Retirement: The First Year :: Emotional and Mental Health

Retirement: The First Year
by author Jay-Harris Lucas, PhD

I had overestimated my need to retire and underestimated my need to be significant.

We planned our retirement 10 years in advance and updated the plan annually. I thought we had everything figured out. We had our retirement savings in place, the mortgages were paid off, our health was good, and we had a variety of interests. We would winter in Arizona and summer in Minnesota and play with our grandchildren. I would write short stories in the summer and novels in the winter. Fishing would occupy most of my time in the summer and hiking would do the same in the winter. I would introduce myself to people as “Jay” and avoid any reference to my past work as a psychologist. My wife, Lois, would sew and quilt. I would do more running and Lois would do more walking. We would live a simple life. Since Lois and I had worked together for many years, there would be no adjustment to togetherness in retirement.

We were so eager to retire we could almost taste it. When the day finally arrived we leaped for joy, sped off to our cabin and slept 10 hours a night for two months. I suspect selling the home we had lived in for 25 years, selling my practice and retiring may have had something to do with the exhaustion we experienced.

When we finally ended our two-month hibernation and emerged from our dens, I felt a strange restlessness. After writing a couple of short pieces, I found I was too restless to write anymore. So I fished and then I fished some more. When the fish decided they had seen enough of me, I turned to the woods and cleared brush and cut down dead trees on our two-acre lot. Heavy physical activity seemed to quell the restlessness. I loved the life of the rugged outdoorsman, as long as I could shower daily, sleep in a king-size bed and watch satellite television in my air-conditioned lake home. Unfortunately, I was asking my 59-year-old body to do the tasks of a 20-year-old. My body humoured me as long as it could. Finally it said, “Enough,” and filled my flaccid muscles with spasms and aches that immobilized me.

Stretched out and groaning in my lounge chair, I decided my next venture would be to become a woodworker, a less physically taxing pastime. The fact that I had chronic lack of skill in this area and knew nothing about woodworking would only make the adventure more interesting. I slapped together a storage shelf for the garage. It was ugly but functional and I found woodworking quieted my restlessness. So I made more storage shelves. I cut, drilled, and hammered until I had lined the walls of the garage and two rooms in the basement with storage shelves. Then I ran out of space.

As I pondered building storage shelves to store storage shelves, I stretched out in my lounge chair again and closed my eyes. I slept long and deep. Dreams whizzed through my mind carrying symbols and messages so obvious that even a retired psychologist could not ignore them. I missed work. There, I said it. Unthinkable! Heresy! Could it be true? For seven months I had been unable to even say the word psychologist without cringing. Now I was thinking of becoming one, again.

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Dr. Jay-Harris recently retired after 31 years practising as a clinical psychologist. Dr. Lucas, a three-term president in his state psychological association, received the Corrigan award for outstanding contributions. We welcome your feedback at editorial@alive.com.

Source: alive #253, November 2003

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