'Welcome to God's waiting room': A leading doctor reflects on his retirement

 

There is something vaguely automotive about the word ‘retirement’ — it carries the faint odour of worn-out tyres.

Last century retired teachers in my secondary school returned to teach us physics and chemistry because of staff shortages.

They were known as ‘retreads’. They didn’t last long.

When I retired from the Western Sydney Local Health District on 30 June last year, at age 78, I sensed a corporate sigh of relief. 

My formal farewell was delightful, but the underlying message was clear.

“Out with the old; in with the new!” said one senior manager who wished me Godspeed.

There’s nothing like retirement to lift the lid on otherwise hidden existential realities.

“Welcome to God’s waiting room!” a fellow retiree said to me.

Look up life expectancy tables and prepare to take fright. Only 10 years left (at best)? 

Think of 10 years ago — seems but as yesterday. Already sharp by day, these figures assume dagger-like forms at 3am or 4am.

Retirement is a big deal.

Handsome young feel-good gurus on social media, with wide smiles, perfect teeth, and advice to drink six glasses of water a day, make fortunes selling psychological trusses and bandages to keep us happy in retirement. 

Nevertheless, it is a life event. It perturbs the organism. It strips us of our identity. It cancels our power and influence. Yesterday’s rooster (excuse the sexism) has become today’s feather duster.

But let’s get this straight. We doctors are incredibly fortunate to have had generally deeply fulfilling professional lives. 

Most people do not have this immense privilege. This does not cancel the existential stuff, but it does put it in context.

That we can still function well in our 60s or 70s is an uncommon luxury, not open to sportspeople, tradespeople, or miners. And generally, we are pretty financially secure.

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If we are reasonably healthy and have loving domestic arrangements, then our privilege is even greater.

So, when to retire?

We can only answer as individuals.

Common wisdom suggests we should move on before our decline is a danger to others. We are lucky if we have colleagues who can offer some gentle counselling on such a deeply emotional issue. At times, ageing robs us of the ability to be self-critical.

Fortunate are those who look to retirement as an opportunity to engage more deeply in music, art, writing, reading, faith-based activities, creative gardening, or bushwalking and are well enough to pursue these interests.

But those substitutes may not answer our deeply held desire to do things that contribute to human well-being.

Grandparental duties may partly fill this void. But beware!

I met my late dear friend Dr Bernie Amos after lunch one afternoon in the NSW Department of Health car park.

The department’s director-general looked weary. He explained that he had been caring for grandchildren.

He asked if I knew the best part of the morning. Before I answered he reached into his pocket, smiled, withdrew his car keys, and jangled them saying: “This!”

You don’t need me to rehearse all the suggestions for self-preservation after retirement.

They usually include proposals for maintaining physical and mental wellbeing often through social groups, preferably including people young enough so that conversations are not like those you hear in outpatients where ailments, and grumbles about healthcare dominate.

Friends devote hours to crosswords and love it. Lots of fruit. Access to a good clinical psychologist if in doubt. I did.

Keeping alive intellectually as far as dementia permits is critical.

I was reminded recently by a lively American friend in his 80s of something that Carl Friedrich Gauss, the great German mathematician, wrote in 1808:

"It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment."

When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again; the never-satisfied man is so strange if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another.

I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.”

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To me this is rather like the lifelong journey to Ithaca, the subject of C.P. Cavafy’s truly wonderful 1911 poem.¹

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Nâzım Hikmet, the great Turkish poet died in 1963, was just 61 when he wrote compellingly about living life in the face of death in his poem On Living:²

I mean you must take living so seriously that,

even when you are 70, you must plant olive trees,

not because you think they will be left to your children,

because you don't believe in death although you are afraid of it

because, I mean, life weighs heavier.

Time to plant olive trees, I think.

More information:

1.     C.P. Cavafy, Ithaca 

2.     Nazim Hikmet, On Living

Published in the Medical Observer Opinion
16 April 2021