My Dad is taking a well-deserved and overdue summer vacation to Poland. He is visiting numerous cousins on his mother’s side, who he’s seeing in person, in their same farming villages where he can speak his native language, for the first time since the 1970s before leaving Poland for good. In photos he messages us brothers (his sons), he appears unusually relaxed, which plays into my prediction that he’ll return home, and to his job with Maricopa County, wishing he’d started visiting Poland years ago, beginning after my Mom passed away in 2013.
Instead, he’s kept himself too tied up with work to take lengthier overseas trips, and now, still working at 75 years, with zero financial need to continue working, I’m convinced that he works until he passes away one day. He says “work keeps me going” but, as with my late Mom’s addiction to Percocet, I suspect work will be the drug that keeps him alive until it does him in at the end.
I cannot relate to why anybody would want to keep working when they no longer need to. If it’s about maintaining a personal identity, there are many ways outside of work to build identity. If Covid lockdowns did me any good, it was realizing how fully capable I am to develop a sense of productivity/accomplishment on my own. When my employer sidelined their workforce for about four months and left us to ourselves through the summer of 2020, the routine I created for myself tapped into a sense of productivity/accomplishment that I thought I’d otherwise lose during months without work or a routine that included gyms (closed) or meeting with friends.
Over the past decade, we’ve addressed with our Dad whether he’ll ever retire, and it’s mostly a directionless discussion. But a few months ago, when I was telling him about the sudden passing of an older coworker who retired a few years ago, my Dad’s response gave me an idea of why he continues to work. True or not, he responded by saying “most men die within a few years after they retire.” It’s a disquieting view into his reasoning: he’s afraid that once he stops working it’ll speed up the clock on the inevitable. The inevitable comes for all of us, yes, but I find his approach slightly tragic.
