[The Internet is full of people quoting Goodman about Graceful Exits. Nowhere is the entire column posted, except now, here. I claim fair use. Yes, the whole column. As a percentage of her lifetime work: .001%. There is no sign she is currently exploiting this. If this is on the web somewhere where she benefits, tell me and I will turn this into a pointer. Also public interest. Anything that appears 888 times on the Internet deserves preservation that is not behind a paywall.]
By Ellen Goodman
Oct. 8, 1976
I have a friend who is a devotee of Graceful Exits. All things considered, he’d like to play his life like Fred Astaire. He’d like to exit stage left, as soon as a particular scene is over — no muss, no fuss — with a smile on his face, dressed in spotless white tie and tails.
For this reason, he has lately become a Retirement Watcher, although he’s some 30 years from his own gold watch. He passionately observes the way some of us do and don’t bungle the curtain line and the awkward entr'actes of our lives.
This fall, he’s been watching men like George Blanda and Eugene McCarthy and Nelson Rockefeller, and he’s still trying to find some grace.
He thinks Blanda, the 49-year-old former placekicker for the Oakland Raiders, is the classic example of the guy who's done it all wrong. Blanda is like those instant has-beens who will still be arm-wrestling their middle-aged sons when they’re 70. He held on by his toes, and railed against his replacement, until they had to kick the kicker out. Unseemly.
And my friend has been watching McCarthy wear out. McCarthy was a guy so over-prepared for his exit in 1968 he nearly leaped into it. But now he’s back again, playing the pale ghost of his own Christmas future, rerunning the lines of Irish poets and Roman philosophers and Clean Gene to a smaller, tougher off-off Broadway crowd He’s decided to be a bit player instead of leaving the scene.
My observer friend has also noted Rockefeller's finale. The 68-year-old vice president is going out in a burst of feistiness, swearing, “I haven’t flipped my lid.’’
He has the energy born of bitterness and freedom, the kind of freedom Janis Joplin sang about: "Freedom is Just another word for nothing left to lose."
The Retirement Watcher isn’t alone. We are all fascinated with these departure stories, and the others.
We don’t want Io retire like Wilbur Mills, after a year of working crossword puzzles. We don't want to fight the inevitable like Blanda or be slowly deflated like McCarthy We want to leave in top form, like a player pushing his chair from the poker table at the peak moment.
Retiring Rep. Thomas Rees of California put it this way: ”If you’re a politician, you’re like the old fighter who hears the bell and goes into the shuffle. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life as an aging politician. I just felt it was a good time to leave."
But it seems as hard to exit gracefully as it is to age gracefully. Few of us can accept the toss of the dice the way a remarkable Phil Hart has. Few of us seem to move with, the equanimity Tom Rees describes. We seldom have the perspective, the timing, the class to hear our cues.
There's a trick to the Graceful Exit, I suspect. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over, and to let go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives.
It involves a sense of the future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out.
Some people, of course, play every scene in preparation for the end. They don’t get involved, they can leave easily — no muss, no fuss. But those who make commitments, who attach themselves to people or roles or jobs find it harder to disengage without a devastating loss of self. They often have to be pushed out, or they hang in. acquiring the pallor of the dogged survivor. Or they finally leave, throwing a finger at the world.
It's hard to learn that we don’t leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the capital or the office [ed. Note: or the bedroom, as the case may be].