Retirement Role Models – My Next Chapter: A Retirement Journey

If we’re fortunate, we have mentors and role models throughout our careers - both people we know personally and others we watch from afar.

But what about when we retire?

There aren’t many cultural references for successful retirement. American women of my generation had Mary Tyler Moore as a career woman icon, for example. Who do any of us have as retirees? Older celebrities are typically admired when they’re still working at their crafts. Professional athletes who retire are typically too young to want to stop working regularly at something else. And stories about older people, if they exist at all, tend to focus on general aging issues and not specifically the move away from working full time.

Many of the retirement resources that do exist tend to focus on finances — which, while extremely important, leave out a lot of other things we might need to address. How do we craft a new identity? How do we want to spend our time now? How can we tend to our social connections if our jobs provided many of those interactions?

And there are other issues at this stage of life. Some of us have elderly parents who need increased attention and help. There can also be local siblings and/or close friends with medical issues – temporary or chronic – who need assistance. Some retirees have kids and grandchildren who could use a hand, especially with babysitting.

These things can arise when you’re still working, too. I consider them challenges of aging in general as opposed to retirement-specific, which is why I don’t often cover them here.

However, once you retire, the questions around those can change. While still employed, it’s often “How can I possibly fit all this in while also working a full-time job?” After retirement, there’s more freedom to serve others, but there are questions around that, too. Others’ expectations can rise once your work obligations end.

In retirement, questions can be “How can I best support my loved ones while still tending to my own physical and mental well-being? Do I want to set boundaries when people now think my time is limitless? If so, how can I do that in a way that doesn’t make me feel endless guilt?

“Will I – either by choice or necessity - sacrifice some months or years of my retirement to care for those who I love and loved and cared for me, knowing that my own years of good health and decent energy levels are limited? How do I manage that?”

None of this is easy. But none of this is new, either. Most of us have people in our lives who have retired. We just need to seek them out.

This may or may not start with parents. Both of my parents modeled successful retirement, at least in my eyes. My Mom did a lot of volunteer work, audited college classes, had a full circle of family and friends, and regularly attended the theater. Dad loved nothing more than being with family and also had his golfing buddies. Plus, several months a year, he graciously put his accounting skills to work preparing tax returns for his friends and relatives. And that meant he also spent time and effort keeping up to date on federal and state tax laws throughout the year.

That’s what I saw. I regret not talking to them about their transitions away from full-time work. I was in my mid-50s when I lost them, still feeling like I was in the midst of my career. I wasn’t thinking about the nuts and bolts of what retirement would mean. I couldn’t yet imagine myself as a retiree.

Luckily, as I started thinking about winding down my career, I had friends who preceded me in leaving their working lives. It was helpful to ask them things like how they knew it was time to retire (“you’ll just know” was good advice), how they dealt with missing certain things about their jobs, and how they decided what they most wanted to do with the blessing of time unconstrained by work.

We need to do our own research, both before we retire and after, about this next chapter in our lives. We’ll likely find fewer public resources about retirement (except for financial advice) than for other important life transitions like college, marriage, parenting, and careers. But we probably have resources in our personal lives. And those might be best of all.