Verified by 
Two newspaper articles that appeared last week about late-life transformations -- one about a change in gender, the other about a change in sexual orientation -- drive home the point that no matter how old you get, life might still throw you a surprise or two.
The first story, which appeared in The Washington Post, was about the Rohrs, a couple who have been married for almost 50 years, ever since college. To all outward appearances they were an ordinary, happy, successful couple -- the husband, Bill, was a respected orthopedic surgeon, and he and his wife, Linda, raised two kids who grew up to be solid, upstanding adults. But about three years ago, at the age of 67, Bill told his wife a secret that had haunted him his whole life: despite his anatomy and his gender assignment, he had always felt himself to be female. It took a little while for Linda to absorb the shock, but not that long, really. She encouraged her husband to live his life the way he had always wanted to, stood by him as he took estrogen to transform himself from Bill to Kate, and last February held a vigil in a hospital waiting room during her spouse's five-hour sex reassignment surgery -- which amounted to, as Kate put it, "turning an outie into an innie."
"It's not about the gender," Linda told Washington Post reporter Amy Ellis Nutt in explaining why she not only stuck around through the transition, but actively encouraged it. "It's about the soul."
Theirs is a beautiful love story. There's also a lovely video that accompanies the piece. I must admit, though, that the science writer in me was left wondering about one detail that was raised and then dropped: the Rohrs adopted their two children because they found out, when Bill and Linda were trying to get pregnant, that Bill didn't manufacture sperm. Was that related somehow to his lifelong feelings of being transgender?
The second article, an op-ed in The New York Times by former U.S. Senator Harris Wofford, was designed to elicit similar warm-and-fuzzy feelings. It was about how Wofford, 75 years old and still reeling from the loss of his much-loved wife five years earlier, found himself on a Florida beach one day and falling in to a relationship -- first a friendship, than a romance -- with a young man. A very young man. A man who was only 25 years old at the time.
Wofford's point in writing the op-ed was, I guess, to revel in the great surprise of a late-life conversion to homosexuality, and what the openness to love, wherever it might come from, looks like. As he wrote --
To some, our bond is entirely natural, to others it comes as a strange surprise, but most soon see the strength of our feelings and our devotion to each other. We have now been together for 15 years.
Too often, our society seeks to label people by pinning them on the wall — straight, gay or in between. I don’t categorize myself based on the gender of those I love. I had a half-century of marriage with a wonderful woman, and now am lucky for a second time to have found happiness.
At the end of April, Wofford, now 90, will marry his young man, Matthew Charlton, who is 40.
I must admit that as much as I wanted to revel along with Wofford in the glory of unexpected love, I found myself stymied by the rather shocking 50-year age difference. Many online commenters at nytimes.com (there were more than 500 of them last time I checked) also found themselves stymied. They wondered whether Charlton was a golddigger, whether Wofford had been a closeted gay man his whole life, whether the whole relationship smacked of inappropriateness. But who are we to judge, right? I'd rather just come away with the feelings expressed by one commenter, who wrote, "Bravo! It takes courage to own the complexity of experience."
And that's the heart of the matter, really, in both of these stories. Humans are complicated, experiences are diverse, the future is unknowable. And for as long as there is breath and life, there is the possibility of change.
