I’m still 1320 days from retirement — that’s 3y, 6m for those who can’t do the math — but I’ve been reading about some of the psychological elements when you retire. Obviously, one of the biggest hits happens to your social network. You spend 7.5h or more a day at work with a group of specific people, and then you retire, with many of them never to be seen again except perhaps in grocery store checkout lines or a movie theatre lobby. The literature differentiates between “personal life” friends and “location-based” friends, and work or school are most often the latter. Some people hang on to acquaintances and friends like glue. I, however, do not.

I think back to my elementary school days and I had lots of acquaintances, but only 2-3 friends who translated outside the “location”. A kid, Tony, was one of my favourite people. A bit quiet, nice sense of humour. Another, Tania, was super nice, also quieter. And Giselle, who was definitely NOT quiet. When I graduated from a Catholic elementary school, and went to a public high school, I separated from all of them.

For early high school, I had two main friends Pat and Mark who lived in the house behind us and went to the same school. I picked up another friend, Paul aka Rufus in Grade 11/12 or so, and we were tight school friends but rarely did much outside of school. Giselle moved over later in high school to the same school, and we reacquainted but we weren’t really close. Different strokes. There were a couple of people I really liked interacting with…Jennifer, a girl named Lauren, although I didn’t know either very well. I can think of another girl, and I can see her face VERY clearly, but I don’t remember her name today. Gone from my memory, I guess. When I went off to university, I didn’t have any emotional goodbyes, I was just transitioning to a new place. I didn’t stay friends with really any of them much. Notice a pattern?

My life at Trent University was a bit of a whirlwind in some ways. I was surprised to see a guy I knew named Neil from high school who was in my same program. We knew each other from high school, it wasn’t that big a place, but I didn’t really know him. I didn’t really get his sense of humour in high school, and never really got to know him then. At university, we took most of our classes together and hung out regularly at campus. Looking back, he reminds me a lot of Tony from elementary school and I remember thinking that I was disappointed that I hadn’t got to know him in high school. But while I was at uni, I wasn’t really “part” of the program’s crowd. Not that there was a real program crowd. I had another good friend, Heather, and we hung out regularly. Yet most of my time was spent either working at the library 15 hours a week or connecting to my long-distance girlfriend in Toronto. When I left Trent, I thought, “Oh, absolutely, I’ll stay in touch with Heather and Neil, absolutely”. I even thought I would stay in touch with the people from the library. When I left, they all came out as a group to say goodbye to me — 30 people from across the department all came! I was a STUDENT, they didn’t make that much effort normally for people who were FULL employees. I’m sure some of it was “hey, let’s do something for lunch”, but I was really touched by it. I did know them all, interacted with them regularly, asked them about their families, work, sports teams, etc. They were my work family. But when I went off to UVic, I said goodbye to all of them and well, most of them fell by the wayside. Location-based friendships.

When I went to UVic, life was very different. I was worried that I would be either fully ensconced in the law library or studying in my room all the time, with no friends and no real connections. I lived in residence for the first 7m I was there, moving out just before finals, and I accidentally became an extrovert of sorts. Don’t get me wrong, I was still an introvert, but I got to know my neighbour Jason. And another guy across the hall, David, then Alkis down the hall a bit further. We all started going over to dinner together most nights. I added in Deb and Pat, and soon there was a loose crew of 6-8 of us always going over together. I’d wander down the hall and say, “What time tonight?” and then tell everyone else. Maybe I was lonely more than an accidental extrovert, but I became social glue that bonded an island of misfit toys into a group of friends. It surprised me, to be honest. Jason, David and Mike were some of my favourite people that I have ever met in life. Our friendship took a hit when I moved out, but the next semester we still managed to do some stuff here and there. I didn’t really bond with too many people in law school, probably only one really, Joe was his name. But I thought I would be friends with these people long after university. Then I moved to Ottawa and pretty much all of it went to nothing. They were, regrettably, highly location-based friendships. Jason and I stayed in touch for awhile, and I worked with Mike on a project one time.

When I first came to Ottawa, I thought that I would be here a few months and go back. Instead, I met a girl, Cheryl, and dated for a couple of years. I made a bunch of friends and then some became really good friends — Aliza, Seb, Julia — while working at Foreign Affairs. While I am still good friends with Aliza, I had thought that I would also know Seb and Julia all the way to my last years of life, to be honest, and yet as time progressed and we all moved around, those friendships were hard to maintain and slowly drifted. I’m not particularly good at knowing how to maintain friendships over time without regular contact and social media links weren’t enough. I moved to CIDA and met my now-wife, plus made a dozen or so more friends, of which several have continued further. Some of them are easier to maintain because my wife is the glue for them. There are some people I worked with in the policy branch and multilateral branches of CIDA that I miss working with. People who, at the time, were some of my favourite people ever. And yet a few years later, no more contact.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a pity party, nor were any of these losses open chest wounds. As I got older, I realized that many of the friendships were situational. Location-based, I guess, although that doesn’t really resonate with me. Some of my bosses like Bob or Gaby or Michel, I spent a lot of time with. Christine. And I enjoyed seeing them every day, hearing about their lives. I could list another 20 work friends that I enjoy working with, some that I’ve stayed in touch with, many that I haven’t. A couple of work lives in Laurie and Kathrine.

But once the work bond was broken, most drifted away. I know this will happen when I retire, and I thought I was prepared for it.

I am not.

Early departures

During the pandemic, I was surprised to learn of two people retiring. Not that they weren’t of age, or going early, just more that I hadn’t seen them in a while and had no idea that they were getting close to their date. I am older than I look at work, so often people are surprised to find out that I’m actually entering my late fifties and not just over 50. Some bosses have assumed they were older than me and then were surprised to find that they weren’t. It works that way for me, too; I’ve assumed bosses were automatically older and then found out they weren’t. But because my wife is younger, and a lot of friends are younger, I hadn’t really thought much about others retiring. I tend to be the oldest one in groups.

I was a bit shocked to hear that Geoff was retiring. He was a director, on his second career almost after a major change, and he had lost a wife to cancer. I used to work in the same directorate as him, and regularly had to interact on files, collaborate on corporate stuff, or just be in the same meetings a couple of times a week. When I changed jobs, I’d still frequently wander by his office late in the day, maybe every month or 3 weeks or so, and chat for 10-30 minutes. A lot of the time, he’d tell me about some new project he had going with his team that he was excited about. A bit older than me, obviously, but a good guy to chat with, and I really enjoyed those chats. And in mid-pandemic, he was gone. Not dead, just retired. I didn’t even get to say goodbye really, although I tried before he left. Not much notice for me, although others knew about it. But in the transactional world of pandemic work-life, we didn’t have any reason to talk.

Another good friend and mentor retired last year. And it saddened me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally happy for him. But I have worked on and off with him over the last 15 years, and he was absolutely in my top 5 of favourite people in all of ESDC. Another boss retired about 7 years ago, which leaves probably three.

Or two because a really good friend is finished tomorrow. Tuesday. I met Angie back in 2008 when I joined my current branch. She was a PM-06 in the team doing the Departmental Performance Report and Report on Plans and Priorities, and since I handled Performance Measurement, we ended up working closely together. No drama, no BS, a straight shooter, and a great person to talk to when I needed a calming perspective. I worked with her directly for 10 of the years since then, sometimes side by side, sometimes supervising her nominally. At one point, she transitioned away from one of her sets of files more into another, and that grew into a third area that she’s been doing for the last 8 years or so. It was great to see her doing all of it, and I was both happy and proud for a friend.

But make no mistake about it. She works to live, not lives to work, and she has been looking forward to her retirement date for a very long time. I’ve been asking people about how they mentally approached their retirement (if they are already retired) or what they’re thinking now. Most people do fall into the classic three tropes:

1. It’s like parole…I’ve served my sentence, completed my time, and now I’m being released from my cage.
2. It’s like graduation…I’ve worked long and hard, and that last day is the celebration / bookmark for the end of a long period, before I consider starting what’s next.
3. It’s a transition…I am decreasing my work time and increasing my leisure time, but it’s a gradual transition that has been going on for some time, this is just my last day of work, I’m already “transitioned”.

I won’t say which is her view, that’s not my story to tell. Everybody is different.

But I knew there would be no big celebration for her departure at work. First of all, she would HATE it with a passion. I asked if I could take her out for lunch and talk about her views on retirement, and her question was, “It is JUST US going for lunch, right?”, worried that I might be planning something.

Second, many of her own work crew have already retired. Oddly enough, she was telling me at lunch about a big project that she worked on in her career with several people, her favourite project in all of her career, and they just decommissioned it in the last year. She was joking that it was perfect timing for her to be “decommissioned” too.

Third and perhaps most telling, the pandemic has screwed up a lot of those types of activities. Nobody is in the office on the same days anymore, there’s no obvious sense of a team or bonding anymore. Your work unit is mostly “it,” with a lot of other stuff that is pretty transactional.

So, I convinced her to at least go for lunch with me, and insisted she let me treat. In a normal world, I would thank her for her service (unstated), tell her how amazing she’s been as a friend and coworker (also unstated; she hates that ****) and wish her well (clearly stated).

I am committed to making sure this is not the last time I see her. I have her email address, and I’ll reach out to her. We may even do a small project together. I have an idea for a book I want to write, and there’s a lot of data to manage for the background. Funny enough, she actually said one of the things she’ll miss in retirement is not having the need/opportunity to do various things in Excel anymore. She loves Excel. Welllllll, I said, strange that you mention that desire. Cuz my project might need some Excel magic. 🙂

In the meantime, since I’m telling my story and not hers, her departure surprised me emotionally. I knew it was coming, and I’m super happy for her. I also thought I was ready to say goodbye to people when I retire in 3y, and yet here’s someone leaving even earlier, just one person. I could analyse it intellectually that it’s one more lost person in a large network of acquaintances, but that’s not who she is. She’s one of my five favourite people of the last 20 years of work. A good friend, and my work-life will be diminished by her absence.

It leaves me pondering. Is THAT the real transition? Not a graduation where you say goodbye to everyone but perhaps a slow series of a thousand smaller cuts. And somewhere in there, a blade slips a bit, and you get a deeper cut of the blade.

As I said, I won’t let this one go without more effort. I’ll let her get through her golf days, but then, next fall, she’ll have no excuse to avoid at least another lunch. 🙂 But I will still miss her at work.