Some first moves are hard to make.
The phone call to your cousin, whom you haven’t spoken to in three years. The apology you’ve been rehearsing since 2017. The message to the friend you let drift. The visit to the person who hurt you.
You hold off because being the person who moves first can feel, in some old logic, as if you’ve lost something. You wait for them to come around. You imagine the conversation that will happen when they finally call.
But that conversation doesn’t come. Or it comes from someone else, in a story about that person’s funeral. Or it comes when the person is in the hospital, when the window has narrowed to almost nothing.
In late life, the math changes. Your friends who would have called first are dead, or sick, or in another city with their own grief. Your cousin is sixty-seven and tired. The person who hurt you isn’t going to reach out because they never were, and now they have less time for that.
So, if the move is going to happen, you’re going to have to make it.
You start to count who’s still here
This is the first thing that happens.
Sometime in your sixties, sometime in your seventies, sometime in the year you turned sixty-one and a college roommate died, the list of names you carry in your head starts feeling shorter. You count the people you call on a Sunday. You count the people who would call you back without hesitation if you called them. You count who’s still here.
A 2014 study by Tammy English and Laura Carstensen, published in the International Journal of Behavioral Development, found that social networks grow steadily smaller across adulthood, with the loss concentrated in peripheral partners rather than close ones. The close people, on average, stay. The peripheral people fall away. And in late life, the math is unsparing: the network has been shrinking for thirty years, and the people in your innermost circle—the ones who’d call first—are themselves smaller in number, older, sicker, less able to do the lifting.
You may not have done the counting consciously. The counting happens anyway. You notice when the holiday card list has gotten shorter. You notice when there are fewer hands at the family reunion. You notice when the obituary section of the paper is a place you actually read now.
The call you’ve been putting off can’t wait anymore
There’s a specific call, or there are several. You know which one.
It’s your cousin. Your college friend. The brother-in-law who got injured last year, and you sent a card, and you’ve been meaning to follow up. Your high school friend who didn’t come to your daughter’s wedding, and you’ve been mildly hurt about it for eleven years.
You haven’t called for one of the usual reasons: you don’t want to seem needy, you don’t want to be the one breaking the silence, you’re embarrassed about how long it’s been, you don’t have anything new to say, or you imagine the conversation being awkward. These are all real reasons. They were also real reasons five years ago, and ten years ago, and now we’re getting closer to the edge of the time when these reasons can keep mattering more than the call.
There’s a thing that happens in late life, where the calculation suddenly inverts. The cost of not calling becomes higher than the cost of calling. The fear of an awkward conversation becomes smaller than the fear of finding out you can’t have the conversation at all. You pick up the phone.
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Apologizing becomes the only thing you can actually do
You start to apologize for things you used to argue about.
Some of these you’d never have apologized for, even years ago, because you didn’t think you were wrong. Some of them you weren’t wrong about. The apologizing isn’t a rewriting of the record. The apologizing is something else.
What you apologize for, often, is your part. Not the whole thing. Not the part that was theirs. Your part. The way you handled it. The thing you said in 2009 that you’ve been telling yourself wasn’t a big deal. The way you withdrew after the fight, instead of saying what you needed to say. The pattern in you that you can see now, with the benefit of time, that you couldn’t see then.
The other person may not accept the apology. The other person may not even acknowledge it. That’s a separate event. The act of saying the thing—of naming it out loud, of putting it into the air where the other person can hear it or not hear it—turns out to be its own complete thing. It changes something in you, whether or not it changes anything in them.
Forgiving them is for you now, not them
This one is the hardest and the most asymmetric.
The other person may not know you’ve been carrying it. The other person may not remember the thing they did, or may remember it differently, or may be a different person now in ways that make the original transgression feel like it happened to someone else.
A 2008 study by Mathias Allemand, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, found that age was positively associated with willingness to forgive, and that this association was explained, in significant part, by future time perspective. People who perceived their remaining time as shorter were more willing to forgive, regardless of their age. Forgiveness, the research suggests, is partly a function of how much time you think you have left to carry the grudge.
You start to forgive because the grudge has gotten too heavy to keep dragging across whatever years you have remaining. You forgive without ceremony. You forgive without telling them. You forgive in your car on the way to the grocery store, the way you might decide to stop fighting traffic. The forgiveness isn’t for them. The forgiveness is the act of putting something down that you’ve been holding for thirty years, and discovering that your shoulders, after thirty years of holding, can drop.
Each move is smaller than it feels
Here is what nobody tells you about the calls and the apologies and the forgivings:
They’re smaller than the dread of them.
You make the call you’d been rehearsing for a year, and your cousin picks up on the second ring and is happy to hear from you, and you talk for forty minutes about nothing, and the call ends, and you sit there with the phone in your hand and realize the conversation took less from you than the year of not making it.
You make the apology, and the person says something brief in response, and the moment is over in ninety seconds, and you walk into the rest of your day. You forgive someone, and you discover that you forgave them by the action of saying so to yourself, and the rest of the afternoon proceeds without them.
This is the strange, small consolation of late-life first moves. Doing them takes less time than avoiding them did. The cost of the move turns out, almost always, to be less than the cost of carrying the not-move for as long as you have.
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Most of the time, the other person was waiting too
You won’t always find the person on the other end ready to receive you.
Sometimes they don’t want to talk. Sometimes the apology lands awkwardly. Sometimes the person you’ve been waiting on doesn’t want to be found.
But most of the time—more often than you’d have guessed when you were waiting—the person on the other end was, in their own quieter way, waiting too. They had their own reasons not to call. They had their own version of the wait. They were going to die having not done it, the same way you were going to die having not done it.
You called. You apologized. You forgave. They picked up. They cried. They forgave you back. They sent a card. They invited you to their grandson’s birthday. They told you, in some quiet way, they couldn’t have told you twenty years ago, that they’d been thinking about you all along.
This is what the calling, the apologizing, the forgiving turns out to be for. Not for the move itself, which is small. For what’s on the other end of the move. For the conversation that’s been waiting, all along, for one person to be brave enough to start.
