Wisdom Project | Judith Viorst, 94, on ‘Making the Best of What’s Left’

The Wisdom Project at Moment: Inspirational conversations with wise people who have been fortunate to live long lives.

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This week’s conversation is with Judith Viorst, 94, of Washington, D.C. 

Author Judith Viorst has spent nearly nine decades writing the 47 books for children and adults that stand on your bookshelves. In your kid’s room: The New York Times bestseller Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day—and its three sequels. In your bedroom: her 1986 bestseller, Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow. And in your living room, den, study or personal library, any of her 40-plus volumes of insights, including nonfiction, fiction, kid lit, humorous poems and musings about the decades we live as she lives them.

To the collection, add her new title: Making the Best of What’s Left: When We’re Too Old to Get the Chairs Reupholstered, in which she writes about being in the “fifth-fifth” of life. From Kirkus Reviews: “We should all be in such fine form in our 10th decade. Viorst is as charming, and smart, as ever.”

Viorst knew she wanted to be a writer at age 7. She was born on February 2, 1931 in Newark, NJ, the first of two daughters born to Martin and Ruth June (Ehrenkranz) Stahl. Her father was an accountant; her mother was an avid reader and bridge player. Judith and her sister, Lois, grew up in Maplewood, NJ.

She earned her B.A. from Rutgers University, where she majored in History. She married acclaimed political writer Milton Viorst in 1960. They had three sons, Anthony, Nicholas and Alexander—all named in her Alexander book series—and seven grandchildren. She and Milton were married for 62 years before his passing in 2022 of COVID-19 at the age of 92.

In the late 1970s, Judith went back to school to study psychology. She’d long been fascinated by the gamut of humanity’s emotional responses to life’s events. She studied at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, where she became a research graduate in 1981. Her classic work on the lessons of loss and grief, Necessary Losses, was published five years later. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. She continued writing about psychological subjects, including love, guilt and control, as both an expert and acclaimed storyteller.

Arguably her most famous book, that one about Alexander’s super-crummy day, has sold over four million copies, was made into a Walt Disney feature film, and was one of four musicals she wrote for the stage. The play was first commissioned and performed at the Kennedy Center in 1998. 

She has earned numerous awards and honors for her books, both adult and children’s; poems, and magazine journalism. Moment’s readers know her from her essays “Judith Viorst Talks Nearing 90” and “Counting the Dead,” in 2019 and 2021 respectively. And, oh, is she witty. (A New York Times writer once called her “relentlessly droll.”) 

Her current ambition is to make a “transcendent” matzo ball. 

Moment was delighted to chat with her recently. 

How did you come to write so prolifically and fervently about loss and acceptance? 

When I was a sunny young girl, I always thought that bad things—losses—were outrages against the way things should be. At some point, I figured out that life was a package deal: cancer and butterflies. They’re both there, both part of life.

I’ve always written about what goes on inside us and what goes on between us and other people. The Psychoanalytic Institute gave me a marvelous grounding and theory, but I also knew about [the subject of loss] through friendships, through my own experience, through art and literature and poetry and place. As I thought about what I had learned at the Institute and what I learned from living, I really began to see a pattern of losses, some of them necessary, and how they could lead to seeing advances, gains in your life. Necessary Losses became a book I really had to write.

Is there a way to prepare for loss?

Grow up, grow up, at least to the point of coming to the cancer and butterflies. Get rid of the idea that it’s supposed to be all sunshine.

If the lesson of necessary losses is that you grow from them, is there growth to be found in every experience of loss?

No, no! There are sad, rotten things that happen to people that you just have to climb over. Not every loss is a necessary loss. People have people they love dying too young, getting terrible illnesses.  

But to the extent that you know losing and having to give up things, having to succumb to the realities of age, having people you love die—even those first experiences of watching your kids move out and on to their own lives, and not needing you or wanting you in the ways that were so gratifying—those are losses that you have to learn to live with and move beyond. 

Why is the idea of acceptance so difficult for many people to embrace?

I think people are very comfortable with what they know and certainly very committed to what they want. Revising your visions of your own expectations and place in the world is a wrench every step of the way. From being a single person calling all the shots in your life to suddenly being married to somebody who has an opinion on everything, and onward. We get very entrenched in what we want and expect and letting go of that is not easy.

Is it about changing your expectations?

Sometimes your expectations change on you, whether you like it or not. Particularly at this phase of life, when, for instance, you know your eyesight isn’t so great and you have to stop driving. I didn’t decide to change my expectation about driving; it was imposed on me, on my eyesight. [Your body’s changes] don’t mean that you are a person without agency. There are still lots of choices in how you deal with loss and change. You’re not helpless.

How does it make you feel to no longer be driving? 

Oh, I really hate not driving. You go from volunteering to go get milk every 10 seconds when you first get your driver’s license to no longer being able to just jump in the car. I have improved in certain ways. I was the Uber klutz of all time. If there was a way to screw up getting an Uber, that was me. I’m much better at it now. Let’s put it this way, my freedom has been constrained, but I’m upping my technological ability.

In your newest book, Making the Best of What’s Left, you write that your proudest achievement is your children. And then you write that all mothers say that, but when you ask fathers the same question, their answer is a professional or personal accomplishment. Why is that?

I found that fascinating! Every woman I asked—except one, who said she’s not giving herself any credit because she wasn’t the perfect mother she had hoped to be—but every other highly accomplished woman didn’t even think twice about it. A few fathers would say, of course, “I’m very proud of my kids,” but they talked about their major personal achievements. For the mothers, it wasn’t even “my son, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer;” they were proud of who their children are as human beings, not their professional labels. It was very moving and very nice to hear. 

What do you make of the moms’ and dads’ different answers? 

Well, first, I see with my own kids, my sons are fabulous parents and not only as favors to their wives. They have discovered how much pleasure there is in being a parent. But I did not talk to that generation (for the book). Had I asked this generation, maybe more fathers would have answered “My kids.” 

It’s fairly recent that men have realized that [engaged] parenting is not just being a good husband, a responsible person, but that it’s a joy.

Who has inspired you?

I learned some very important stuff from my mother. She was like the genius of friendship, somebody that everybody came to with good news and bad news. They told her secrets. She never gossiped or told their secrets and she taught me that one of the great, continuing, satisfying joys of life are female friendships.

And it certainly stands in good stead now—most of my friends are widows, and we’re all taking loving care of each other, watching over each other, sharing our complaints and our good news. I’ve been fortunate to know a lot of really terrific women in my life, women who are caring and loving and smart and funny and into the pleasures of motherhood and grandmotherhood. 

Is there anything you wish that you had done differently in your life? 

YES! I am so mad at myself because I did not ask probing questions of my grandmother, my mother, my father while they were alive. I will never know the answers. 

What would you ask them? 

Everything! “Why did you marry him?” “What were your dreams?” “Did you like your life, or was it very different from the life you hoped for?” A million questions, as far as I could go without being obnoxious,

In your book, you gave travel as one example of what’s gotten harder to do as we age. I’m younger than you and Dulles airport just levels me. 

Right? I find it difficult particularly now that everything is done electronically. Pushing buttons at kiosks or they won’t, or you can’t, check your bag…I’m always looking around for someone to help. Or ask where something is. l never had a great sense of direction, and it is not improving with age. I practically have to drop breadcrumbs from the taxis.

Is there anything that comes with age that’s glorious? 

I would say small pleasures that might not light up the happiness meter when you’re young can give you a great deal of pleasure later. I just recently had my 94th birthday and all my kids and all seven of my grandchildren, one of them from Madrid, got in touch to wish me Happy Birthday. Oh, that made me so happy. I bragged about it to everybody like I had won the Nobel Prize.  

I watch my sons with their kids and each other’s kids, playing, fooling around with them, giving them advice, having fun. That would not be on your list of things that made you happy when you were young. Now it lights up my heart. 

Is there anything that you have changed your mind about over the years?

I’m certainly not as sanctimonious as I used to be, or as judgmental. I forget when I figured out that we’re all pains in the ass. You think you’re putting up so graciously with this one’s irritating ways, because you’re going to be a magnanimous person and put up with it. Well, they’re putting up with you, too. We’re all putting up with each other in all kinds of irritating little ways. 

That’s one of the less poetic messages I’ve passed on to my grandchildren, that we’re all pains in the ass. And that we should be grateful that people love us anyway and we should love people anyway.

You’ve written about the relationship between anger and grief. What strikes you most about that?

I think that anger is a way to stave off grief. We think “this shouldn’t have happened” and it’s an outrage. You can get yourself so embroiled in outrage and anger about something to fend off the pain, sorrow and acute feeling of loss that is often underneath all that anger.

How does someone get rid of or move through anger? 

First of all, you need to understand what’s going on. I’ve been very fascinated with people’s insistence on feeling guilty and angry at themselves. They think “I should have done this” and “I should have done that.” That allows you to feel powerful because if you think you could have fixed it or prevented it from happening, you don’t feel as helpless and scared and sad. 

So, then, in the context of being mad at yourself for not asking your grandparents questions, have you made your peace with that?

I’m trying to teach myself and some of my friends to treat themselves the way they would treat their best girlfriend and the people they love. I’m talking about your basic Jewish woman with her capacity for guilt. I’m sure you’ve done this: you’ve talked to a friend who’s very upset and mad at herself, and you say, Oh, honey, you know it was going to happen anyway, or it wasn’t. You talk to your friend in a way that’s different from how you talk to yourself. Be that generous with yourself. 

How has Judaism informed your life and your work?

I don’t do a lot of practicing [but] I identify with being a Jew in connection to all the other Jews in the world. I had a very beloved blonde, blue-eyed Christian girlfriend who once asked me when we were 25, “If you could choose any religion, would you still choose being a Jew?” I thought about it for a minute, and I realized absolutely, yes! I like it. 

I didn’t grow up with any kind of Jewish education. My parents didn’t belong to a synagogue. I don’t think my father was ever Bar Mitzvahed. But I came to be somebody who had Hanukkah and very serious Passovers. I also love that one of my sons has had both of his kids Bar Mitzvahed through the Workmens’ Circle, which I fell in love with. [Editors note: the movement, now called The Workers Circle, is a progressive practice of Judaism that emphasizes social justice.]

You’ve written that you were obsessed with non-existence. How do you make the prospect of non-existence become real to you? 

If you’re looking at the end, I can absolutely feel non-existence. I can feel the world going on and on and me not there. It may have something to do with the fact that when I was five or six years old, I almost died—I mean to the point where my grandmother picked out a tombstone for me. I had pneumonia in the days before antibiotics. I was in a hospital for three months and that probably shaped some of my thinking. 

I expressed that in all my early poetry. Everything I wrote when I started becoming a writer had a dead body. My very first poem when I was in second grade was about my dead mother and father, who were both alive and extremely pissed off.

[Non-existence] has been on my mind for a long time. There’s a whole section in my current book on the afterlife. You would see me around my retirement community, say, standing in line to get a COVID-19 shot, and I’d tap the person in front of me and say, “Hi, I’m Judy Viorst, I live here. I’m writing a book with a chapter on the afterlife. Do you believe in the afterlife? And if so, can I interview you right now?” It would have gone very fast if everybody had said no. 

Is there a difference between writing for children and writing for adults?

One striking difference is [their] responses. Adults will always smile politely and say nice things. Kids will give you a very direct response like “Read another book.” 

My honest answer is that they aren’t that different for me, because I’m writing about what’s inside myself. I’ll ask [myself], say, what it feels like to be a kid having a bad day, or a brother they wish wasn’t born. I can really tap into that kid and myself. I also feel that there are a whole range of subjects, starting with sibling rivalry and jealousy and loneliness and hating to move—there are a million subjects that feel the same for children and adults. 

You had a robust childhood rivalry with your younger sister, Lois, who died in 1984 from cancer at age 50. What did her passing teach you? 

It taught me that somebody who I thought was the softie in the family could mobilize with such maturity the ability to die with grace and courage. I was just blown away by my [formerly] “cry baby” sister. She was magnificent.

How would you describe yourself?

Well, one thing is that I think of myself as a person who loves poetry and appreciates the poetic in life. But over the decades, I have been very consistent about what I want on my tombstone, which is like the world’s most un-poetic thing: I am reliable.

I can quote you some very beautiful lines of poetry. I don’t want any of those lines on my tombstone. 

I am reliable. You can count on me. If I’m two minutes late somewhere, all of my friends assume I’m dead because I was just run over by a car. Even if I was, I would be getting my cell phone out of the gutter and calling them and saying, “I’m going to be a little late.” I have not been able to rise above or change that. I’m inordinately proud of my reliability. It’s so boring.

What’s next for you?

For the first time, I’m going to do my own audio of this book. Had I known, I would have been working on my New Jersey accent. 

Have you been able to make a transcendent matzo ball?

I make a pretty damn good matzo ball. It’s the sinker, not the floater kind. I make no apologies.

Top image: Judith Viorst (Credit: Simon & Schuster).