Honour the distance you have travelled.
Tragedies can only be endured while they are in progress—the more you try to escape the pain, the worse it is. There is no outrunning the inevitable storms of life; you can only move through them.
The gift of getting older is that we can look back and gain understanding of the triumphs and the tragedies, large and small, of our lives with a depth that we might not have been capable of when they happened. Simply put, age gives us an opportunity to reflect. The third act is all about drawing meaning from the seemingly disconnected storylines of our lives. And when I look back on the narrative of my life so far, I see the fullness of the human condition. There has been love, pain, excitement, boredom, pride, humiliation, hope, disappointment. It’s all there, as rich, fortifying and flavourful as a cup of freshly brewed espresso.
Many writers have commented on the powerful draw toward memoir as they age; they, like I, feel an almost daily desire to contemplate and connect the dots between the disparate elements of our lives. I have a little terrace outside my bedroom in Montreal. I fill it up with flowers and herbs in the summertime, and sit out there in the mornings enjoying my coffee. It is totally private, walled with flowers and terracotta pots. And as I sit here, listening to the sounds of a bustling city, yet somehow separate from it all, I think about life. What is the connection among six decades’ worth of story and experience? In a word, spirituality.
Contemplating the Big Questions and exploring spirituality is, I believe, part of the great work of our lives as we push north of 50. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating a big, boomer rush on the church doors. Nor am I suggesting a pilgrimage to India (although that does sound like fun). What I’m suggesting is that we all regard the third act as an opportunity to explore the deeper meaning of our lives.
I grew up going to Sunday school, as so many people used to do. Our family said grace on special occasions and we all professed to believe in God. But I had a casual relationship with religion until I met Pierre. He was a devout Catholic and I admired the certainty and strength he drew from his faith. I converted to Catholicism before our marriage. He never explicitly asked me to, but I sensed that adopting his religion was an unspoken expectation. I promised to raise our children in the Catholic faith and did my best to adopt it as my own.
The trouble is, the more I learned about organized religion, the more questions I had. And inevitably, these questions led to trouble. I remember a trip Pierre and I took to Italy to visit Pope Paul VI. The pope was staying in his summer residence at the time, a sprawling villa on Lake Como. We had hit a rough patch in our relationship and Pierre thought it might be helpful to seek counsel. So I carefully prepared some questions I wanted to ask, and on the day in question, readied myself as painstakingly as if I were meeting—well, the pope. I remember holding tightly to the banister as we climbed an enormous palatial staircase to the room where the pope would receive us. He greeted us warmly and he and Pierre began talking. I don’t recall exactly what these two world leaders discussed, but I do remember feeling the discussion was never-ending.
Finally the pope turned to Pierre and said, “My son, do you have any questions for me?”
“No,” Pierre said, “my faith is solid.”
Then he turned to me. I drew in my breath, ready to ask him my questions—whether it was truly possible to sin in thought, his thoughts on abortion and on birth control. But I never got my chance. He put his hand out to bless me—a gesture that at the time felt an awful lot like I was being silenced.
“I understand you have three beautiful sons,” he said.
“Mm-hmm.”
He smiled radiantly. “Surely you are blessed among women.”
And then we were dismissed.
I was livid. I stomped down those elaborate stairs so hard I was sure I’d break them. Meanwhile Pierre, who’d gotten a kick out of the whole thing, teased me and asked if I’d gotten the answers I needed. Of course I hadn’t. I felt belittled and humiliated. But looking back, I see that my audience with the pope taught me a lesson: that I would not find the answers I was looking for in organized religion. I would have to search for them elsewhere.
One of the great blessings of my life is that I have had the chance to meet so many influential people, including religious leaders. Some years ago, Sacha and I had a private meeting with the Dalai Lama. I remember that he took my face in his hands and said, “Margaret, you are the mother of the world.” Wow, I remember thinking. Some mother. I was initially bewildered by what he told me, but I think of his words often, especially when I do my work as an advocate for women’s rights, clean drinking water and mental health. That is my mother-of-the-world work.
As much as I loved the Dalai Lama and as frustrated as I was with the pope, my brushes with religious leaders have taught me that, at the end of the day, they are just men. Powerful men who lead movements that are also institutions. And while there is a lot to be said for organized religion, no matter how devoutly you follow a school of thought or a set of beliefs, at the end of the day, your relationship with the divine is something that happens within you. You find and define it.
For me, any authentic discussion about spirituality always, always leads me to a single theme: love. You might call it God. I think of that power as a great energy, and that energy is love. And love is patient, generous, kind, compassionate and still. I savour that stillness each day when I meditate. Meditation isn’t easy for me; one of the consequences of bipolar disorder is a racing mind. So every day, four or five times, I do micro-meditations—a few minutes of deep breathing, where I draw in new air to still my tired mind. And in that stillness of meditation, I feel something profound inside me. And what I feel is love.
In fact it was a Jesuit priest who captured my religious philosophy most accurately. Father Regis taught Pierre when he was a little boy, and became our confessor priest when we lived at 24 Sussex. Once a month on a Tuesday he would come for dinner and afterwards he’d listen to our confessions. He got to know me very well.
One day he took me aside and said, “Margaret, we’re all trying to get into the state of grace. What we need to understand is that we are already there. You’ve already got it. You just have to live it.”
Father Regis was referring to that peaceful love I feel inside me when I meditate. A calm, expansive energy that is always there, always waiting. I can see the wisdom of his words now, though I didn’t see it as clearly at the time. Because a few short years after that conversation with Father Regis, I embarked on one of the most selfish, self-preoccupied and narcissistic phases of my life. I was lost and hated myself for being lost. I was disconnected from my family and hated myself for that too. You could call the months after I left Pierre my days and nights in the desert. I once regarded that phase of my life with shame. But today, when I look back on that younger woman, I feel only tremendous compassion. If only I had taken Father Regis’s words to heart. The light was inside me the whole time.
What I do admire about organized religion, however, is its emphasis on ritual. Rituals are a powerful reminder of the sanctity of life and of the human condition. I still go to mass from time to time, but these days I make my own rituals. Except I don’t call them rituals. I call them celebrations.
When I take stock of my life, the events I recall most vividly and fondly are always the times I have celebrated with the people I love and cherish. If grief and loss are the price of love, celebration is love’s festive companion. To this day, I frequently host Sunday dinners at my house—gatherings of family and friends where we eat meals that have been lovingly prepared and revel in lively conversation.
In a life marked by episodes of tragedy, celebration is the way in which I honour the life that others have lost. It is my way of cherishing all that is sacred about this experience: kinship, food, conversation. Celebration is the way our family has healed from the devastation of losing Michel and Pierre. It is how we honour their memories and each other.
Our biggest celebrations always seem to happen at the cottage at Morin-Heights. Sacha and my beautiful daughter-in-law Zoë married there a few years ago. We had a dance floor in the backyard, a stage for a Malian band and a tent village for guests. The next morning I went for a walk to the stream where the priest would be christening little Pierre later that day. I found Sacha in his underwear with a tool belt round his waist. He was putting the finishing touches on a massive deck and walkway he’d built specifically for the christening. That’s my Sacha, industrious and hard-working, and capable of building anything. Pierre was christened in the stream, with dozens of our closest family and friends—and his newly married parents—surrounding him. We all cried tears of joy; and in that moment of celebration we didn’t mourn what we’d lost, we celebrated what we had.
The older I get, the more these moments mean to me. They are a reminder of how far I have travelled, and how much I have to treasure in this life.