Threshold

I’ll never forget the day last Spring when I had to decide once and for all if I was going to retire from my job of 21 years. I could postpone it or I could do it. That afternoon I was scheduled to go to the human resources office and sign the papers that would officially get the ball rolling. Once I had inked those papers, I knew that for all intent and purpose I would be retired. Finis. The end of my work life and actually the end of my whole life as I had comfortably known it for many years. I was on auto-pilot, but the plane had to land. I could have kept working, but I was at the perfect age to retire. I had only just recently gotten Medicare forms in the mail. Opening that mail was as if someone was saying to me, “Now’s the time. Do it.” I was truly on a momentous threshold and I knew it. I was extremely anxious about what I was planning to do that afternoon, yet the whole time I knew I would go forward with it. I knew that afternoon would change my life, and it did.

About 3 o’clock I couldn’t sit in the office any longer. I was fidgeting. My nerves were becoming a tangled mess. Would I or wouldn’t I? But I knew I wanted to avoid one thing at all cost — indecision. Terrible indecision is one of the hallmarks of depression, and I certainly didn’t want to revisit times in the past where I was in a place of agony about what to do regarding almost any decision I had to make, no matter how trivial. But of course there was a huge amount at stake with this decision.

I walked briskly to the waterfront nearby, sat on a bench and pondered my fate. About ten minutes later I got up. It was a beautiful, sunny day. I walked back to work, and with a sense of trepidation but also newly firm resolve, I signed the papers. I walked out of the human resources office a different person. I would soon be leaving my friends, my daily purpose for being these past 21 years, and the comfortable routines that had guided me along during two decades of a satisfying final career ( I had had two previous careers).

I had crossed the threshold into a new world that afternoon, one that would be full of new beginnings and unknown adventures. For the immediate future, and for who knows how much longer, I would be immersed in the heavy responsibilities of caregiving for my mother, just as I had done when I worked. But I would be a different person, looking ahead to the final chapter of life and trying to do it one day at a time.