Radical Endurance

The unvarnished true stories that comprise Radical Endurance help show us that we become who we become mostly by virtue of our influences: our families and ancestors, our cultural mores and biases, our heroes and friends, our experiences, our vulnerabilities, our reckonings. To tell the stories that have enabled me to endure for over three-quarters of a century, I call on some of my most cherished heroes, from health and justice journalist Barbara Ehrenreich to feminist scholar and writer Carolyn Heilbrun, from heroic gynecologist Jane Hodgson to heroic singer Joan Baez, from Seneca archeologist and activist Arthur C. Parker to groundbreaking educator Herbert Kohl, from psychiatrist Gene Cohen to poet May Sarton, and from Nobel literature laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer to all my predeceased loved ones who now reside in my ever-expanding “archive of spirits.”

As an earnest personal narrative about aging should, Radical Endurance seeks to affirm that we are enlivened by the life stories of each other. In each of us, there is something for all of us. If we are alive now, chances are still excellent that if we are not already old, we are going to grow old. It is then, and perhaps only then, that we can experience what May Sarton calls that “supreme moment of life” in which we finally become “aware of the ‘sacred.’” That is what happened to me; that is the gift of radical endurance.