Retirement: Tuesday's Reflection

He opened a practice in family medicine on April Fool's Day, 1977, and on April Fool's Day, 2018, he retired. 

I am referring, of course, to my husband, Bruce, who has had a wonderful career providing care and support for his patients and their families, as well as his colleagues and the organizations where he has worked. Much of his professional life has been as a hospice physician where he has seen the miraculous mixture of death and life. 

How appropriate that his first day of retirement was not only April Fool's Day, but more importantly, Easter Sunday. A day of rejoicing. A day of amazement. Not just new life, but ongoing life. A day to view the tomb, not just as a place of death or endings or emptiness, but a place of openness to whatever is next. To choose living into this time with a whole heart instead of replaying what might have been or what has always been. 

A friend uses the word "preferment" to describe these retirement years. What is it I prefer to do? How is it I prefer to live into my aging? Now granted, we don't get a choice about some of the facts of our life, some of the challenges these years present, but we do get a choice about how we live with those facts. 

These years, too, can be sacred. 

If one has the gift of these years, this can be time to know "the rest of ourselves," as Joan Chittister says. 

How fitting then that John O'Donohue includes a blessing for retirement in the "Beyond Endings" section of his book To Bless the Space Between Us.  I love these lines:
                 You stand on the shore of new invitation
                 To open your life to what is left undone,
                 Let your heart enjoy a different rhythm
                 When drawn to the wonder of other horizons.

So, Dr. B, as you have been known by so many, you deserve this time, and as your partner in life, I am so grateful to share this new horizon with you. Well done, good and faithful servant. 

An Invitation
What does the word "retirement"mean to you? I would love to know.  

NOTE: This will be the only post this week. I will be back on Tuesday, April 10.