Lyndsay Green - Ready to Retire?: What You and Your Spouse Need to Know About the Reality of Retirement

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Teens Gone Wired: Are You Ready?

You Could Live a Long Time: Are You Ready?

The Perfect Home for a Long Life: Choosing the Right

Retirement Lifestyle for You

LYNDSAY GREEN is a pioneering sociologist and researcher and the author of the national bestseller You Could Live a Long Time: Are You Ready? She lives in Victoria, BC.

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Cover photo: iStockphoto.com

READY TO RETIRE?

Copyright 2016 by Lyndsay Green.

All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Map illustration by Anne Emond

First edition

EPub Edition: November 2015 ISBN: 9781443440585

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

M4W 1A8

www.harpercollins.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-44344-056-1

RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Hank, my very own retiree

When I told a retirement-aged man that I was working on a book about mens retirement, he replied, Ah, youre writing about death. His quip made us both laugh, but the response was more than glib cocktail banter. My research had been uncovering the sense of impending doom that can accompany discussions of retirement. A schoolteacher told me the following story to prepare me for some of the attitudes I would encounter. He had attended a pre-retirement seminar provided by his employer, and the instructor started with the following quiz. When you retire you need to be prepared for the three Ds. Name them. At this point in his story, the teacher asked me to fill in the blanks. All I could think of were non-D words like liberation, leisure, reinvention. I finally came up with dishesmaking the assumption a retiree wasnt used to pulling his weight at home. The D words he was looking for were drink, depression and divorce. And now my jester had given me a fourth D to adddeath.

I was trying to understand mens retirement because I could see it was going to be a critical stage in the lives of the men I lovemy husband, my brothers and my friends who were quickly closing in on 65. Having spent the past decade researching aging, I have seen the way our assumptions and expectations cloud reality. I found the gap between myth and reality to be particularly wide for the period of aging we have labelled retirement, especially when it comes to men. Given the captivating images that accompanied those Freedom 55 television ads that ran in the 1980s, I assumed that men were chomping at the bit to sever their work chains to be free to run along the beach, roar around in their convertibles and hit the golf course. Instead, I found a great fear of retirement. Most of the male seniors I interviewed for You Could Live a Long Time: Are You Ready? advised me to forget about retiring and urged me to develop a work plan rather than a retirement plan. One of them warned me that if I stopped working Id age rapidly, just as the people of Shangri-La did when they left their isolated mountain paradise in James Hiltons book Lost Horizon. He told me some of his colleagues couldnt wait to retire, and then went into decline as soon as they did.

But I also had the experience of my father to consider. He retired just before his 65th birthday after negotiating a satisfactory pension with his employer, the federal government, and left on mutually agreeable terms. He had worked hard throughout his career in both the private and public sectors, and had made a real contribution. When it was over, he walked out the door and never looked back. He lived another twenty-five years, and I dont remember him ever saying that he missed his work. If he found retirement distressing, he never let on.

What I saw was a man who couldnt wait to get up in the morning and tackle his to-do list. He was a civil engineer with an MBA who had worked in the oil and gas sector, and his retirement projects exercised all the skills he had accumulated. He had a steady stream of home renovation projects on the go and carried them out with obsessive precision. He tracked his investments religiously on elaborate spread sheets and used the output to mail his three children well-argued financial strategies. He maintained his professional interest in the vagaries of fossil fuels and sent us tips on switching our furnaces from oil to gas, or vice versa, and safety tips on the use of propane.

Genealogy became a passion, and we received meticulously researched family histories, sometimes in response to a request from a grandchild doing a class project. A visit from any of his seven grandchildren was the cause for an exhaustive tour of the local tourist hot spots, following to the letter a custom-prepared itinerary, often detailed down to the last quarter-hour. During family gatherings on frigid winter days, it was my father who hauled the visiting grandchildren out on the slopes to make sure they learned how to ski.

Another responsibility he took seriously was making his views known on the issues of the dayfrom submitting a twelve-page review of retirement pensions and savings plans to his Member of Parliament, to detailing the impact of a road-widening to his municipal councillor. And through all this, he kept up a personal regime of rigorous daily walking.

He was a busy guy. This was, no doubt, one of the reasons that my mother adapted pretty well to his retirement. That, and the fact that he continued to leave every morning for workby walking downstairs to his basement office. It must be said that my mother was tormented by the length of time it took Dad to complete his home renovation projects. But there were few other major complaints, and my parents adjusted well to retirementuntil the late-in-life arrival of another D word, dementia