Golden Years

Recently I wrote here about how I have now outlived my father. This is a distinction I share with all sorts of people, close friends of mine included. That said, I am currently feeling yet another wave of what being left an orphan at this stage of my life means. 

I sat through a second hour-long teleconference about my eventual retirement this week. If you're a big fan of all those pithy commentaries I tend to publish here about being a teacher at an urban Oakland Elementary School, don't panic. I am not planning on hitting the dusty trail over the hill anytime soon. But that was the purpose for which we held these little gatherings: So someone could tell me when it was okay to stop. 

My father never stopped working. When he died at the age of sixty-one, I was the one who got to go to his office and clear out his desk. His messy, cluttered desk. Full of years of notes and reminders of appointments that he never made. Comic strips and aphorisms clipped from magazines that reminded him of his place in the universe, outside of his cluttered, messy desk. The tricky part about my dad's career was that when he decided to divorce my mom ten years prior he also left the company he had been with for most of my life. Whatever pension or retirement plan that was set up there went by the wayside because he had one of those "mid-life" things. His health insurance lapsed for a bit, and some of the things that might have been part of preparing for the golden years with his family fell by the wayside. My dad's retirement plan was to die in a small plane crash. 

Not that the crash was planned, but it was how the life insurance he had came into play. And his car and place of residence. These all became his legacy. The 401K and 403B that I got to discuss on Zoom decades later were not part of my father's exit strategy. Consequently, I find myself wondering how my father would have wanted his departure from the workforce to go. I do not believe that the seemingly endless confabulation about my relative preparedness was so torturous that I would trade it for a ride in a single engine aircraft, but it did make me wonder if dad had spent any time with financial advisors regarding his future. The one that turned out to be tragically short. 

It's all a great big word problem with variables that I can only now begin to fathom. I have faith in the process, and expect that once the price and the time has been decided for my departure from the workforce that I will be prepared. Financially and emotionally. Or at least one of those.