Lessons of forced retirement

At a recent meeting, I gave my card to a woman. It says I am a writer and speaker about disability, Life and end of life issues. She read it, paused then her face took on a sad expression. She said, “This doesn’t have anything to do with end of life, but my father is having a tough time dealing with retirement.” I told her that retirement may not be the end of life but for a person who have derived his sense of identity from his work it may seem like it. If he has not internally prepared himself for retirement, it is the end of the life he knew.


Put out to pasture

I experienced this in my own family. Heart disease forced my father into premature retirement at the age of fifty. He was not prepared for it and felt like a lame work horse “put out to pasture.”

Suddenly my mother found him loitering around the house, reorganizing cupboards in the kitchen, offering unsolicited and unwelcome advice on how the prepare meals, and generally getting in my mom’s way. It came to a head one afternoon when my mother threatening him with a frying pan and ordering him out of the kitchen whenever she was working there. He moped around like a lost puppy. It was sad to see him in such a state after being so vital, engaged and productive in his work-life.


Twenty-five years later, multiple sclerosis forced me into medical retirement from a career with the Canadian government. I was thirty-eight years old and sank into a clinical depression. I, too, had derived much of my identity from work. You might think I should have learned not to do this after witnessing my father’s struggle, but no – I fell into the same trap. It’s easy to do.


Delusions of indispensibility

After all, I spend many years in the work world. There were places to go, people I needed to see, tasks that needed to be done (they could only be done by me). It was so easy to delude myself into believing I was indispensible. Retirement told me it was all a lie and that I was not as indispensible as I had believed.

Work carried on just fine without me. The basket into which I had put so many eggs of my exaggerated sense of self-importance and identity had a false bottom that opened to send my delusions crashing at my feet.
It was just prior to the Christmas Season in 1991. Christmas was miserable that year.



The festivities of the Season only made my loss more apparent and my perceived detachment from my world more complete. I did not feel festive. No, I felt like a grim observer removed from the gaiety and the hustle and bustle of Christmas shoppers and the incessant droning of Seasonal music in shopping malls. It was as though a pall had descended over me.

It wasn’t logical because the Advent Season has nothing to do with human careers ─ but I was viewing reality through the distorted and darkened lens of clinical depression. It had very little to do with logic or reason.


Help needed!

My thinking was all wrong and I knew it. The problem was, in that state, I just didn’t care. Help was needed!


The physiology of clinical depression can be alleviated with medications. With proper treatment, one’s spirits and equilibrium begin to return to normal allowing a disposition toward logic and reason to return too.



New outlook


Retirement is an opportunity not a sentence. It is a wonderful opportunity to redefine personal identity and priorities. It allows the retiree to start afresh and place faith, family and community (in that order) front and center in their lives. That’s where they should have been all along. Work is a good and important thing ― but not the most important thing ― it should not be treated by our actions and priorities as though it is. We work to live not live to work.

Keep this in mind and retirement will be easier because it can be seen as part of life’s many transitions. Each transition is as important and vital to human development and internal growth as previous and future transitions. But most important of all, retirement is a marvellous time draw closer to Christ and the people around us.

Retirement is not to be feared but embraced. As for this retiree, my new title is Christian, father, grandfather, and a citizen. That’s where my identity is now. It’s the most important job I have ever had.


Mark Pickup

(This blog also appeared in the December 1st 2008 edition of Canada's Western Catholic Reporter under the title "Prepare for the rejuvenating gift of retirement." See(http://www.wcr.ab.ca/columns/markpickup/2008/markpickup120108.shtml )