A Pilgrim’s Digression

Recently at work, someone I came to like and respect very much announced her retirement. Joyce’s colleagues planned a party for her, held yesterday at lunch, and I did not go. I am normally not the kind of person who attends parties at work anyway. Sociability is something I have to force upon myself, the way some people have to force their pants to button around their waist.

But in this case I thought seriously about going, but then decided not to. Today, at our regular Thursday meeting, I saw Joyce for the last time before she is “out processed” [the technical term used in government] tomorrow. She actually asked me why I didn’t come to her party, and her question shocked me enough that I lied and said I hadn’t received the email. “Oh, but I’m sure I put you on my list,” she said.

A colleague helped me out by saying, “We’ve just been swamped with work lately, Joyce.”

Later, he told me, “I didn’t go either. Those things are always as awful as funerals.”

When the meeting was over, Joyce went around the room and shook hands with the men, hugged the women, and looked as if she would burst into tears at any moment. She left the room, then abruptly came back even more red-eyed, saying she forgot her purse. It was an uncomfortable parting, and it left me wondering why it should be so uncomfortable.

Nearly all of us spend our work years waiting for retirement, supposedly. So why the sadness? Part of it is that I think people where I work genuinely love their work. Many of them like Joyce met their future spouses here. They have worked here for their entire adult life. They leave a decades-long file cabinet of history and memories behind.

And the institution goes on without them.

The comparison to a funeral is probably correct. Retirement probably does feel like a kind of death, to some, a rehearsal for the grand “out processing” that will occur for real in another two decades or so.

Thinking about my own retirement now, when it is still a good quarter century in the future, I wonder how I will feel. I already feel old and worn out, in many ways. Will I have been too anti-social and irascible to warrant a retirement party?

There are people who simply disappear at retirement. I’ll never forget an English professor I had in college named Terry, who retired in 1995 or 1996. I liked him very much, and knowing that he was retiring, I took his final course offerings in Science Fiction and the Bible as Literature, even though I knew he was not a great teacher and the classes would be simplistic. They were undergraduate survey courses.

I remember one time, I was sitting on a bench on the quad between the three main buildings at West Virginia University, reading a book, and he came up and sat down with me. He was an old man, frail and in poor health. He smoked menthol cigarettes while sucking on peppermints, and his lips were always red from the candy almost as if he had applied lipstick, in contrast with his face which seemed kind of purplish from lack of oxygen.

“It’s hard being old,” he said wheezily, sitting down next to me.

“You must be looking forward to your retirement, though,” I said.

“Not really,” he sighed. “But it’s time, I think.”

“What are you going to do in your retirement?”

He turned the peppermint over in his mouth, making a kind of sucking sound, then took a drag on his cigarette. He didn’t say anything for a long time, until I began to wonder if he had even heard my question.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “Retirement is wasted on me, I think. I wish I were your age and retired. When you’re young–that’s when you want unlimited freedom and money to spend.”

Then he began coughing and had to cut short the conversation until he had his respiration under control. He was headed to one of the last classes he would ever teach, and I walked with him. We didn’t say much. He needed his breath for walking.

But one thing I do remember is that at one point I asked him if there would be a retirement party for him in the English department.

“For me?” He said, scoffingly. “No, not for me. The other professors are all young and preoccupied by their careers. Probably no more than one or two even know who I am. I wouldn’t want their condescending, half-hearted goodbye anyway.”

“That’s kind of sad,” I said.

“Well, at some point you come to terms with the fact that not much of anything we accomplish in life amounts to more than an attempt to shovel the dirt out of our grave faster than the gravedigger can shovel it in on top of us. These other professors haven’t realized that yet, so they write their books and articles and try to fend off the gravedigger–or even deny that he’s there. But he’s there alright. And what he’s saying is, ‘Keep shoveling, boys, cause I’m up here and you’re down there. You can’t win.’ And he’s right.”

“That’s pretty depressing,” I said. “Most of us feel that what we’re doing in life matters, or at least we want to feel that way.”

“Of course we do,” Terry said. “But in the end, the one thing that matters most is whether we enjoyed our youth, or whether we spent it accumulating work for ourselves and material possessions for future enjoyment. There is no future enjoyment. Old age takes all the enjoyment out of it.”

That may have been one of the last times I saw Terry. I remember going to his office once, whether before or after this incident, I don’t recall, and he told me to take whatever books I wanted. He had no way to take his books with him. He was going to leave the rest for the other professors to scavenge.

And then he was gone. It seemed like very soon thereafter, maybe within the next school year, I read his obituary in the college newspaper. It was one short paragraph: “…born and raised in Welch, West Virginia, he retired there last year after teaching at WVU since 1965…”

The obituary said very little, nothing really. Certainly it said less than he told me in the year or two that I knew him. In the English department, it was if he had never lived, let alone lived and died. I mentioned his death to one of the young professors, a teacher of Post-Modern literature and an author of popular books on the subject.

“Who?” He asked.

I repeated the name. “He taught the survey courses on the Bible as Literature and Science Fiction as Literature.”

“Oh,” he replied. “Those courses aren’t in the curriculum anymore.”

At some point, though not necessarily at that moment, I decided I did not want to be a Literature professor.