The New Old Age

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Anne Kenner worked for many years as a federal prosecutor, first in the Eastern District of New York, and then in the Northern District of California, trying mobsters and drug dealers. “I like the hairy edge,” she told me. Her job was meaningful to her; it made her feel useful. When she became disturbed by the powerlessness of some of the young people caught up in the system, she developed a curriculum to help students understand their rights if they came into contact with law enforcement: Here’s what to do if the police stop you; here’s what to do if a cop asks to look inside your backpack.

A turning point in Kenner’s life came when she was in her 50s. Her brother, who had been troubled since childhood, shot and killed himself. They’d had a difficult relationship when they were kids, and she hadn’t spoken with him in 33 years. He had cut off almost all contact with her family decades earlier, as his life spiraled into reclusive paranoia. Still, she told me, his death “was a massively tumultuous experience. I wanted to understand why I was knocked sideways personally.”

Around that time, she heard about what was then a new program at Stanford University called the Distinguished Careers Institute. It’s for adults, mostly in their 50s and 60s, who are retiring from their main career and trying to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives. The fellows spend a year learning together as a cohort of a few dozen, reinventing themselves for the next stage. “Somebody told me it offered breathing room, a chance to take a step back,” Kenner recalled.

But that is not how she experienced it: “It wasn’t breathing space; it was free fall.”

On her first day, Phil Pizzo, who’d been a researcher and dean of Stanford’s medical school before founding the program, told the group to throw away their résumés: “That’s no longer who you are. That’s not going to help you.” Kenner took his words to heart. “I thought, Okay, nothing I’ve done matters. Everything I do going forward has to be different.”

Kenner’s first few days on campus were a shock. The fellows, most of whom had been wildly successful in tech or finance or some other endeavor, were no longer running anything. They were effectively college freshmen again, carrying backpacks, trying to get into classes, struggling to remember how to write a term paper. One day Kenner walked into the program’s study area and saw “the guy who was the biggest success and the biggest asshole” in the program lying on his back on the floor.

“What are you doing down there?” Kenner asked.

He couldn’t answer; he was hyperventilating. “This 65-year-old brilliantly successful man was in a total panic” because of the changes to his life, Kenner recalled. Over the ensuing year, she continued, “he became a dear friend.”

At one point during the program, the fellows are asked to get up and tell the group something important about their life journey, something deeper than the items on their CV. Kenner talked about her brother. It was a transformative experience: For her family, her brother’s troubled nature had always been shrouded in secrecy, and not openly discussed. But “keeping secrets was very dangerous in my family,” she now realizes. “Telling my brother’s story was my declaration of independence from all that.”

Her life has a new direction now. When I talked with her in May, a few years after her Stanford experience, she was working with the Magic Theatre in San Francisco to workshop a play she had written about Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, one of Kenner’s lifelong heroes. The play was in rehearsals as we spoke; readings ran during the daytime and Kenner rewrote scenes in the evenings. “I can’t sleep, it’s so exciting,” she told me. “I’m a pretty controlled person. I’m not much of a crier and these theater people are such emotional people. They’re crying all the time. I’m learning to go with that.”

She reflected on one of the things she had learned during her second education in the Stanford DCI program: “It’s all about putting myself in situatio