Retirement isn't for everyone. Even if they successfully achieve it many just can't survive it.
My most horrific experience with this was with my own father. My father was always a man's man and towards the end of his working life he stopped being an Electrical Contractor because he said he could make more money and have less worries just by being a Union Electrician which at that time where he lived paid about 30 dollars an hour in 1980. He was working at the Encina Power Plant building it when he retired. Within two years of his retirement he watched his foreman and several men die and be impaled on three inch thick re-bar vertically placed for cement when the crane bucket they were riding in fell hundreds of feet along with the crane when a guywire broke to the main crane. He was supposed to be in that bucket but there hadn't been room so he watched them all die (about 5 men) from below. He was friends with all these guys and so never really got over seeing them all die like this.
He had always dreamed of retiring to his 2 1/2 acres in the desert to a retirement home that he and I and my mother had built on weekends from 1968 until 1980 when he retired. But retirement wasn't at all what he expected it to be. He found that he needed the camaraderie of all his friends from work. So, though he worked every day on perfecting and building more onto his house or welding up a wood stove for my new 2 1/2 acres in the Mt. Shasta area or building a fork lock for my motorcycle so I could tow it from my Toyota long bed truck with a cab over camper by the tow hitch with the rear wheel on the ground of the motorcycle to Mt. Shasta or coming up to Mt. Shasta to help me design and build my A-Frame home for my family and myself back then, most of the time I saw by the look in his eyes that he was lonely in a completely unexpected way for him. My father was a very outgoing gregarious man and my mother was always very quiet and good natured but not an intellectual constantly studying some new thing like my father. So he only lasted about 5 years before he was gone in 1985 from Prostate Cancer. I always have felt that retirement itself killed him and that it wasn't at all what he had expected.
He had told me the story of how he and his brother and first wife had chartered a yacht out of Vancouver, Canada, the Lorna D, to sail to Tahiti in 1939 and how even though he had envisioned a paradise and that he would stay there in paradise that when he got there as beautiful as it was he found he couldn't deal with that much free time. I think it was that Dad had never had free time before because his father always had the kids working their butts off to keep them out of trouble. So when Dad actually had two years to do whatever he wanted to at age 23 and 24 he just didn't know what to do with himself beyond a certain point.
So, though I'm a lot like my Dad in that I'm always studying about something and writing about it because I always love to learn new things and to be amazed at what I learn, I'm not a workaholic like my Dad mostly because I had blunt trauma childhood epilepsy and to be a workaholic type of person between the ages of 10 and 15 would have died sometime between 10 and 25. So, instead of becoming a workaholic like my Dad I became an "Idea Man" which is someone who is definitely not a plodder but who survives on "Great ideas". So, I found that being a business owner of one or more businesses suited me best as being an entrepreneur was my forte more than any other way of making money.
So, when my Dad died I was completely traumatized by it because he was always someone like a "John Wayne" figure in my life and my mother's life and was someone just too "larger than life" to ever possibly ever die! And especially to "larger than life" to die as young as 69 years of age. My father was always very into preventative maintenance in that he always ate the best organic food all my life and was always very disciplined so even in 1980 when he was 65 he looked no more than about 40 to 45 years of age. And he was a very "Healthy" 40 to 45 in his looks at that. So, even up to age 60 to 65 my father could always "through will alone" out walk me and out hike me and out endurance wise me in most ways. So, to the child inside me my father was like an immortal who didn't smoke or drink and who shared the same teacher as Jack La Lanne. Jack La Lanne's health culturist teacher was Paul Bragg.
So in my mind and my mother's mind it just wasn't possible for my father to die until he was about 100. But the problem was that my father hated doctors and (like his father) thought that one should only go to a hospital to die, if that. And this was my father's downfall. And so when he began peeing pink (blood in urine) I got him to go to an MD. However, when the doctor told him he likely had prostate cancer my father decided he would cure it by becoming macrobiotic and instead of curing it this way it eventually led to his death. By not removing the cancer in the early stages it metasticized into his bladder, then kidney and then finally bone. I don't believe even now 30 years later that bone cancer has any real cure available. But not having his cancer treated or removed killed him.
So, my horrific lesson from this was that even if you are the healthiest guy your age at 65 that anyone knows, you still have to deal with medical interventions when problems arise or you will die. So when I became 50 and got a heart virus I studied how to survive it and did. I also got two colonoscopies and the first one saved my life because I had precancerous polyps removed during the first colonoscopy. So without that colonoscopy I would be dead now from colon cancer. Medical preventative medicine here in the United States is the best in the world if we utilize it. So, even if you think you can live forever, don't forget to save your own life if confronted by the unthinkable.
So, after my heart virus I was forced to retire. So, even though no one I knew of in 1998 survived a heart virus then, somehow I did. But then, if I hadn't had the first colonoscopy I would be dead right now, also. Then a few years ago I found I had a hypothyroid condition and finding this out added about 20 or more (potentially) quality years to my life.
Every step of the way, one must be disciplined enough to survive but also open minded enough to survive. Disciplines that keep us alive when we are younger can sometimes kill us as we age. So, learning how to survive changes over time. What works when you are young sometimes doesn't work as we age. So, long term survival is really based upon being and staying balanced enough in all ways to go on no matter what. And in the end if we can't have enough happiness and satisfaction in our lives we tend not to go on anyway or we find a way directly or indirectly to end our lives. This is just the way it is. So, follow your bliss. Otherwise, why be alive?
No comments:
Post a Comment