As their average life expectancy increases, today's adults experience a whole new stage of life — the years after their children have left home and before the onset of old age. Often, they are experiencing these "bonus years" with their significant others. In "September Songs," journalist Maggie Scarf shares the findings of her extensive interviews with older couples, revealing how these extra years change married life. An excerpt.

Chapter one: Lynn and Carl McBride
My interview with the McBrides began — as did all my interviews — with a short discussion of the “bonus years”: the recent and phenomenal change in the human life span. I stated that in 1900, in the industrialized West, the average person’s life expectancy was not quite fifty years, while in the year 2006 it stood at a record high of 77.6. In a single century, a full thirty years had been added to the time that the average person could be expected to live.

In consequence, a new stage has been added to the life cycle — one that, I suggested, mirrors the adolescent years in terms of the number of physical, psychological and other life changes that had to be confronted. But unlike adolescence, this later stage of living remained relatively mysterious territory, for its challenges and demands had been far less researched than had the earlier midlife years and the latter, declining years (the so-called “old-old” years) near the end of life. The “bonus years” of fairly healthy later adulthood (the fifties, sixties, early seventies) were the area that I had marked out for exploration. I wanted to find out just how people in this age-group were experiencing them.

As I said my little speech, both Lynn and Carl McBride were nodding their heads as if to say they knew just what I was talking about. So I took out my digital tape recorder and placed it on the dark walnut cocktail table between us. Then I opened the large drawing pad on my lap and turned the pages until I came to one that was blank.

I was embarking upon the interview, as I always do, by quickly constructing an outline of the most important facts of the McBrides’ history as a couple. This bare-bones sketch would contain mundane, ordinary details such as the length of their marriage, the names and ages of their adult children, the names of their parents and information about which of their parents were still living. I was also filling in peripheral information about each of their backgrounds, and some general sense of what their lives in their families of origin had been like.

In so doing, I was making use of a well-known device called a “family genogram.” I have invariably found this clinical tool to be the shortest, safest, most efficient way of gathering an overview of a couple’s emotional and relational biography — a preliminary impression of each individual’s life narrative and major themes, as they’d intertwined with each other in the making of their unique relationship. For, dry and factual as these first, commonplace questions posed in the genogram actually are, they are always laden with rich associations —  associations that begin spilling out in the course of the ensuing discussion. And so the conversation begins.

I feel so rich!
Lynn McBride, who is a slim, short woman with straight blond Dutch-cut hair, told me that this was a first marriage both for her and her husband, and they had been married for thirty-five years. Carl, who is much taller than his wife, has a rangy physique and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. He told me he was fifty-nine and Lynn was two years older. The couple had three grown children: two daughters and a son. All of the McBrides’ children were now in their twenties, and all were getting on well in their lives. The older two had graduated from outstanding colleges and were working in New York and Chicago, at jobs they really enjoyed. The youngest was about to graduate from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

The family room we had settled in had a friendly, warm feeling. Carl sat at one end of a long, subtly tweedy sofa scattered with loose back pillows. Lynn sat closer to the other end, with her legs up on the sofa forming a bridge between them. I was seated on one of three large, comfortable chairs that were ranged across the other side. I found myself admiring the lovely worn Isfahan rug that covered the floor beneath this grouping, and which was bordered by an expanse of varnished hardwood floors.

When I asked the couple about their relationships with their now adult children, Lynn was the one to supply the answer. “We get along fine,” she said cheerfully. “In fact, just recently they thanked me for staying home when they were growing up.” I smiled at her, and said that moms rarely receive such outright kudos. She laughed, colored slightly, glanced at her husband in a somewhat ambiguous way, then said, “I agree.”

I learned that both the McBrides were accomplished musicians; Lynn played the flute, but the piano was the major instrument for both of them. At the present time, Carl was a full professor of music at a major Ivy League university in northern New England. Lynn had gone very far in her musical studies — she had both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree — but had eventually decided that the field didn’t suit her.

“I’d always had an interest in psychology and in mental health,” she said. “This was true from the time I was a teenager. And as I got older I found myself less and less interested in the music business, so I dropped out before getting my doctorate.” She’d wanted to begin her training to be a counselor or social worker immediately, but explained that she couldn’t afford to go back to school for a while. “Of course, we lived in North Carolina at the time,” she said dryly, as if this were part of a more convoluted explanation.

I let that pass, and asked the couple if they had given any thought to their eventual retirement. Since the typical age of retirement in this country is between sixty and sixty-two, I was surprised to hear that they hadn’t. Carl said that he planned to teach until age sixty-five, and maybe seventy. “I will probably teach thirteen to fifteen more years ... or I plan to.” Lynn, who had recently completed a postgraduate fellowship in social work, said she felt closer to the beginning than the end of a career. “I have my first real job in years, and I feel so rich!” She was working at an outpatient unit for recently discharged mental patients, most of whom suffered from borderline personality disorder.

Thoughts about retirement were simply not on this couple’s horizon.

Lynn said she thought that life as a retiree would be altogether boring. “I don’t understand why people retire!” she declared. But then, after a brief pause, she said musingly, “I suppose there will come a time when I have less energy and want to work part-time. And we’re probably going to want to travel, so I’ll want more freedom ....” Her voice trailed off as if such notions had been reserved for a misty, far-off future. Carl’s expression was one of impassive agreement.

Video   Till death do us part? Sept. 4: TODAY hosts talk to author Maggie Scarf and psychologist Dale Atkins about ways to keep your marriage strong. Today show

The McBrides’ responses were unusual, for most couples in their age range tended to answer this question at length, with a stream of stories, fantasies of the future, recollections of the past, accounts of their career experiences. But neither Lynn nor Carl had given any serious consideration to eventually retiring from their careers.

My next questions were about health. Usually, people at their time of life have a complaint of a trivial or, in some instances, a serious sort. In Lynn’s case, there had been a real scare — a cancer of the thyroid, one that had been successfully removed several years ago. She was using thyroid replacement hormones and feeling completely like herself. There was no effect on her daily life at all.

“Count your blessings,” I said.

“Well, I’m trying,” Carl said — a remark I found somewhat perplexing at that moment.

I asked them if they’d ever given thought, as people at our age tend to do (my instinct was that it would be tactful to include myself in this ticklish question), to what life would be like in the absence of the spouse. “I don’t think that anybody at these particular ages has any idea how long she or her spouse will live,” I added.

There was a pause. “Of course not,” Lynn said, while her husband nodded his agreement.

“Do you ever think about that?”

“Yes, I do,” Lynn said.

“Yes, for sure,” Carl said, almost in unison.

I asked them how they thought that he or she would handle it.

“It’s interesting that you should ask that,” Lynn said, “because he just got back from a weeklong trip to Toronto, and I was pretty lonesome and I thought about it.” She shook her head as if to shake the notion away, then smiled. “The fact is, we expect to live to eighty. But you never know ....”

“Anything can happen,” Carl said, an apprehensive expression settling on his face.

“Yes,” I said, “friends start to thin out ....” I was thinking of my beloved friend Betsey, who had died recently of pancreatic cancer.

Carl said that hadn’t happened to them yet; they hadn’t lost close friends of their own generation. “What we’ve been doing is losing parents. Lynn’s dad died four years ago, and my dad died a couple of years later.” A glance at my sketchbook told me that Lynn’s mother had died many years earlier; the McBrides now had just one living parent, Carl’s mother.

He told me that she was now living in a retirement village in the midwestern farming community where he grew up; she’d had a life with which she was contented. “She is very secure and happy living in that culture,” he said. His tone of voice made it sound as if she were living in a culture that had, over time, grown foreign to him.

I asked Lynn how she thought she would handle things if she were on her own.

“When I think about that, I’m glad I have this career .... because I would probably stay real busy, and I suppose I would reach out to friends more. I would probably depend on friends and colleagues far more than I do now,” she replied.

I turned to Carl. “How about you?”

He hesitated a long time before responding. “I do think that if Lynn were to go first, I would grieve ... I would grieve a lot .... If she were to go first, it would be very, very difficult ....” His voice trailed off.

When I prompted him by asking how he thought he would manage, he simply said, “That’s a tough call.” He fell silent again, and I didn’t press him further.

At last Lynn said, “We thought of that in regard to our parents — which one would manage better if the other went first. And it did come out better, in both cases.”

“For both.” Carl nodded. “Because her mother died first, and my dad died first. And in each couple that person was the more problematic member of the couple. By quite a long shot, I think.”

“I see,” I said, knowing that this was a subject to which we would be returning.

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