Retirement

My father in his late 50s supervised an area in Northern Luzon and one day, in a hurry to get home on his motorbike an hour from Tuguegarao, he went headlong against a bus that was also in a hurry. My brother medevacked him to Manila for repairs.

His “early” retirement allowed him to come and live in Hawaii. That’s when I heard him call retirement as simply a “re-tire-ment,” an acquisition of a new set of tires! He put in another 34 years before he took his turn at Oahu’s Mililani slopes at 94.

My mother eight years his junior might do him one year better as she reached 94 this year at Kuakini’s Elders Hospital in Honolulu, though she now sleeps her days away. I am not too far behind but even with parents’ good genetics, more than a decade of smoking made me chop a decade of statistical longevity. This year, I officially retired at 69, the last year of age count by my class kabatch as lifespan turned longer than the 39 we once counted as last before “forgotten.”

Folks often worry about retirement. One of my super-active classmates in the Bay Area took me to the airport after our last class reunion at her place. She said: “I really do not know what I will do when I retire.” One of my smartest high school classmates, I am not at all worried about her not finding something to do after her “retirement” but the fear of doing “nothing” after a certain age bedevils many otherwise sane minds. My classmate knows that she’ll simply have to create her path as she goes like the rest of us. One does not simply slide into a “retirement” slot, even with a minimum half-a-million retirement portfolio.

My Dad just went out and did his thing, wherever his self-defined retirement led him to be. He did lament the fact that he did not have much to leave behind—a cultural hang-up, for no one really expected him to. After all, he taught us: “The only piece of real estate I shall bequeath you will be whatever is stuck on the sole of my shoe!”

My formal retirement with the church involved so minuscule an income that the office advised I withdrew the whole thing to save them bureaucratic hassle. Though I spent years with the global communion, I did not bother to join a U.S. Conference with a healthy retirement fund save my three years on Saipan and a year credit in Guam. My Philippine connection did not even bother to keep me on the list! Not one to whine, I don’t mind.

With a diagnosis of spondylosis at SVES PSS, I withdrew my fund contributions to deal with the physical malady. Though qualified for medical retirement by age and condition, the CNMI failed to remit its counterpart to the Retirement Fund and I was not inclined to fight for medical referral.

My “retirement” traverses the triangle of Shenyang, Saipan, and Honolulu; the absence of things to do worries me the least. Focusing on the most effective way to be glocal, local in residence but global in perspective in three residences before my muse Gaia (Earth) is my challenge.

First, I’ve got Shenyang. The Manchurian Plain is cold to my tropical cartilages, sinews, and bones and the pollution of coal-burning industries and electrical plants has me lined up for asthma. But as an oral English teacher I get psychic income from the vast area of need. After APEC, the general population who went on a massive cleanup to keep “face” might learn to like having clean posts, poles, and walls. Besides, Urmuqi (the bullet train from Lanzhou in Gansu just opened) in Xinjiang and Lhasa in Xizang beckon, and the allure of the Silk Overland Road to meet the Turk, Tajik, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Kazakh lights up my fire.

Second, I’ve got Saipan. It’s a leisurely island, a comforting place to visit, where I run for Medicare cover (not that CHC is much of an option but it is what I’ve got) since I file my taxes in their books. ST still finds favor with the words I scribble, and for as long as they print, I will keep hacking my scratching!

Third, I’ve got Honolulu and siblings, and mother sleeps her remaining conscious days at the ward of the Kuakini Elder’s Hospital. A long time off-and-on resident of Hawaii, I might have overstayed my welcome; my years of visits are numbered. I waved goodbye to North America this year, curtailing travels to the birds of paradise as well.

This is not, however, about the facts of my retirement. Rather, it is an invitation for one and all to reflect on the wellness of their retreating days. Director Ezekiel Emanuel of Clinical Bioethics at the U.S. National Institutes of Health did just that in an article in The Atlantic titled, “Why I hope to die at 75.” The 57-year-old MD heads U Penn’s Medical Ethics and Health Policy department and he claims that we are not living longer; we are just prolonging dying. My year to keep mum is at 76, not off target from the norm; my physiology aims to linger ’til I hit 86.

Penned by a favored scribe, “Freedom is just another word for nothing else to lose,” wailed by some poets. In case you don’t know yet, that’s the key to retirement! Yo!