A Personal Note
About a year ago, a little more than a year into my retirement, I had a conversation about how to go about retiring with a former colleague, who was still employed at the time. We arranged the call on LinkedIn and I took it while I was on one of my endless morning walks through streets, ravines, and parks. When my former colleague’s call came through, I remember having to step back into a ravine area to escape the strident sounds of nearby road construction.
My former colleague was interested not so much in what I was doing in retirement, but instead wanted to know about the process of retiring: how I transitioned my work-related duties and responsibilities with, as he put it, “professionalism and class.”
To be clear, I didn’t think I’d done anything particularly impressive in managing the transition from employment to retirement. I thought I’d done what anybody would do in similar circumstances.
What I did, as a I prepared to move on from my professional life, was ensure that I was leaving my successor and members of my immediate team with no surprises. It was all part of a succession plan. We brought aboard my successor while I was still working, and we had about a three-month period where my successor was able to come up to speed while I was still around and able to answer questions and deal with challenges related to internal processes and external relationships with various clients. I tried to prepare my successor for every conceivable scenario that might unfold on the job, based on what I’d experienced on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual cadences. In my mind, I wasn’t doing anything above and beyond the scope of courtesy and professionalism.
At any rate, the former colleague who spoke with me that day, about a year ago, wanted to know all the details of how we (my boss and I) mapped out my retirement process and executed it. I shared all the details, and my former colleague was appreciative. Back when we spoke in the fall of 2023, he indicated that he planned to retire in early 2025, which is just a few months from now.
This is where the narrative takes a poignant turn.
I learned last week that my former colleague, who shall remain anonymous for reasons of privacy, had died suddenly in recent weeks. He never reached retirement, though he might have been moving toward that goal, perhaps leveraging some of the insights and perspectives that we discussed a year ago.
I didn’t know my former colleague all that well. We worked in different areas of technology, and we were separated geographically by the better part of a continent. We talked at industry conferences where we were both in attendance, and we spoke occasionally at IDC’s annual Directions event in the Bay Area. We certainly knew of each other, and we were familiar with and respectful of each other’s work.
Implacable Time
Nonetheless, when I learned of his passing, I was deeply saddened. I didn’t know my colleague’s age, but I would say he was not much older than I am. That, I think, is too young for somebody to leave us, but, as I discover on too many occasions when I check in on LinkedIn, untimely deaths seem to be occurring with alarming regularity. You have to brace yourself before you fire up LinkedIn these days, just in case you learn that another counterpart, colleague, or industry acquaintance is no longer among the living.
The other painful aspect to my colleague’s demise was his proximity to retirement. He was so close to having time and space for himself and his family, without the work-related encumbrances and obligations of the daily grind.
Now I realize that some people live to work – that’s how they define themselves and they would be lost otherwise – rather than work to live. I also know that some people don’t have the financial freedom to retire; they have to keep working because it’s the only way they can support themselves. I feel for those people because they have no choice in the matter of retirement. They must continue to work, even if they’d like to stop, even if they’re exhausted and at the breaking point. What’s even worse for them is that they persevere in a cultural environment where a stealthy ageism is on the rise, with many employers actively spurning prospective employees of a certain vintage.
In the case of my former colleague, however, I know that he intended to retire. I didn’t ask why he wanted to retire. He reached out to me to ask questions about my experience of transitioning to retirement, and I didn’t feel it was my place to ask him intrusive questions about why he intended to call time on his career. We all have our reasons, of course, and they are ours to keep private or to share as we see fit.
What I think is important, though, is that each of us realizes that time is finite. I read an article yesterday in which medical researchers said that human life expectancies, despite medical and pharmaceutical advances, are unlikely to grow much beyond their current limits. Our lives might become healthier, but they’re unlikely to get much longer. If you’re hoping to reach your 150th birthday, you’re likely to be disappointed.
For some of you, working until the very end will be your choice. If that’s what you want to do, I am not sitting in judgment. As for those who wish to retire, who want to have a measure of time to yourself and with your friends and loved ones without the distractions and importunities of work, I urge you to do what you can to find that time and savor it.
Many people say age is just a number. That’s brave stuff, though I think it’s self-evidently facile, a sort of whistling while walking through the graveyard. The fact is, our time is limited. Nobody has beaten time, and none of us knows how much time we will be given. I don’t want to be didactic, or to pretend that I have it all figured out, but I know that much for certain.