights more heavily toward stocks, and over the last few weeks I’ve been putting that strategy into effect (in fact I’ve gotten rid of long-term bonds entirely, contrary to the Permanent Portfolio approach I discovered and implemented about ten years ago). More radically, after a series of conversations with a good friend of mine I got interested in buying a rental property, and last week I closed on a small home about five minutes from my house, which I plan to rent out initially to one of my best friends. I doubt that I would have done these things in concert with Elisa, at least not without a few years of careful planning and discussion, but on my own I’ve made these changes quite quickly. And there are other examples, too - I’ve bought a few musical instruments, donated two old vehicles to benefit our local jazz radio station, made contributions to some new charities, etc.
In a way I feel somewhat guilty about all this, as if I’m betraying Elisa and the shared life we built together. Intellectually I realize that I’m simply exploring new paths and starting to find a more independent identity, but emotionally it doesn’t always feel right. Although change is inevitable, I feel the need to honor continuity, too. It can be rather confusing at times...
Thank you.
My experience has been that even in a solid loving relationship - close friends, spouses and partners, and other family members - where we have adjusted well to each other's rhythms, biases, etc., over the years, if that person is gone (not necessarily deceased) we might start to notice what you have. When my father passed away, even though my parents had been divorced for 12 years, my mom said that she felt that a 50-pound monkey was off her back, and she started to do things that she enjoyed that she had stopped doing decades before.
I suspect that if I leave for the home planet before my husband, he will start playing his classical music very loudly (again) and shift more of our investment portfolio to risker investments. And probably eat more ice cream.