18 What About Loss in Retirement?
Kimberly missed her husband’s companionship for months after his passing. They’d enjoyed a few good years of retirement together, although not as long as Kimberly had hoped and expected. She and her husband both knew that his chronic health issues would likely take him first, and so they had prepared both for his departure and her endurance, as much as they were able. But of course, her husband’s passing had still shocked Kimberly. For a time, her family and friends had made special efforts to help her get through the hardest part of his loss. Yet in time, Kimberly found that she had to make other adjustments that she hadn’t planned or expected, mostly to endure and overcome her loneliness.
Loss
Retirement can also unfortunately be a time of loss. You may lose a loved one, particularly your spouse but perhaps instead a sibling, in retirement before your own departure. Some retirees instead face the unnatural and early loss of an adult child. Many retirees face losing lifelong or longtime friends and acquaintances of their own generation. Some retirees, through their blessed longevity, even lose most or all of their peers before their own natural if delayed passing. Their morbid joke may be that all they do anymore is attend the funerals of friends. Retirement can also be a time of losing the ability to engage in meaningful activities and thus losing the friendship, fellowship, and community of those activities’ other participants. Being unable to attend your church or meetings of your book club or veterans organization, to play in a golf league or band, or to accompany your fishing or hunting buddies on their frequent excursions can be almost as jarring as seeing friends move away or pass away. Prepare to experience loss in retirement, so far as you are able.
Preparing
When you know or suspect that loss is coming, you may be able to take some steps to prepare for it that may, in small or large respects, soften the blow. First, ensure that legal and financial affairs are in order for the loss. Doing so may mean getting a will in place or updating a will, ensuring that the will has properly provided for the surviving spouse and other heirs, especially minor or adult disabled children. Doing so may also mean ensuring that retirement accounts and life insurance policies have the proper beneficiary designation and that checking and savings accounts are in joint names. At the same time, devote your time and attention to the spouse or other family member or friend who is facing their passing. Your presence and listening, and witnessing and assurance, may be your most important contributions, although your care and services may also be necessary or appropriate. Coordinating medical or hospice care may be necessary, while making preliminary arrangements for memorial and burial plans may also be helpful. Then, consider what other arrangements you may need to initiate to deal with the aftermath of the loss, including a change in housing, transportation, or household services. Prepare discretely, in ways that ease the transition without unsettling the loved one facing their passing.
Goodbyes
When the time nears for your loved one’s passing, be sure to take the time and make the effort to say appropriate goodbyes. Too often, surviving spouses or other close family members regret not having shared with their departing loved one their gratitude for the loved one’s commitment, care, character, and service, even for their perseverance and forgiveness. Share those things that you know you need or wish to speak at a time when your loved one is still in the condition to hear, understand, and respond to them. Put things in kind cards, notes, and other writings, if it helps your loved one to hear and take to heart the things you wish to say to them in love and gratitude. The passing may come sooner than you both anticipate. Don’t wait until what you believe will be the end, sometime months, weeks, or days later. Instead, begin sharing goodbyes, gently at first and more clearly and passionately later, as soon as you perceive that passing may be approaching. Goodbyes need not be solely in words. They can also be in embraces, touches, demeanor, and gestures.
Assurance
What your departing loved one may need from you most, though, is the assurance of a saving faith. Your loved one may already know the Lord Jesus Christ in full embrace. In that case, your loved one may still benefit from your own assurance. You should both anticipate Christ’s swift and sure embrace in the heavenly realm upon your loved one’s departure. Continue to project that genuine, sound, and solid assurance through whatever questioning or suffering your loved one may endure. Each passing is unique. Neither of you may know your loved one’s precise course. Accept with awe and gratitude each providence and comfort either of you receives in that precious course. The assurance on which you both rely came at great cost. If you find yourself unable to provide adequate spiritual support and assurance, then by all means enlist the help of your loved one’s closest pastor and faith friends. Beware, on the other hand, the interference of non-believing individuals or others who may deliberately or unintentionally sow sordid seeds of doubt and discouragement. Help your loved one to the glorious victory your loved one chose and the Lord chose for the two of you.
Passing
Devote your full attention to the last course of your loved one’s passing. Last days, hours, and moments with your loved one can be critical to your loved one’s comfort and assurance, as well as to your own. You may long remember those last moments, so make those memories good ones rather than ones tinged with regrets. Speak what you need to say in the way of gratitude, encouragement, and forgiveness. Withhold criticism and judgment. Do not burden your loved one, but accept whatever burdens your loved one needs to unload. Answer confusion with clarity and doubt with assurance. Be present or available, not distracted. Set other duties aside, as others would understand under the circumstances. Lean on your pastor and church’s care ministry for support, while ensuring that your loved one has spiritual, medical, and hospice support to the end. Keep the funeral director and pastor informed of your loved one’s condition and prognosis as to the anticipated day of final demise. To hold your loved one’s hand at the moment of passing can be a great honor and provide great comfort and assurance. Be there, above all.
Particulars
Whether your loved one’s passing is slow and expected, or sudden and unexpected, rely on the professionals who manage these things, to assist you and your family through the particulars of the passing. Emergency technicians may be the first to respond, to examine and remove the body. A medical examiner or coroner may confirm the cause of death, signing the certificate that you may need for legal, financial, and insurance purposes, and releasing the body from the hospital or morgue to the funeral director. Your notifying the funeral director of the passing may smooth, speed, and ease the process. Notifying the pastor who will preside over the memorial should help you and your family secure an appropriate memorial-service time and date. Your departed loved one’s personal representative, if not you, should also have prompt notice and should authorize or approve each significant step of the process in which the departed one’s estate may incur expenses. Then, let the funeral director and pastor guide you, your family, and the personal representative through the rest of the memorial and burial process.
Celebrating
To the extent that you are able, try to make your loved one’s memorial a time of celebrating your loved one’s life. Of course, you and your other family members, and the loved one’s close friends, will grieve your loss. Yet the first thing you may need to do is to remember, honor, and celebrate the loved one’s life, and celebrate the loved one’s rescue, even as you begin to deeply grieve the loss. Memorial services don’t serve their function so well when treated solely as somber, sad, and morbid affairs. The presiding pastor, family member or friend eulogist, and funeral director should help you, your family, and others honor your departed loved one in the way that the loved one would have most appreciated. That honor should help you celebrate your loved one’s life, while preserving and enhancing the best memories. Celebration of your loved one’s life is an important part of the grieving process. Take the time to do so in a suitable fashion.
Grieving
Grieving the loss of a loved one can be hard in the flurry of necessary activity following the loss. Initially, you may not have much peace and quiet within which to do so, instead attending to the above particulars while managing communications with family members and friends. That activity is in part why you should initially focus on the celebration more than the grieving. But soon, as the necessary activities surrounding the passing subside, you should find the time and solitude to grieve the passing. Take the time, and make the time, to do so. Losing a spouse or other close family member can have a profound impact on your soul, spirit, and psyche. That impact, and the mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual adjustments you must make, can take enormous energy with which to deal. You need not interpret your lethargy, if that’s what you feel, as depression. Don’t pathologize the normal. Needing to withdraw, sit, rest, and sleep may just mean that you are making the necessary progress in grieving and adjusting to the loss. If you need time alone, then let those who wish to support you know that you appreciate their offers of company and may soon take them up on it but presently need to rest. Don’t play a role. Instead, grieve authentically, as you feel your soul and psyche urging you.
Adjusting
The loss of a loved one, especially a spouse, in retirement can require substantial adjustment in routines, responsibilities, and lifestyle. Spouses tend to work closely supporting one another and their household in coordinated roles. If you lose a spouse who was paying bills, managing investments, paying taxes, maintaining the motor vehicle, and mowing the lawn, then you may need to learn, adopt, and manage those responsibilities. If you can make some of those preparations and adjustments before your spouse’s passing, doing so may be smoother for the advice and information your spouse can share, as long as doing so does not upset your spouse or the relationship. Cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and doing the laundry are other representative chores that you may need to learn, adopt, and manage. Alternatively, you may find that another family member can take over some of the roles, especially those for which you do not feel able or qualified, or you may be able to contract for services. Expect major adjustments, and manage them as well as you can.
Issues
Don’t be surprised if you face issues and difficulties making necessary adjustments. As just suggested, you may need family or professional assistance with finances, investments, taxes, home maintenance and repair, household chores, and yard care. You may find yourself overwhelmed, with more than you can manage. Try to navigate the initial adjustment period as well as you can without making major adjustments or new commitments. Do not, for instance, suddenly sell your retirement home to move in with an adult child or other relative or friend, or new companion. You may just need time to learn how to manage, after which things may no longer feel overwhelming. If, instead, you rush into a new arrangement, you may soon regret not having preserved aspects of your old life, in a modified or transitional arrangement. Try, in other words, not to make big decisions for a long enough period to know that you are not overreacting. Instead, solve issues one by one as they arise, as best you can. Then, step back and reassess, with sound advice and counsel from those who know you best. If you see clearly then that you need to sell a home, relocate, and make new living arrangements, you won’t be rushing into a mistake by doing so.
Reflection
If you are married in retirement, do either you or your spouse appear, from age, illness, or other conditions, to clearly be more likely to predecease the other? If so, can the two of you talk about it to see what steps you can take to prepare the surviving spouse to manage alone? Even if you have no idea who may pass first, can the two of you plan to ease the adjustments the survivor will need to make? Are you prepared to devote your full time and attention to helping your spouse or other loved one through a last illness or decline? Do you have the appropriate medical, hospice, pastoral, and funeral-home resources and connections identified? How do you anticipate your grieving process to go? Can you allow yourself to celebrate your loved one’s life first, through the necessary activity of a memorial, before trying to deeply process your loss? Are you, conversely, ready to ask friends and family members for the solitude and rest you may then need to make the adjustment? What do you anticipate will be your most difficult adjustment? What don’t you believe you will be able to manage? Who can help you do so, whether a family member, friend, or professional? Are those on whom you may need to rely trustworthy?
Key Points
Retirement can bring loss of a loved one, family members, and friends.
Prepare for the loss of a spouse or other loved one as best you can.
Take the time and make the effort to say appropriate goodbyes.
Help your departing loved one with the greatest assurance of faith.
Devote your full time and attention to the last days of your loved one.
Rely on medical, hospice, emergency, and other professionals for help.
Honor and celebrate your loved one at an appropriate memorial.
Ask others to allow you the solitude later to process and grieve the loss.
Losing a spouse or other household family member requires adjusting.
Don’t let difficulties in adjusting to loss rush you into bad decisions.