Retirement is real

This past May 31 marked the one-year anniversary of my retirement after 21 years at my last place of employment. It now feels like I’ve always lived like this, although it took about six months to completely adjust. I have to say I love it. It makes caregiving for my 94-year-old mother who has dementia much less stressful. I can get up late in the morning and let her sleep as long as she wants. I assist the caregivers with getting her dressed and going to the bathroom. All of them need my assistance with this, whereas when I was working they didn’t. So I really didn’t have much choice given the inevitable deterioration in Mom’s condition. It was the perfect time to retire. I had just turned 66.

I’m still so pre-occupied with caregiving and worrying about Mom that in one very important sense I’m still working, still sitting with her and trying to cope with having no nights free (the latest any caregiver stays is 8 pm one night a week. The others are ready to leave by 6:30 and 7 pm). I haven’t had an actual “vacation” in almost 10 years. I moved into her house and started taking care of her full time in 2010. Now, since I have to assist the caregivers, I can’t even take short day trips of 100 miles to places like Columbia where I lived for a number of years, and to the small city where my mother grew up and which used to be like a second home to me when my much loved and cherished aunt, and Mom’s older sister, was alive. Now I just have memories of all those special visits years ago. I’m very nostalgic, so those places hold intense memories.

So it’s partial retirement, I would say. I used to love to travel and I dream of doing that again some day. I even bought on impulse at Costco a new, much easier-to-read state topographic map book, essential for back roads travel if you don’t use GPS. if I really plan it right, I can call in extra help and take a longer road trip one Saturday. How unimaginably great it will be to get a real change of scenery, even if just for a day.

4:30 pm

It’s a lazy, rainy Friday afternoon and I’m lying in my upstairs bedroom, listening to the gentle plip plop of rain on the tin roof. A little over a year ago I would have been at work til 6, sitting at my desk wondering if everything was okay or whether the caregiver would call with any surprises about Mom’s condition. Mostly things at work went okay, but it became obvious I couldn’t continue working.

Now as I lie here flipping through magazines and blessedly having some time to idly rest while my sister, visiting from Seattle, sits with Mom in the den, I have the opportunity to once again reflect on all the changes in a year that has swiftly passed since I retired. I’ve discovered a few of things:

1) It’s a cliche, I know, but when you’re retired the days fly by so fast they run into each other and you forget what day it is. I’m constantly confusing Friday with Saturday, for instance, and Monday could be Tuesday and Tuesday could be Thursday. Each day I’m doing what I want to and and when I want to do it as long as a caregiver is with Mom.

2) This is really, really IT. The final third of my life. I keep getting older but my health is starting to slip ever so slightly. Mysterious pains start appearing, and it just so happened that I read in my latest Mayo Clinic Health Letter about a condition that could, in fact, be just what I’ve been experiencing. No, it really couldn’t be the that, but should I ask the doctor anyway? No. I just had a checkup a month ago. Self-diagnosis is a slippery slope, I’m discovering. Much more so as I get older.. This doesn’t mean I’m not always going to be reading too much about everything related to my health that I’m concerned about, thanks to the Internet. In the old days you had to go to the library and look things up in books, of all things.

By the way, I’m reading an excellent book titled, appropriately enough, “Pilgrimage into the Last Third of Life: 7 Gateways to Spiritual Growth.”

3) This really is IT, again. I’ll never have to get up every morning and go to work, unless, of course, I absolutely have to, but who’s going to hire a 67-year old anyway? And after 45 years I don’t at all want to work again. I don’t miss it. This is really what life should be about at a certain point. Retirement has brought a wonderful sense of freedom and release, but as I mentioned earlier, it took me about six months of to get used to it and realize that my self-esteem and self concept didn’t depend on holding on to a job anymore. I also wondered how I’d feel not seeing the co-workers I’ve known for 20 or more years. Not so terribly bad, actually. We have to move on eventually, and I have nice visits with some of them every few weeks. That’s worked out well. I miss the banter and camaraderie. But I told them when I left that I wasn’t going to disappear. I kept my word. Besides, they were like extended family to me. They know that. The going away party they gave me on my last day at work was very emotional, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to have worked there all those years. Honestly, in my 40s and job hunting I never thought I’d find a job that I could do for so many years. I felt stability for the first time in my life.

4) it seems more imperative to contact old friends I haven’t heard from in 25 or more years.

5) I’ve always been introspective and older than my years, particularly when I was younger. But now it really is time to concentrate on what’s really important in life and think about the deepest and most penetrating philosophical and religious ideas and concepts. To have the opportunity to really delve into these matters is very exciting. Excuses about putting this off or not dealing with it begin to sound quite hollow.

Finally, I badly want to go back and revisit places where I lived and worked in the past and also my hometown. There are a lot of memories to recall and sometimes the best way to do that is visit as many of the places where your formative experiences in life unfolded as possible.

I feel I’ve lived a long life, and now is the first time I’ve truly felt that way. I don’t have to prove anything to myself or to others anymore. That’s very satisfying.