Essay: In throes of Big R

For a year now I've been withdrawing from an addiction. I have the shakes and almost every day, my new habit pattern wobbles. I'm in the throes of "The Big R."

I'd been sidling up to retirement for a couple of years, eying my age cohort as they slipped away from my work orbit and into another life somewhere. I began to confide my anxieties to closest friends after swearing them to secrecy. I felt like I was sneaking up on an adversary.

Finally, I broached the subject with the dean and department chairman. And so I began to work half-time, down to three courses a year instead of six. I can't complain. More time to enjoy my students and fewer meetings.

Although sometimes when I show up, I'm not needed. That's when the shakes and wobbles come.

But I had to face the family math. My mother lived to 91.

At age 66, with good luck, I had a quarter century left. OK, let's be realistic. Those last five years? Not so much. So subtract five and that knocks me down to, maybe 20 years. At most, two decades remain in the game.

I'd been through all the other life-markers — births and baptisms, weddings, wakes and funerals (other people's). Throw divorce in there, too. You've got to face them when they hit. But their tedious social traditions bucked me up, provided tried and true ceremonies to lean on.

And now comes retirement.

It's different, more like a state of suspended existence that America seems to have just made up. And there are greeting cards for it.

Made up like adolescence — that one's a double header. First you do it to your parents, then your kids do it to you. Then there's middle age. Nice to know you're in your prime, but it's another 19th century invention too, says Patricia Cohen, New York Times culture reporter.

There's little anthropological evidence that our ancient forebears retired from anything. They just died in the traces, drifted away on ice floes or were eaten. As my friend Chris says, "first you work, then you die."

The online Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology says "retire" is from the French or Old French, "retirer." It means to drawback or withdraw. It first appears in English (or as the linguists say, is attested) in the 17th century. How did the French get into this?

Well, the main French exhibit is Montaigne. Famous in his own lifetime, he had retired early from public life. You can do that if your family is rich and you have a first-class education. At age 37 — middle age back in the day — he chucked it all and "withdrew himself" (that's what he said in Latin) to a tower in his father's castle to write. He had wisdom sayings carved on the ceiling beams and he relieved his "fits of melancholy" by writing.

He traveled a bit, even served as mayor of Bordeaux. But mainly, he wrote and wrote — about Greek and Latin writers, age and sleep, the education of children, wearing clothes, learning to die (read philosophy) and cannibals (rumored to roam the New World). He covered a lot of ground. A balanced latter life for nearly 20 years. What a game plan.

Contemporary retirement does not connote such elegant composure. It generates panic and a colossal amount of self-absorption. It's right up there with adolescence. And like adolescence, retirement is big on marketing — books, blogs, therapy. It's all there to help you navigate this looming, potential crisis. By the way, spend some money too, before impoverishment takes over. And it tells you — avoid disaster. Prepare, prepare — this is a big deal.

Move over, Montaigne, I'm having my fits of melancholy — fatigue, depression, apprehension. And I'm sleeping 10 hours a night like a teenager. Here I thought I was managing middle age, even enjoying it through the lens of writers like Nora Ephron, that wry chronicler of uneasy aging.

Now it turns out that I'm no longer in the middle of middle age. I'm at its further edge. Smack — it's the Big R.

And did I mention that they've got greeting cards for it?

Disinclined to carve wisdom sayings on the beams over my desk, I tried post-it notes. I've got a lot of them. They're from work.

And on each one I scribble an anticipated change with retirement, a gimmick to collect my thoughts.

No e-mails that close with the snippily abridged "Best" or the faux British, "Cheers."

No e-mails with "sent from my iPhone or Droid."

No office parties.

Time to —

• Write Christmas cards to nonagenarian friends.

• Prune shrubs and put down bulbs.

• Exercise in the middle of the day.

• Buy fresh food and cook from scratch.

• Read in the afternoon.

• Write in the mornings.

• Feed the birds.

Not bad at all.

What could I have overlooked? Oh, yes, the calamitous drop in income. No help from the affluent Montaigne here. The best I can say is that I don't worry about work conflicts for my quarterly appointments with my CFP (certified financial planner for readers younger than 25).

Money. That's another entire packet of post-it notes. Of course, it's not retirement or even money that's so disturbing.

It's what comes after.

The Big R being the anteroom of the Big D. Time to read philosophy.

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Teddy Robertson grew up in California but has lived in Flint since 1984 and in Mott Park since 1995. She teaches history at UM-Flint, specializing in Polish history. Her research is about the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz and she has published translations from Polish to English.