Does Your Retirement Loom? You Will Mourn. Then, Take Control.

 By Karen and Erica

You are a smart, energetic, interested, engaged, stylish, collegial, problem-solving woman—just as you have been for decades. You are on top of the world.

You are about to retire. That will change everything.

At first it is fun. You sleep in. You stream shows. You wear sweats. (Maybe you are already doing that, this year.) When life gets social again, you will go to matinees, and have wine with lazy lunches in elegant surroundings, wearing cool clothes that you would not wear to a board meeting.

But then things will change. You will begin to feel dislocated and lost. Your many assets—experience, knowledge, enthusiasm—seemingly become irrelevant. You don’t know what to do and where to go each day. Something—maybe a lot of things—are missing—especially now. All the usual methods of communication and collegiality have been disrupted. You may feel very lost.

We have some advice. We retired in happier times, but it took us a while to get back on our feet anyway. We think the retirement approach we stumbled upon, by trial and error, will work for you, even now.

First, you have to go through the mourning stage. Everyone who retires from a job they loved must experience that loss. Then figure out how to deal with that loss. One approach is to be quite analytical about what you liked and what you didn’t like about working, and then to take baby steps that allow you to move forward, finding the things you like, in different form.

What are you missing? Structure. Identity. Purpose. Deadlines. Colleagues. Paychecks. Among other things.

What can you do about it?

For starters, understand that this is a big transition. You had a career for four decades. You derived all kinds of psychic benefits from your career. Now you don’t have a career any more. You have—temporarily—lost your identity. You have lost your paycheck. Your colleagues. You need to mourn. That’s painful. But it is necessary.

While you are doing that, think about the pieces you miss. We missed having an office, business cards, scheduled calls, meetings, obligations. We missed colleagues and a support staff and a reason to get dressed up. We missed saying things like “I am a partner”—emphasis on “am.”   

So we replaced what we could. We got an office—in a WeWork. (We plan to go back when we can. We definitely plan to work outside our homes.) We got business cards. We began to think about what we wanted to do next. We learned some of the things that would be necessary if we were to do something new—like how to operate a website, and how to find people to help with technology issues.

We could not replace our careers—in fact we did not want to. After forty years of intense work, we wanted to work in a more modulated way. We had practiced law at a high level, and we did not want to practice any other way. We wanted to do something different. We looked at our favorite non-profits and we identified projects that would benefit from our strengths. Sadly, no-one wanted us to do their projects. In fact, they didn’t seem to realize there were projects worth doing. So we decided to start our own project—figuring out why people seemed not to know how to use us, and figuring out how to change their minds.

All of this resulted in the birth of Lustre.

Your process will be similar. Once you have emerged from mourning, you start thinking about what you loved about working, and how you can replicate that in a completely different way. You will come up with something that energizes you, and your identity will be revived and reinvigorated.

If we at Lustre are successful, you will be able to do all the things no-one wanted us to do. That’s our purpose. We look forward to hearing about yours. And you will be part of a very modern movement, just like you were when you entered the workforce.

If we all work toward the same goal there is nothing we cannot accomplish.

Note: We wear masks. And it is not summer any more! We are not in a position to have photos taken together right now. When we can, we will!