Generativity and Integrity in the Final Decades

I met Merton Gill in the early 1970s and knew him for more than 20 years. So my relationship with him encompassed the last two decades of his life, roughly between the ages of 60 and 80. These years included his official semi-retirement, corresponding with his unofficial absolute nonretirement, and the beginning, at least, of what might conventionally be called his old age. Supported by the steady, loving companionship of his wife, Dr. Ilse Judas, Merton not only survived several life-threatening illnesses and major surgeries in this period, but was also able to make it among the most prolific of his career. So perhaps now that he's gone, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that, despite emotional and physical adversity, he lived a full and productive life and that he left us with a rich legacy, one that will endure long after his death. Ironically, however, that very legacy also gets in the way of our potential consolations because a big part of Merton's challenge to us was to try to be honest with ourselves and each other, to struggle against denial, to try our best to face up to even the most difficult things. And when we do that, we recognize that it was not an old man who died on November 13th and whose passing we gather to mourn. More than once in the last few years, Merton said to me that, despite his various illnesses and physical traumas, he had the same basic sense of himself now as a person that he had when he was 30 or 40 years old. He was appalled at the way his physical health could deteriorate in a manner that was entirely out of his control as the years passed. We know how vigorous and energetic he was as a thinker and as a major participant right to the end in the various controversies stirring within contemporary psychoanalysis. Robert Michels said on the dust jacket of Merton's recent book that “his was among the most youthful minds” in the field. So it is not farfetched, I think, to say that Merton was a very youthful 80 and that, in a very