Working May Outweigh Retirement
The memo hit Kevin McMahon’s desk just weeks after his 55th birthday and promised to rescue him from employment hell. After 23 years of working for the U.S. Treasury Department, McMahon was - like so many other Americans these days - being offered a sweetened retirement deal if he would only give up his job.
“I don’t know if I literally jumped for joy, but I did inside,” says McMahon, 57, who now lives in Fresno, Calif. “I didn’t like my job and had a million things I’d always wanted to do.”
Losing his mind, however, wasn’t one of them.
Yet that’s how he describes what happened to him in the months after he left his job. To his surprise, McMahon’s transition out of everyday work was punctuated with panic attacks, disorientation and physical distress that eventually landed him in a hospital emergency room.
McMahon’s symptoms, it turns out, are not unusual among men who are suddenly “downsized” or take early retirement. So identified are we with our work that even when we make the choice to get out, we can feel, in McMahon’s words, “like a useless, superfluous speck occupying space and time.”
For McMahon - who asked that his real name not be used because his wife still works at Treasury - retirement was at first a relief. “It almost seemed like I’d resumed my normal life,” he says. He read books, reopened his stamp collection and went dancing with his wife.
After two work-free months, though, he began feeling isolated and irritable. He became jealous of the attention his wife gave to her work or to other people. He wondered what she still saw in him.
Then one day his world began to twirl.
As he describes it: “I was spinning so fast I had to hang onto my bed to keep from disintegrating. I turned white … alternating between profuse sweating and violent chills. My wife called 911, and they hauled me off to the ER. By the time we got there, all symptoms had vanished; all tests were negative.”
McMahon knew then that he was reacting to his retirement. Books about coping with retirement, however, offered him nothing “but a few platitudes, and some suggestions on which mutual funds to invest in.”
When his wife was transferred to a job in Fresno about a year into his retirement, he hoped the change of scenery would make a difference. It didn’t.
Rather, he despaired about having “nothing meaningful to do; my preoccupied wife; my faraway children; our cats that I could never stand; weeds in the yard.”
“One really bad afternoon,” he continued, “I knew the time had come to decide among the following: suicide, flee and start another life somewhere, lapse into a nervous breakdown, or something totally different from anything I’d done before.”
Primarily out of “a sense of duty to my family,” he says, he chose the latter. He made some phone calls and volunteered as a classroom aide in an elementary school in a Hispanic and Asian neighborhood. Being Caucasian, he says, he felt like a Martian.
But the fourth-graders took to him. Today, six months later, he’s no longer having panic attacks - and he says he’s more satisfied than ever in his “work.”
He offers no advice to other retirees. Watching his young students, though, he says he’s saddened by how early in their lives boys become isolated.
“In the classroom, whenever a boy is clearly sad or hurt and allows it to be shown, all the other guys give him a wide berth,” McMahon observes. “When a girl shows the same emotions, at least one other girl materializes instantly to be with her.”
Male call: What kind of reaction did you have to retirement? Send responses to P.O. Box 8071, Lexington, KY 40533-8071, or to e-mail address nchetaol.com.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Neil Chethik Universal Press Syndicate