A Sense of Purpose

“You are old when regrets take the place of dreams.”

--Jimmy Carter, “The Virtues of Aging”

Former President Carter remembers clearly when reality struck, when he knew he had reached senior citizendom, a state he had until then rejected as only for older folks.

He and Rosalynn and friends had ordered identical breakfasts at a cafe in Georgia, but when the bills came, Carter’s was less. An honest man, Carter “called the waitress over and said, ‘You made a mistake,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘You didn’t charge me enough.’ ”

Whereupon, a farmer of a certain age sitting at the next table said, his voice booming, “That ain’t no mistake, Mr. President.

“They give free coffee to senior citizens.”

“Everybody roared with laughter,” says Carter--but for him it was a watershed, “the first time I ever realized that I was a senior citizen. At first, it was really disturbing to me. But now I’ve gotten to kind of enjoy it, because there’s some privileges that go with being older.”

Older, perhaps, but hardly old. Trim and vigorous at 74, Carter deals more in dreams than in regrets. Sure, he wishes he “could have had four more years in the White House. I wish I could have made a lot of progress on Mideast peace.”

When “retired” involuntarily at 56 after a single term, he was, he admits, devastated.

“We went back to our tiny town [Plains, Ga.]. I didn’t have a job. We were deeply in debt. We thought the best time of our life was over,” a feeling that millions of Americans share upon getting the handshake and the gold watch. “Just because we had lived in the White House didn’t make us any different.

“And we went through a very difficult time with each other. Rosalynn was almost physically ill. I think I looked on the bright side of things more to combat her despair than [because that was how] I really felt.”

Things looked grim, he says, until “we finally had the courage to do what everybody needs to do: to sit down in a time of quiet contemplation and say, ‘OK, what is there that I have? What are my talents? What are my abilities?

“ ‘What have my experiences given me on which I can build for my future? What are some of the things we did when we were young that we really enjoyed and have never had a chance to pursue because we were too busy making a living? What are the talents that I thought I had when I was young that I never was able to develop?’ ”

The Carters asked themselves, too, what interesting experiences might await them, either in Plains among their own circle of acquaintances or out in the world.

“Out of that analysis,” Carter says, “has come almost everything that we do now,” none of which has to do with politics or other aspects of their preretirement life.

Time to Reflect on the Joys of Aging

One thing they do is write books. Carter, who has turned out 14 since leaving office, was in Los Angeles last week promoting “The Virtues of Aging” (Ballantine Books, $18.95), his newest, in which he both extols the joys of the golden years and addresses such challenges as dying with grace and dignity.

Chapter headings, borrowed from a mountain philosopher who was a Carter friend, include such nuggets as “Anybody who can do at 60 what he was doing at 20 wasn’t doing much at 20”; “Getting a second doctor’s opinion is kind of like switching slot machines”; and “When you’re pushing 70, that’s exercise enough.”

Carter’s own definition of old age:

“Each of us is old when we think we are.”

By that definition, he is not.

He wrote of himself and his wife: “Our primary purpose in our golden years is not just to stay alive as long as we can, but to savor every opportunity for pleasure, excitement, adventure and fulfillment.”

“I have a lot of unfulfilled ambitions,” he said, relaxing in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel. “I’m writing a novel now about the last five years of the Revolutionary War, about which historians don’t know very much, in particular what happened in the Southern part of the Colonies during the Revolution.” It will be based in part on his own family’s history.

Carter is a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, a deacon of the Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains and a dedicated and visible volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, an international nonprofit organization that helps the needy build homes for themselves.

He also heads the Carter Center in Atlanta, whose programs worldwide include monitoring democratic elections in developing countries, attempting to eradicate disease, helping African farmers improve crop yields and mediating conflict in countries from Haiti to North Korea.

Taking Charge of One’s Life

Volunteerism has played a major role in the Carters’ post-White House years, and he laments the reluctance of other seniors to volunteer.

“A lot of people become human vegetables” leading “narrow, restricted” lives, he observes.

“And that’s when we really become old, when we begin to depend on others to do things that we can do ourselves [and] we accept that from now on our life is going to be declining.

“That’s rarely the case, unless we have some terminal illness. But even then there’s an opportunity to expand our degree of love, our degree of caring, our degree of interest in our own selves and in others.”

Carter acknowledges the reluctance of most people to reach out to those different from--perhaps needier than--themselves.

“We have an almost uncontrollable fear that an additional responsibility or burden will be placed on our shoulders as we expand our tightly controlled existence. We build a cocoon around ourselves.”

But, he says, once the first step is taken, “invariably, it is one of the most wonderful blessings that comes to us. It adds a new dimension to our lives, of adventure and challenge and interest and gratification and pleasure. It gives us a new purpose.”

Happiness Found in Keeping It Simple

Other senior citizens without the Carters’ status as a former first family, without the connections, might scoff at all this golden-years-are-great stuff.

Carter’s response?

“The most important things in life are the simplest things, that anyone can do.”

He asked rhetorically what most people would do, given only two months to live.

“Would we go out and try to earn more money to build up our bank account or would we try to move into a larger house or would we buy a fancy car or would we try to get our name in the paper?”

More likely, “We would say, ‘OK, what are the important things in my life?’ It would be the highly personal things--probably in our own home or our own backyard or visiting our friends or cementing relationships with members of our family, or reaching out to someone against whom we have a grudge.”

In choosing “The Virtues of Aging” as his title, Carter explained, he was interpreting virtues as blessings, the kind that come with age.

“One is [that] not as much is expected of us. We have an unprecedented degree of freedom to choose what we want to do, what we don’t want to do. We have an opportunity to build on our past experiences and do exciting and challenging and adventurous and unpredictable and gratifying things.

“We have a chance to heal wounds that might have existed between us and other people. We have an opportunity to expand the ties of understanding with the people we love most.”

The other blessing is the opportunity to share, to use free time to benefit others.

“It may be to volunteer to rock a baby in a public hospital or maybe to help build a Habitat house for someone who’s never had a decent home, or a hundred things in between. . . .

“Whenever we decide we’re going to do a favor for someone else with some degree of sacrifice for us, it turns out not to be a sacrifice, but another way to expand our lives and to give us a more satisfying existence.”

Despite the upbeat tone of his book, and his discussion of such joys of aging as the “indescribable blessing” of grandchildren, Carter is no Pollyanna and didn’t shirk from addressing nitty-gritty issues.

One is money--specifically, the Social Security crunch. In the next 20 years or so, he predicts, Social Security will be the catalyst for “the biggest and most divisive and bitter debate that our country has ever seen on a domestic issue.” As the baby boomers--who produced few children--approach retirement, “you’re going to have an enormous number of people reaching retirement age and a very tiny work force to support them.

“When Social Security was founded, there were 33 workers for every retiree. In the next 10 or 20 years, for every retiree only two people are going to be working and paying Social Security taxes. . . . There’s a lot of animosity already to older people for whom working families are having to provide funds.”

Society must care for its needy, he added. But he would favor eliminating Social Security payments “for people who are very wealthy and who don’t need Social Security but are now demanding it. It may be that there will be a means test so that somebody who has a very high income or a very high net worth will not receive benefits.

“I would personally support it, although it would cost me a little bit of income. I don’t really need it and would rather see the people who really need it get first crack at benefit funding.”

How to Approach Death With Dignity

The most difficult chapter to write, Carter said, was the one dealing with death. He spoke of how “we can approach that inevitable end of our life on Earth with a degree of equanimity and without the painful and excruciating feeling of sorrow, how we can minimize the burdens, both psychologically and financially, on the people we love most.”

Through sales of his books, Carter said, he has become “quite wealthy” and the Carter wills stipulate that a “substantial portion” of their estate will go to the Carter Center. The Carters also have living wills precluding artificial measures to keep them alive should there be no hope for recovery.

While stopping short of saying such measures are morally wrong, he pointed out that half of Medicare payments go to the last year of a person’s life “and if a person’s public money is limited, then to artificially sustain life for just a few additional days . . . is enormously costly.” It might wipe out a person’s estate and place a burden on the family.

“And it also puts a great psychological burden on a family to see a loved one lying in that hospital bed suffering, with his or her throat and nose full of tubes.”

Does he fear death?

“No, not at all. I can’t say, in good conscience, that I look forward to death, but I don’t have any fear of death. I guess for one thing I’m grateful for my religious faith, which provides great comfort” and a belief in life after death.

Carter, who has lost his mother, Lillian, brother Billy and sisters Gloria and Ruth, said he hopes to approach the end of his life as they did, “with good humor, filled with love and total awareness of the people around their bed, and with a sense of common purpose and without a tragic trauma of horror and anguish.”