One of life's biggest transitions looms ahead in Daydreaming on the Porch

I’m facing one of the biggest transitions in my life – one everyone faces – but one which, in my case, I really haven’t had to even think about until recently.   After 22 years of coming to the same workplace and the same comfortable, book-filled and paper-strewn cubicle, I am retiring (or at least think I am. I have two days to change my mind).   It’s hard to even say it, much less write these words, but the simple truth is I’m at the perfect time to retire now and get all my benefits.  If I don’t retire now, I will just be putting off the inevitable from this time forward.  Finally, and perhaps most persuasively, I can’t continue to work full time and be the primary caregiver for my mother.  Even though we have plenty of part-time caregivers who have made my continuing to work possible the past five years, I am now having a difficult time balancing all the hiring and managing of caregivers with continuing to work.   The stress continues to mount with Mom’s advanced memory loss, confusion and physical decline.  I fear I will be called more often at work about problems at home.   I simply need to be home, or near home, or, at least not working so I am always available.   A recent evaluation indicated Mom is not ready for Hospice.   She’s not going to a nursing home.   Her physical condition, while inexorably diminishing, is relatively stable for someone 93 years old.   She hasn’t been in the hospital in almost five years.

Given all this, the hard part is that if I were living on my own and not caregiving, I would probably put off retirement.  I like my work overall, although it’s changed a lot over the past ten years.  I enjoy the social engagement, helping people and the daily rapport and interaction with my co-workers.  I’m loyal and extremely grateful to a job and place that probably literally saved my life after an extended bout of unemployment and depression.

I’ve made a lot of good friends in past jobs, but I’ve basically been a solitary person all my life, and this job is now my only social outlet.   Leaving it will create a tremendous vacuum, and I will absolutely have find other outlets through volunteering.  I have a lot of potential contacts and I have a lot of ideas.  I’m not too worried about that. 

What worries me is that if I should lose Mom soon after I’ve retired, I’ll have lost everything that presently occupies my life, thoughts, worries, fears, joys, heartache and sense of belonging and accomplishment – everything.  So, while most people would rejoice to be finally able to retire, I have been going back and forth over the pros and cons, all the while knowing with certainty I am going to do it, and soon.   I have to give our Human Resources office a final day of work, after all, and complete the paperwork.  And crunch time is coming this week.  I’ve been procrastinating a bit.

Before saying I’m crazy for not jumping at the opportunity to be free at last from the shackles of getting up every morning and having to go to work, consider all I’ve just said.  And, there are other reasons why I’m reluctant to retire.  All my life until I got this present final job and career (for it was a completely new career from anything I had done previously), I had gone from one job and career to another.  From graduate program to graduate program, getting degrees I never used until earning my final master’s which I needed for any advancement in my current job.   All through the 1980s, I worked temporary jobs or left one unsuitable job after another every year or two.  I made huge mistakes in taking jobs I never should have accepted, but did out of desperation because I needed a job so badly.   I traveled solo by car around the country during most of the 1980s.   Those travels were a fantastic, overwhelmingly positive experience, but they only increased my sense of rootlessness and seeming inability to settle down anywhere.

When I finally got found a new job and career that I would stay with all those years, I found a measure of security I had never known before.    I no longer had that gnawing fear of being unemployed (for as long as a year in the past).  I settled into routines.  I finally was able to buy any book I wanted and as many as I wanted (the result is that I am overwhelmed by books and have many hundreds to read in retirement).  My job gives me a sense of security and belonging and doesn’t involve much stress. It has ample psychic rewards just from the sheer number of people I’ve been able to help.   It has allowed me to pursue my hobby of photography.  It is a job that is difficult to retire from.   When I think of no longer working, I get this very strange and anxious fear of the unknown.   Even now, beforehand, I feel my life has suddenly been shortened, that I am older than I would, or could, ever really acknowledge until now, and that I am going to embark on the final stage of life alone, with no immediate family to keep me company in my old age.  That’s why I will probably move near my sister and her family.   I’m not at all sure I can go it alone in the dream retirement town I have had my eyes on for years.   I’ve not by any means ruled out that place.   It has everything I could want except for one key element – proximity to family.

I have no idea what will happen in the next year.   I can make plans but who knows what will come of those?    I’m suddenly pondering the mysteries of life in ways I never have before.   I know one thing:  retirement will free me to engage in my lifelong quest for knowledge, a deepened faith, and the exciting possibilities of unlocking doors to the unknown, the mysteries of the universe.  I truly believe that and look forward to that time, even though it still seems unreal that I am even contemplating all this.  This is big.  This is serious.  In a short while, my life will be dramatically different, or least I think it will be now as I write this.

Every year I’ve lived in Charleston has brought me incrementally closer to the answers I seek.    Soon I’ll have the freedom to not only ask the questions, but find the answers.  That’s my dream for retirement anyway.

It’s already started.   I’m thinking a lot more about the past, what I’ve accomplished, the people I’ve met and known and hopefully influenced in a positive way, all the places I’ve lived, and the beautiful, grand and natural wonders I’ve seen and experienced.   I’m trying to look ahead with anticipation and excitement, even as I’m still encumbered by so much anxiety and so many obligations.   What will I do when I’m actually free?

Last updated April 12, 2017