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We came across the line from King Lear last week, the “we” being the small group of adults who are taking my session on two of Shakespeare’s plays. Lear’s line is:
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”
Those older people assembled in front of me (I am one of them), were aware that Lear was raving on the heath in a storm, abandoned. His daughters scorned him. He’d given away his kingship, his title, the identity he knew.
“Can that question apply to us?” I asked.
Several instantly volunteered. “Retirement. It’s like retirement.”
Some people live for retirement, can’t wait. My step-daughter-in-law, for instance, has been talking about it for ten years. I think she’s almost there, almost at the Social Security Age. Is that what it’s about? Growing old for Social Security? My own dad, who died young in self-defense, I think, would have enjoyed “retirement.” He had a strenuous ugly job in the steel mills.
But for those of us who have identified with our professions our whole life, retirement seems to be facing an empty life. At least for me. In my case, everyone had disappeared before me, and then I didn’t want to leave teaching; I was retired – I mean, it happened to me, the result of severe cutbacks. Who was I, then?
I have friends who have retired who “have never been busier.” Well, these friends have husbands who are still alive, children, even grandchildren. They have ample retirement checks – along with the spouse’s—to do as they please, and they please a lot.They fill that empty life. That’s what they do. Water exercise, pickle ball, travels to Europe, museums, family outings, performances, gardening— there is no emptiness.
I have been a teacher all my life. I defined myself that way. I’m chagrined to say that when I was asked the question Who are you, I’d answer “a teacher” first and then “a mother.” But if I’ve given away my “titles,” or, in my case, if they’ve been taken away, and I am not a mother or a wife or a teacher, who am I? Who is it that can tell me?
I always loved reading and preparing and explaining and being in a classroom. It took up a good deal of my time. Too much, all that full time high school, five classes a day, and I “retired” from that after 38 years and taught part-time college for the next seventeen.
Until the withdrawals: of my family, my partner, and then my position.
With what do you fill an empty life? With writing every day. With writing stories and essays and even books. Who reads them? Does it matter? With music, with dance, with plays, with inviting friends (mostly old women) to lunches and dinners. With walks.
People say of “retirement,” “I’ve never been happier.” Well, I have. I was. But I am filling an empty life.