The coaching relationship is about making change. Some clients come to me because they want to initiate some kind of change. Others need help navigating an unwelcome change or a loss. Whether we choose a change or not, change is hard. It introduces a lot of uncertainty—however temporary--in our lives.
One of the women I’ve been writing about in my book on growing older is Jean McKelvey Hersey, and she has become a role model for me in thinking about how to face life’s changing seasons. Born in New York City in 1902, Jean became a prolific writer. As a young wife and mother of three, she developed gardens around her home in the Bronx, and she soon began to write about that process. She published her first articles on gardening in Better Home & Gardens in the 1930s. Over the years, she raised three children, she became a sought-after garden club speaker, and she expanded her writing repertoire, publishing several gardening books, a travel memoir, and other books that her publishers described as reflections on the “art of living.” She co-authored two retirement books with her husband, Robert Hersey. Her gift as a writer was to skillfully blend details about daily life with deeply thoughtful reflections on life’s existential questions in a compelling and approachable way.
Jean’s life was full of change. Many of these changes were welcome. She and Bob traveled frequently, and when her children were toddlers, Jean fled the New York winters to spend a couple of months in Tryon, North Carolina. Later Jean and Bob spent parts of every summer at a tiny cottage on Cape Cod that they had renovated themselves. Jean enjoyed two extended stays in a friend’s house in Guatemala, the first a family sabbatical when her children were adolescents and the second with Bob after his retirement. In the early 1950s, empty nesters Jean and Bob moved to Fairfield County, Connecticut, where Jean had more space for gardening. Change came again after Bob retired in 1967. The couple realized that they wanted a simpler life with less garden to care for, and preferably a place far away from the snow and ice of Connecticut winters. They ultimately purchased and remodeled a home in Tryon, North Carolina.
In her books, Jean chronicled these moves and travels. She took a positive approach to life, but she was also frank about the stresses that accompanied the many adventures of her life.
No one is immune to the changes wrought by tragic events, of course. Less than two months after moving in to the renovated home in the North Carolina mountains, Bob woke on a cold January night to find the house engulfed in flames. The couple escaped unharmed, but the damage was extensive. They had to move out for several months while the home was repaired. In a book about this period, Jean confessed to having a lot of “down days” after the fire. She wrote, “Depression would catch me at the most unlikely moments. ‘I simply cannot survive one more minute in this state of confusion,’ I remember thinking one time.”
But survive she did, and once the home was repaired, the Herseys reveled in their new life in the South. They purchased a tent trailer (pop up camper) for beach trips and other vacations. They worked in the garden and took evening walks in the mountains. The couple enjoyed their garden. Jean wrote and taught writing. Bob worked on projects in his workshop. They settled into the community, quickly building ties to neighbors and fellow church congregants. In short, Jean lived the way she had always lived: moving resolutely forward with building a life in a new place.
Then, five years after the couple settled in Tryon, Jean’s life changed abruptly again when Bob died suddenly. He was 77. Jean was 72. His death plunged Jean into a devastating maelstrom of shock and grief. In her memoir about this time, A Widow’s Pilgrimage, Jean wrote frankly about the months of depression, months when she didn’t want to continue living.
Eventually work provided Jean with the motivation to engage with life again. Shortly before Bob died, she had signed a contract to write a book on wildflowers. Digging into this project in the second year after her husband’s death, Jean began to move forward. She no longer felt at home in Tryon. She would later write “In Tryon, I am living an epilogue.” She believed that she could only move forward by starting over in a new place where she had not shared life with Bob.
Three years after Bob’s death, Jean moved into an apartment at a Quaker retirement community in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Once again, Jean built a new life, making friends, taking classes on everything from sewing to spirituality, and developing a small garden next to her apartment patio.
In her final book, Gardening and Being, Jean Hersey reflected on what she had learned from a lifetime of navigating change. She said, “Life means change. So we have to learn. When we are younger, we can better manage alterations in our living patterns. But as we get old it becomes more difficult to accept some of the different things that occur. . . . [I]t is important. . . to adjust and adapt to [changes], to incorporate them into our lives.” Though she admitted that there are no rules for adapting to changes, she noted that change is easier if we can approach it as a new beginning or a learning experience. And that is exactly how she lived her life.
In my work as a coach, I try to use Jean Hersey’s approach to change. I encourage clients to look for the learning opportunity embedded in the process of change, and then we work to develop strategies to incorporate those changes into their lives.
Postscript: The paper trail of Jean Hersey’s life largely vanishes after the 1982 publication of Gardening and Being. Based on the demographic records, I know that at some point she embraced change again, returning to Tryon where she died in 1997. Since none of her children lived in Tryon, or indeed anywhere near the state of North Carolina, I believe she must have made this choice deliberately. It seems that to the end of her life, Jean Hersey was proactively making changes.
Image by Peggychoucair from Pixabay