WORKING WHEN OLDER

(This is a Guest post from a friend in her mid-80s, still working as a psychotherapist. I love it for her very different take on retirement. Mine was 'Get-to-70-and-Stop'; hers is 'Keep-going-till-you-Can't'. )

Working when older is quite a lot like working when younger. I am thinking of working when older as a bridge—but from where to where? To my younger self, certainly, but that assumes a span over something, to the very first experience of work. That was at age 16, a summer job working in a hospital laboratory, in a small town twenty miles of cornfields away from the even smaller town where I lived. My GP neighbour approached the hospital and set it up, but at whose instigation? Mine? My Biology teacher’s, who’d had his eye on me for several years? My best friend also got a job at the hospital, as a nursing assistant, but in her family it was clearly stated to all eight children: you WILL go to University and you WILL finance it yourself. No such pressure on me, however. Friend and I paid for a daily lift (picked up at 7am to arrive for 8am to 3 pm shift) with an older girl who had a car. I had one white nylon nurse-style uniform which I washed and ironed every evening.

Two summers of that—lovely, earning money and pretending to be grown-up—then, at age 18 I was selected as one of forty national ‘Future Scientists of America’, which brought with it the possibility of different and distant summer work, at the Westinghouse Atomic Power Division in Pittsburgh, where the engines for the Nautilus had been developed and built. Three summers of that (essentially, working in a chemistry lab) during university, plus a bit of part-time work during university terms, using the typing and shorthand my mother had advised as a safety net, “in case all this science doesn’t work out”.

Marriage at 21, then to London as a PhD student. And then: continuous work, with only a few weeks or months off to have three babies—another undergraduate degree, in medicine, and onward, ever onward. Does that suggest a treadmill? No. It just has felt right, all along the line.

The gist is: never stopped, never thought of stopping, this is life.

Lately, I needed to help out a daughter by standing in for her for a fortnight. I felt a small panic at the thought of all those days without work. So I assembled an assortment of useful activities that could be done without patients, computer or usual surroundings. I came up with a good assortment (writing this being one of them).

What has changed between 16 and 85? The body: stiffer, weaker, with sight and hearing augmented. The memory files (both conscious and unconscious) piled up with much more data, getting a little slower and more erratic to access. Belated gratitude to the mother who wasn’t sure about all this science stuff and pushed for learning to touch-type at 16. It is a continuum—it is my life. Something will happen to make me stop working (and I have two younger therapists watching me for signs of change) but my guess is that the something will be external to Me (to me, as a dualist, the body is Other, my transport system). When that happens, I hope to negotiate it with some grace, and I will probably come up with a list of Useful Things To Be Done, once work is excluded. H. L. Mencken pointed out that conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

Perhaps this should be a piece about the Manic Defence? It is probably significant that the piece of music I have chosen to represent Work in my memorial concert is the Allegretto from Karl Jenkins’ Palladio. Listen to it: that says it all. It is inexorable.

Afterthought: It’s obvious, isn’t it: the bridge is a span over anxiety.