Way back in the early days of this blog, I posted a piece about a friend and I agreeing to shadow each other at work one day a year. We realized that we knew each other only in social settings and had just a superficial awareness of how we spent the bulk of our waking time during the work week. The same could be said of most of our friendships. For people whose work was such a central part of our identities, not knowing each other as “workers” called for a remedy.
The same motivation lay behind a practice we instituted years ago at our Jewish religious group — our chavurah. When we gathered for potluck lunches, we sometimes invite members to make a 20–30-minute presentation about their work; we called them work talks. The consensus was that they brought us closer together. It’s an admirable group of people – doctors, therapists, educators, academics, artists and others trying in their own ways to make the world a better place. Listening to these talks brought home to me how much I didn’t know about the people I thought I knew well.
Fast forward to the present and we find a number of those fine people now retired. How are they managing with one of the linchpins of their identity stripped away? How are they using this new gift of time that has been bestowed on them? How are they feeling about their retooled lives? The work talks continue. Those of us who are still working use them in the traditional way while the retirees are invited to do a “Retirement Review” – a term adapted from the hospice practice of conducting Life Reviews – in which they try to address the above questions and more.
So, I’m going to try in writing to do my own Retirement Review. It’s been about 12 years since I retired from work that meant everything to me; an in-depth reflection on these years is long overdue. Most of you know something about my work life before retirement, but for those who don’t, here’s the short version. If you’re curious,a more detailed account is contained in the transcript of an interview Arthur Tobier did with me that you’ll find on the same website that contains my blog entries.) Although I was trained as a clinical psychologist, I spent almost all of my professional life in education — related areas – helping to run one of the earliest HeadStart programs in the country, directing a school writing program in New York City, teaching at multiple grade levels, directing a pre-K to 8 charter school and, finally helping to start a program for preparing teachers to work in Chicago public schools.
I was 74 when I retired. I loved every job on that list. I knew it was time to step aside but I had no intention of putting my feet up and fading away. My instincts told me that I had to move quickly to build a schedule that would provide structure for my new life. I signed up to volunteer with a program called AIM HIGH, started by a friend who was shocked by the dismal graduation rates from Chicago high schools and the low college attendance and completion rates from those schools. The knowledge I had accumulated of the city’s schools and bureaucracy proved useful to the program. During my six years at AIM HIGH, I learned a lot about areas new to me, like financing higher education for low-income students. During this busy and fulfilling period, my wife described my situation by telling friends, “He’s only retired from his paycheck.”
Alongside that work, I visited the classrooms of graduates of the teacher education program that I was so proud to have helped design. The program already contained a critical and unique element of providing coaching support for alums’ first three years in the classroom. I was interested in going one step farther by serving as a thought partner to those teachers beyond the novice phase who were ready to engage in ambitious projects that brought their work to a new level. I had no official role in the program, but I had its blessing for my work which also helped sustain the alumni network that provided much-needed support for teachers working too often in isolation.
In 2019, I added to my structure the blog you’re now reading. It proved to be a critical addition because a lot of what I had built up to this point came crashing down with Covid, cutting me off from the face-to-face work that I found so nourishing and life-giving. The blog and Zoom were my constant companions during those dark years which upended the lives of not just retirees but also of those still working but now cut off from their colleagues and the population they served.
Blogging and Zooming continue to sustain me. The zooming that warded off loneliness during the pandemic is now a vehicle for a regular schedule of visits with family, friends, colleagues and former students, most of whom are geographically out of reach. I’ve written so much in past posts about the importance of friendships. Relationships in general are especially important in retirement, so I’ve tried to be attentive to do the work to sustain them. It’s so easy at this stage in your life to feel like you’ve disappeared from people’s social charts.
In addition, Rosellen and I are volunteering with a program called Village, which I’ve written about previously. It is devoted to helping people in our community who have chosen to age in place. We drive people to their appointments, medical and otherwise. We visit a family whose husband is working valiantly to keep his wife with him despite her decline into Alzheimer’s.
My work in the community garden has offered huge rewards during these retirement years, particularly during Covid when it was virtually the only place where I could meet the world unmasked. As I write this, my body is sore from a morning of picking the season’s dwindling crops for distribution at the food pantry run by the church on whose grounds the garden sits. It’s worth every moment of discomfort in my aging body.
In preparing for this posting, I combed through this month’s calendar. Even though we sometimes feel isolated, our schedule is full of social activities, many of which revolve around our Jewish group. We go to the theater – 3 times this month; our trainer comes every Wednesday morning; we go to rallies and other political events; we travel to and with family.
So much of this will come to an abrupt end when our physical frailties intervene, but the important lesson of this Retirement Review is this: Do not allow a vacuum to develop once your work life has ended. It takes energy and resourcefulness but it’s critical to build a new structure for your life, onethat has the potential to engage and fulfill you. It’s easy to fall into thinking you’re no longer useful in this world that seems to be spinning away more and more rapidly. And don’t forget to leave time for a daily nap. You can spare the half hour it absorbs.
