Late in Life, Roger Rosenblatt Finds Gratitude, Usefulness and Active Empathy on the East River

Before dawn on the East River, the first thing Roger Rosenblatt sees from his apartment window is a tugboat lit in white and yellow, waiting to tow and push a load of garbage away from a sanitation plant. He calls it a patient, stoic little dockworker. He has come to think it waits for him, as though Charon were at its helm at the entrance to the River Styx.

He watches the river run uptown past a mix of expensive apartments and tenements, schools and hospitals, then past the dangerous channel of Hell Gate near Randall's and Wards Islands. Beyond his sight it becomes Long Island Sound and then the Atlantic. In his telling, it grows from the small and known into the magnificent and invisible.

The essay, published in the Times opinion section, takes up the question he says every old person asks: have I made a ripple? Family, he says, yes: a wife, children, grandchildren. Friends, yes. His work as a writer he cannot judge, since writers send pieces out to an unseen public like paper boats. He cites Abdul El-Sayed, the senator-elect from Michigan, who says his religion teaches that saving one life is like saving all of humanity. Rosenblatt notes the same idea appears in the Talmud, and calls it the writer's creed too. As a writing teacher he hoped to help students see the world generously and stay open to all experience, dark and light. He quotes the poet Richard Wilbur: step off assuredly into the blank of your mind, and something will come.

His measure of a life is use. In the 1990s he was writing an essay for the Times about Lewis Thomas, the physician-philosopher who wrote "The Lives of a Cell." Thomas, a friend, was dying, and Rosenblatt wanted to ask him about it. Thomas preferred to talk about living, and said he thought the purpose of living was to be useful. Rosenblatt says he feels the same.

He locates a particular kind of usefulness in extending empathy to people who feel deserted or alone. About once a week he writes to a friend who has recently lost a partner. The point, he says, is to make people feel worthy of your time and attention, and in the cold isolation of modern life to help them feel love or something close to it. Dostoyevsky was said to have active empathy, and Rosenblatt suggests that moving from self-interest to that quality may be how a life's progress is judged. It takes a lifetime to appreciate and apply, and it brings a certain peace.

He does not pretend the nights are easy. Beneath the calm runs an undercurrent of regret and self-reproach: wrong things said and done, right things left unsaid or undone. Such attacks are so plentiful, he writes, that old age might seem to consist of nothing else. His consolation is that only the morally aware are troubled by them.

Above all, he feels gratitude: for the people who love him, for rivers and seas, for the country, which he says in the recent elections remembered and showed its best colors, and for life itself. He writes that one day his tug will carry him out to open water, to a place from which no one returns. It is something we can never know, and he notes that Tennyson, in "Crossing the Bar," saw the river as life and the end as a final surprise.

He closes on advice. When he and his wife, Ginny, were expecting their first child, Carl, he wrote to his university mentor John Kelleher, anxious about being a good father. Kelleher replied with what his own father once told him: you take what you get, and you do what you can with it. The tug, he says, rolls with the tides like a boxer rolling with punches. Life is not easy but doable, and it does what it can with you. Overhead, terns swoop and squawk over beginnings and ends. Rosenblatt is the author of "Making Toast," "Kayak Morning," "Cold Moon" and "More Rules for Aging."