Life 3.0: Protirement NOT Retirement by Katsof Ellis

Author:Katsof, Ellis [Katsof, Ellis]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: MyProtirement
Published: 2017-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

My Advice

Find something that is important to you and do it.

Name:

Occupation:

Retirement Age:

Current Age:

Protirement Activities:

Susan M.

Government Administrator

55

60

Caregiver; Hobbyist

My Protirement Story

It was a strange time because I was busy right up until the time I retired. My daughter was moving home from university. Suddenly, both my kids were back home and we had a very full house. I felt like I was on vacation. After a few weeks, I started going for walks. My husband still had his routine and was doing his own thing. There is a mall near our house. I would walk there, get a coffee, and read. Some of my other friends were retired and we started meeting for coffee.

Retirement became like a long vacation. I missed my friends from work. I keep in touch with some of them. This is something that is interesting about retirement for me: my self-worth was never wrapped around work, so that’s probably why I don’t miss the actual work. I don’t feel like I have lost any brainpower or anything just because I am no longer working; I feel the same, just less tired.

Because I was always running out the door fairly early, when I was working, I was never there to make breakfast for them; my husband was the morning parent. So now, I can get up and make breakfast for them as though I was a stay-at-home mom, even though they are now adults. I am not sure how I got the meals made, got the kids to soccer, answered the BlackBerry, when I was working.

About eight months into my retirement, my parent’s health began to change. My 90-year-old father had minor prostate surgery that set him into a decline with infections. I was thrown immediately into the caregiver role, dealing with the Community Care Access Centre (CCAC). My mom was 87 and had Parkinson’s, so she wasn’t that great, either. We had nurses coming in, neurology appointments to go to, and I was coordinating all of it.

My mother was nervous about being at home at night with my father. Trying to get CCAC help was horrible. We eventually placed my dad into a nursing home that was in a different town from where my disabled sister was. I had to drive him to the home with my mother waving at the window. Then my mother needed to be placed in a home because she couldn’t stay on her own. We also decided to put the house up for sale. I was managing all of that. It was the winter of 2013 and my disabled sister was in a home in Stayner, while my father was in a home in Collingwood.

It was a cold, wintry day when I got a call on my cell, in the middle of a snow storm, that they had a bed for my dad in the same nursing home in Stayner where my sister was living. Two hours later, they called me back to say there was another bed for my mother, but she also had to move in by Friday.

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