The Meaning Of Retirement To Me: Doing What I Had Not Allowed Myself To Do Before
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/01/opinion/dying-well-planning-life.html
Over the past ten years, I have reflected quite a lot on my work life. Did I accomplish enough? Did I collect enough awards, citations, publications, and medals? Did I make a contribution, as so many of my mentors would have asked me?
I have reflected on my personal life, too. Was I a good husband, father, friend, and colleague?
I have decided to let others determine whether or not I did anything of value at work. I know I had a lot of fun at times, but upon reflection the fun was more about working with people in a team and actually doing experiments or writing up results. The entries on my cv were of little consequence in the end.
I will also allow others, like my family and friends, to judge whether or not I treated them well. I tried hard, but often fell short. Sometimes the demands of the job caused me to have to do things that hurt others. That happens when you are a vice president. As Super Chicken used to say to his side kick the lion Fred, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”
I think, after these years of retirement when I wrote a few books, kept up this blog, started a podcast with my son, and worked on my golf game while supporting my wife in her latest career as an academic politician, the past ten or so years have been better than everything before. Why? Because, for the most part, I decided what I was allowed to do and was not letting someone else tell me what I was to do.
Now it is the nature of modern work life that one must take orders from a supervisor when working in a large organization. In my case, I had many supervisors for most of my jobs from true bosses, to their bosses, to the faculty when I was a vice president, to the NIH, AACR, ASCO, ASCI, FDA, ORI and a panoply of other alphabet soup organizations that I deemed very important to my future. These do not rule my days any longer.
I think the clearest example of running my own life in retirement is a strange one. Once I decided that I wanted to lose twenty or so pounds using GLP-1 drugs, it was I who decided to deny myself foods that I had previously loved although the drug surely helped. Now that I am off the drug, it is up to me to continue the diet, without the pharmacologic assistance. But, I am making the call. No one is making me do this. No one did, although my internist surely wanted me to take the weight off and was instrumental in my success. Not only all of that, if I want to take off more weight using the GLP-1 drugs, I will. My choice.
The same is true with my exercise program of Pilates, conditioning, and weight training. I decide to do this. I don’t allow myself not to do it. I can’t run any more. I can barely take a long walk, but I press on. Golf, my passion, demands a level of fitness that seems to take more effort to attain every day.
I think in my work life and family life when my kids were still home, I had to deny myself lots. It was my choice. I’d do it again. The same way except I think I could have been a better father than I was when I was running my lab and chasing fame, fortune, and endless gold stars. I could have been home more.
Water under the bridge.
I have no illusions. This could all end in an instant–a car accident, a stray golf ball, or an unanticipated oncogene expressing itself somewhere in my body. This was brought home to me in the attached essay from The New York Times on June 1 by palliative care physician Sunita Puri (see above).
For now, I am going to enjoy getting up in the morning and trying to make my own choices, even if those choices are denying myself a cookie or sweating a little bit more lifting weights. It’s my choice now.
In a life filled with tests to take, term paper deadlines, college applications, medical school interviews, papers to submit, grant applications to write, and most importantly sick patients to attend to, I’m finally calling my own shots. That’s my idea of a successful retirement. It sure does differ from the rest of my life.
Soon enough, the choices will start to fade away with the ineluctable loss of physical and cognitive capacity. For now, I can still move and I have my “marbles” as an older psychiatrist friend said to me recently.
For this much, I am eternally grateful.
