Retirement: A Journey into the Unknown and the Unexpected

By Anthony J. Yanik

Like thousands of other men and women, I looked forward to retirement, the so-called Golden Years, a vacation that would extend to the end of my days. It meant sleeping late each morning, enjoying a cup of coffee, free of the irritating, busy work traffic that I usually faced when I reached my office facing new problems that no longer challenged me nor captured my interest. It meant freedom from a regulated life, forgetting the clock to spend parts of the day with my wife or in tackling those nagging small jobs I had put aside week after week like painting the living room which had been waiting months for a new coat. Such work usually had to be jammed into weekends which I would rather spend at the beach, visiting our married offspring and their little ones, or simply traveling to places which interested us.

Such dreams came to fruition once my retirement began. Happy years rolled by until an unexpected event entered our life. A normal physical for my wife brought all of them to an abrupt end. She was diagnosed with lung cancer. The shock! The tears that followed. My brain turned numb and refused
to accept what it had just heard. What followed still seems like a dream. My placid life turned into dust.

Days were filled with doctor’s visits and radiation treatments, always with the hope for the next day.
Finally, we both realized the next day’s hope would never come. I watched her life slowly ebb away. I
remember little of her funeral. To wake up the next morning to an empty house was one of the worst
moments of my life. Memory after memory drifted before my eyes, happy memories never to be relived again. I ultimately discovered that memories like this can be an impediment to my everyday life. They should be kept under control. If not, I would constantly live in the past, ignoring the promise of what life God still had in store for me.

This lesson was brought home a few days after the funeral by our pastor. We met after Mass
that morning. He could see the grief I labored under. “Look,” he said, “You took care of your wife for
these many years without complaint. Now you must take good care of yourself. Don’t get trapped living in the past. It’s important that you live in the present to maintain a decent quality of life. Face reality. It consists of the now – today. Where do you go from here?”

Where indeed do go? Life was presenting me with new challenges. My food no longer magically
appeared on the dinner table. My clothes must be washed, dried and put away. The floor must be swept and mopped. Food shopping must be done and bills paid. The freedom I had enjoyed while my wife was alive had disappeared. I had three choices – wallow away my time in perpetual grief, hire others to do my routine household work, or learn how to handle all the tasks she had undertaken these many years for which I was ill-prepared. My free time had to be shared with other (male-type) normal household duties aka grass cutting, painting walls, repairing things that constantly broke down. My learning curve for routine house cleaning had to be taken to the next level if it was to remotely reach any resemblance to what my wife accomplished as a matter of routine.

Life did not stand still waiting for me to make a decision. I accepted the challenge: live according to my own resources; that is, do my own cooking, or learn how to best operate the tools at hand: my own washer and dryer, a hot iron, and a vacuum cleaner. If my wife had become proficient in all these tasks, so could I. It was time to read all of the instructional manuals she had saved for the tools of this trade.

Cooking, that was a different challenge. Cooking does not come with instruction manuals unless you will be operating a stove, microwave, mixer, slow cooker or any other appliance that requires plugging a cord into a wall socket. Cook by menu? How can you go wrong if you rigidly follow the instructions? Well, be ready to be surprised, even with more mundane cooking tasks as cooking a
hardboiled egg, one of my favorites. I searched through all the cookbooks in my wife’s library for
instructions and could not find a single recipe that compared one with another! Finally, I settled on one that I could not possibly mess: place the eggs in a pot, cover them completely in water, bring the
water to a boil, shut off the burner but leave the pot on it for 15 minutes. Then remove it, replace the
hot water with cold and ignore it. What could be easier?

On the other hand examples like this are few. I would be remiss if I did not mention that one of the best friends an untutored cook like me could have is a crock pot. Just toss in anything that could give you problems (potatoes, carrots, beans, meats of all kinds that would save time and trouble in their preparation, add water, plug in the crock pot then do nothing but wait six or eight hours and remove. The meal is ready for the table without any further effort on your part.

Before long I was faced with one of the most important things of which every cook needed to be aware: proper storage times, especially regarding such mundane foods as luncheon meats. I had been
eating luncheon meats most of my life never realizing that food poisoning always lurked in the wings if ignored. Neither my mother nor my wife had ever mentioned food storage times. To be on the safe side, I would only open packaged meat like ham or bologna on Monday. If any slices were still left over by Friday they went into the trash unless I had previously placed them in the freezer.

Washing clothes? Back to the instructional manuals to learn the fine points I may have missed when my wife had explained to me the art of automatic washers. Dryers? Another supposed cinch. This led me into the baffling world of washing and drying times for different fabrics to keep them from shrinking.

By now the days I spent working in my office were beginning to look more appealing than
keeping the entire house clean: vacuuming the carpets, washing the floors and countertops, dusting,
and doing the windows; was there no end to the household tasks that had confronted my wife each day? Yet she had continued to sail through them usually without complaint, even with a sense of pride. I felt woefully ill-equipped in my ability to succeed her until I gradually realized that each task had a purpose: it helped fill up my day and kept me from sitting around, feeling sorry for myself. This was a blessing in itself. Of all the learning curves I encountered through my retirement after my wife passed away, this proved to be one of the more important.

Such routine busyness, however, did not fill my most critical need: to replace the loss of community which had been supplied my entire life through the workplace: a place where I gathered among friends and acquaintances each week even if it was for work. This was replaced by my wife’s presence during evenings and weekends at home. Retirement and her death now had stripped me of such community comforts and left me alone in an empty house, without any meaning or real purpose in my life.

Weeks went by before it dawned on me that I was ignoring the most precious solution I could
ever have expected: God. He had been waiting patiently for me to recognize that in him was the answer to my needs. Community? My church gave me community. It was filled with people like myself where we could come together, thank him for our existence and provide us with countless opportunities for filling the needs of others rather than ourselves. My life then could become meaningful regardless of my age or situation in life. For those who are Roman Catholic, like myself, there was daily Mass to provide me with a chance to be with those who shared my belief, with whom I could develop close friendships that extended beyond my parish boundaries. I discovered that there was a vibrant life outside my front door, waiting for me if only I would make the first move and respond to God’s invitation. Other denominations offer similar opportunities.

For those lacking any spiritual home on which to base their own search for community, they need only to step outside their comfort zones by volunteering to help in various civic, medical (hospitals) or educational groups where they would be most welcome, especially if they could bring some of the skills and abilities they had developed over a lifetime in the workplace. The need to become a member
of this vast network of helping others exists in virtually every corner of the world in which we live. By
joining it no longer would our lives be without meaning as we brought smiles to those who really could use them. It is well worth trying.