Detecting the Deadly Detour

Just a couple of days ago, our family interred my uncle at Arlington National Cemetery will full military honors. He was an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who once served in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara during the Kennedy-Johnson administrations. He was quite a brilliant and accomplished man. As a pilot in the Army-Air Force attached to Gen. Montgomery in North Africa, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross, one of the highest medals of honor awarded to pilots for heroism in flight.

One of the reasons for his extraordinary promotion from enlisted man to Lieutenant Colonel was his remarkable attention to detail. He had an insatiable thirst for knowledge, particularly technical knowledge. He firmly believed that there wasn't anything he couldn't do.

I remember many years ago when a young wild bird was injured flying into their glass sliders, he took the bird inside and nursed it to health. Not only that, but he researched, and kept detailed records of the bird's diet and feeding. He began by purchasing meal worms from a local pet supplier to feed the bird, and wound up turning his family rec room into a home-grown meal worm factory to care for the bird.

This wasn't at all unusual for my uncle: whether it was researching family genealogy, repairing a broken dishwasher or installing an HVAC system from scratch, the methodology was always the same. It was all about the research, the development of specialized skills, and detailed documentation of everything he did. His life should have been a model for unqualified success; unfortunately, it was not.

Sometime after his retirement from the Air Force (he had finished his time in the Pentagon and his superiors decided that his next assignment would be in Southeast Asia), the traps and pitfalls of midlife engulfed him. Although his marriage to my Aunt (my Godmother) was loving and stable — they were married over 60 years — the loss of his career and some very gradually deepening health problems in the two of them began to take their toll. His life took a detour down a road that far too many men in early retirement take: the road of aimless isolation.

I've made no secret of the fact that the key to the existence — and the survival — of midlife consists in finding the inner, essentially spiritual, direction of one's life. This quest can become oddly challenging and often extremely difficult for men of practical intelligence and enormous courage, because it means a fundamental surrender in all humility before an intuitive (and often seemingly irrational) spiritual Power. For someone whose ego has (apparently) kept him alive against all odds and has brought him measures of success above and beyond his fellows, the idea of humbly surrendering to a supra-rational force not only goes against the grain, it flies in the face of his very survival instinct itself. Yet, that's what the midlife transition actually entails. For a man like my uncle, in spite of (or, even, because of) his intelligence and prowess, it was a path that he was mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and, ultimately, physically unprepared to travel.

And so, he took the midlife detour; and took my loving Aunt along with him. After around the early 1980's, he retreated into his home, where he surrounded himself with his beloved research. The extent of his interests (over time, he had amassed enough college credits for multiple PhD's, but never enough in one place actually to receive one) led him to undertake ever more projects. One by one, the smaller projects were left on the shelf until later, to be joined, over time by the next unfinished research, and items undergoing repair. The world of his midlife isolation slowly but sure consumed the outside world, until he and my Aunt were finally imprisoned in storehouse of worthless papers and junk: a psychologist would call it obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder; I call it a midlife transition gone terribly wrong. Since he and my Aunt had passed away, we, his heirs, have spent the last eight or ten months emptying out their little home: dozens of 30-yard dumpsters filled and hauled away.

No one should make the mistake of thinking that a failed midlife transition is a joking matter. I believe that it was entirely due to the heroic love that my Aunt showed over all those years that their marriage endured this midlife crisis of self-confidence in my Uncle's life. The detour into self at midlife can be both a tragic and deadly trap. Even if the person physically survives, the gross distortions that slip into one's world will, eventually, come to a tragic end. After enormous success in the Air Force, my poor Uncle never did figure out what he wanted to be when he reached his maturity.

I tell my Uncle's story as the very starkest example I can think of to illustrate the critical importance that the midlife transition experience holds for us. Also, so that you'll never underestimate how subtle those crazy little decisions that you may make along the way: the sexual dalliance, the angry reaction to a career change, the neglect of your health issues, the luxury purchase you can't afford, or — like my poor uncle, the man of incredible courage and genius who died alone and nearly forgotten — the collections of 'important' papers and projects that you're going to get to Real Soon Now. The sole antidote is a good dose of spiritual reality taken with a hefty chaser of humility. Open wide!