Lessons in love and life from Bill Torbert

“I think I am discovering things about friendship I never knew, even after all these years,” Bill Torbert told me last month. “I think I was wrong about what friendship would be like here in the final chapter; perhaps I was wrong about what it always was.” 

We were sitting in his apartment, the walls covered with bookshelves and the art I remembered from the last time I visited, but the signs of great illness all around us: the walker next to his chair, the hospital bed next to the sofa. This was my Goodbye visit to my dear friend and mentor, and we were eating tofu summer rolls and sharing the peanut sauce.

I first wrote to Bill 15 years ago, as I was finishing my first book, Changing on the Job, and looking to see if this giant in the field of adult development and leadership would write an endorsement to go on the back cover. Bill wrote back immediately in the style I would come to understand as his—joyful, playful, open. Somehow—I actually can’t even imagine how it happened—in that first exchange of emails we discovered that he had no first cousins, and I had an enormous number. I offered for him to come into the Garvey/Fitzgerald family as I had plenty of cousins to share. From then on, we called each other cousin. I didn’t imagine this day, this final conversation, when we opened up our cousinship so many years ago. I suppose we never do picture the end at the beginning.

He reached shakily towards my peanut sauce. “You know, Cousin Jennifer,” he said, “I always figured that at the end of my life, my friendships would be a kind of celebration, a kind of comfortable blanket. What I’m discovering is that even here at the end, there are so many unsaid things left to say, so much left to clear. Old resentments, small difficulties we’ve been holding all these years. I didn’t imagine this.” He paused a long time, looking off into the distance, his eyes helping him search for the right words. In the silence, I realised I had no idea what he’d say next, whether the discovery was a blow or a gift. But of course he was around to tell me: “It has been beautiful beyond my expectations. I didn’t know there was so much left to deepen, even now.”

He smiled and somehow his boyishness was back. “I wish I could go back and annotate all my books from this vantage point,” he told me, waving his hands at the bookshelves behind him, “although obviously there isn’t time for any of that. But I would like to say that there’s more than I thought, more kinds of friendship, more kinds of love, more than I could have imagined earlier. I would like to write a note next to each place I spoke of love to explain that the limitations I saw were not the limitations of love, but the limitations of my ability to understand love at that time.”

Bill confided that he had long wondered about whether giving or receiving the love of friendship was the most delightful. Earlier in his life, he had found receiving love the most wonderful because there is no feeling so delicious as being well loved. Later, he found that it was giving love that most enriched his life because it was more active than receiving. Now here at the end, he told me he had figured it out: “There is no difference between the two. I had missed all along that it is the same thing to give and receive love. It is one perfect system even as we live our imperfect ways.”

Bill’s wife Reichi served us ice cream with hot fudge sauce, a daily treat for him, and he grinned sheepishly as he bit into an especially fudgy bite. “I feel the end so close now,” he told me, “and I realize how lucky I have been, how lucky I still am every day.  Ice cream is a miracle! Friendship is a miracle! Life is a miracle! Even death, I dare say, is a miracle.”

This was classic Bill, putting things together, noticing joy and beauty in conflict, in difficulty, in death even. He was a constant reminder of the wonder in finding yourself mistaken (he titled his recent autobiography Numbskull in the Theatre of Inquiry: Transforming self, friends, organizations, and social science). He was a constant reminder of the power of friendship as a developmental force. It changed me just to be near him, proof, I suppose of the developmental power of our own friendship, the way his developmental journey sometimes hewed out a smoother pathway for mine.

And on that day he was offering a reminder of endings and how beautiful they can be. After the tofu rolls and the hot fudge sundae and the even more delicious conversation, Bill’s energy flagged. I hugged him goodbye, as gently as I could, my adopted cousin, my mentor, my dear friend. We walked slowly towards the elevator, and as the doors closed, I could hear him call out, “Goodbye dear Cousin Jennifer! I love you! Goodbye! Goodbye.”

I made it to the lobby and sat down and wept, am weeping now as I type. 

I have never felt the history of the word goodbye so strongly. A contraction of a blessing, “God be with ye,” the word springs from a time when blessings were more common, and when any meeting might be the last one. For me that last conversation was a blessing. Of course, there have been other times when I’ve said goodbye to someone for the last time. I suppose ultimately it always comes that we say goodbye for the last time. But rarely do we know it so well, rarely do we get the chance for one last perfect afternoon, talking about love and learning and loss.

Bill died early this morning. Or at least his body died. His boyish laughter, his challenging questions, his groundbreaking research—these things are still alive. They live in me and in the network of friends, scholars, leaders—humans—who knew him and whose life he changed. His life has changed us, and I’m sure his death will change us in some uncharted way too. Friendship, I’ve learned, is one of the most developmentally potent conveyances in the world. Love reaches beyond any boundary I’ve ever understood. I know it’s true because my cousin Bill told me so over a cold hot fudge sundae on a sparkling September afternoon.