As a young academic hired into a largely older faculty in the mid-1990s, I watched certain colleagues become increasingly grouchy as they approached the final stage of their careers. Thirty years later, I get it: your sense of self, your vocation, the edifice that has housed your purpose and given your days and years meaning—all of it coming to an end. The conventional wisdom on this life phase invokes the perils of aimlessness and loss of identity as we step away from our work. Yet the research on the relationship between retirement and purpose is not all negative, and Hyrum W. Smith, the “father of time management,” urges “purposeful retirement.” Still, retirement shows you how finite your time is. If you stare retirement in the face long enough, then you can even see your death looking back at you. No wonder it can be hard to retire.
I was 29 when I started at a small liberal arts college. Because the faculty was dominated by professors in their 50s and 60s, we had constant retirement parties, which I loved—the best catering of the year and everyone at their most gregarious. But I noticed a few senior colleagues, as their parties approached, crouching into an increasingly defensive, suspicious posture.
Now that I’m in those years myself, I know that there’s a lot to this: your relevance fades, your status dims, your students and colleagues, once so responsive to your talents, don’t get what’s so special about what you’re offering anymore. That hard work you did—the committees you chaired, the policies you crafted, the annual event or publication you established—that was so meaningful at the time disappears into the ash heap of institutional history. No one remembers it or your contribution, or, worse, it is revealed as the problem now, mercilessly picked apart and superseded by a version that’s more appropriate to the moment. This all happens and, as painful as it is, should happen.
But there’s also the death part. You’ll think I’m not old enough to be thinking about my death or even perhaps my retirement. I’m still six years away from Medicare, and there’s longevity in my family on both sides. But just being able to see retirement on the horizon—being able to count on one hand with fingers left over how many more times I’ll teach those biennial classes—changes something about how time feels. I want to speed through the remaining semesters and plunge into that bright, shimmering expanse of days that are my own to command. And, at the same time, I want to pump the brakes, hard.
I want to speed through the remaining semesters and plunge into that bright, shimmering expanse of days that are my own to command. And, at the same time, I want to pump the brakes, hard.
I’ve recently returned from sabbatical. “My last sabbatical!” I announced gaily to colleagues last spring as I headed into it, and I saw their startled calculations (how old is she?) and their vague unease. On my tiny campus, retirement is discussed gingerly, carefully, like a disease. It’s bad form to ask anyone about their retirement plans or even hint; when someone offers, every ear within miles perks up. I’m not even sure if it’s true that I’ll retire before I’m eligible for my next sabbatical, but I felt compelled to try out the idea. What would it feel like to float the possibility? Sure enough, just by speaking about my departure timeline, I feel like I’m half gone.
This job is all-consuming or we stick with it by believing that it is, that it should be, that it calls us into a devoted state. But the urgency is trickling away for me. Having taken the step back, I can review my career with a less feverish mind. How many people will ever read that essay on masculinity in Milton’s political prose in that flagship collection? The question answers itself. And if the highs are less exalted, then the lows are significantly less frustrating, embarrassing, maddening than they were in the moment.
The sense of my work’s importance hasn’t evaporated entirely, but it has changed direction and scale. A recent article in The Economist explains “Why You Should Never Retire,” citing the “buzz of being part of the action” and the “depth in being useful.” But perhaps how we make an impact can and should change over time. My coauthored op-ed about second chances for those serving extreme sentences in Iowa’s prisons presumably not only found more of an audience than my article on girlhood in Jane Campion’s early short films but also may have done some small, real good. Several readers, incarcerated themselves or with incarcerated family members, wrote to me saying that it gave them hope.
When I’m done with this career, I’ll do some other things—I’m an academic so I have a list—and I’ll read books, and then, after that’s happened for a while, I’ll die. I can see it. I couldn’t see it before, when I still had tenure and promotions to earn, administrative posts to vie for, a kid to raise and launch, some very meaningful things to publish, research projects that bristled with significance. But now I can see the little heap of accomplishments almost in its totality and, bobbing above it, the cloud of unrealized possibilities. The shock is in not the size of either but the recognition that in my few years left on the job, I’m in rehearsal for the real and actual end.
But now I can see the little heap of accomplishments almost in its totality and, bobbing above it, the cloud of unrealized possibilities. The shock is in not the size of either but the recognition that in my few years left on the job, I’m in rehearsal for the real and actual end.
The end! I know how time flies: it has flown me through almost six decades. I know that I’m going to be cleaning out my office in one minute and taking my leave of the world in another. In his bracing book Four Thousand Weeks (yes, that’s how many we get, on average), Oliver Burkeman, following Martin Heidegger, urges us to “hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get.” I’ve used up much of my golden coin. What will I do with the rest of the pile, how long will I make it last, what will it purchase?
It’s not frightening exactly, but it’s sobering. It’s also freeing. Now that I know that I’m not going to make all the scholarly impact, write all the books, win all the prizes that dangled in front of us in graduate school, I don’t have to want them anymore. I’m not eyeing the next hoop but thinking about what hoops I want to hew for myself, from what materials, and where I will land when I bound through them.
I observe younger colleagues who seem to have a different perspective on the academic reward structure than my cohort had. Perhaps we were the last humanities doctorates to imagine an entire career of triumphant flourishes at the major conferences. Having become so fractured, contingent, and politicized, the academy is not much of a prize these days. It’s still worth something, though. The pedagogy and much of the scholarship has changed for the better: engaged, applied, socially responsible, and public-facing in ways that wouldn’t have cut it in the insular enclaves in which I was trained.
My death, and a little closer in, my retirement: ultimately, the light coming backward through the tunnel shines on the connections made, whether in the world of ideas or of people, on the aha moments that show us to ourselves and each other, and on the sustenance we receive and offer. While I don’t know the length of the tunnel, I see that the antidote to grouchiness is looking forward to those small goods scattered along the way.
For other posts about death and endings, see Richard T. Hughes’s Finding Vocation in Loss, Suffering, and Death and Stephanie L. Johnson’s Called to Endings.
Gina Hausknecht is the John William King Professor of Literature and Creative Writing in the English Department and Social & Criminal Justice program at Coe College. She teaches early modern British literature and has published and presented on Shakespeare, Milton, 17th-century literature and culture, and graphic narrative. Her work on editorial stage directions in Shakespeare plays includes this interactive learning tool. She directs Coe’s Prison Learning Initiative which offers community education about the challenges of incarceration and reentry. For more posts by Gina, click here.