Chapter 1 — The Empty Calendar

The first Monday of my retirement, I woke at 5:40 the way I had for thirty-four years, made coffee, sat down at the kitchen table with my planner open, and found nothing written in it.

Nothing that day, or the next, or the day after that.

Just the clean grid of the week, empty as a field, and me sitting there in a house I’d moved into six weeks earlier in a city I did not know, holding a pen with nowhere to put it.

I had been a hospital pharmacy director for most of my adult life.

It is not a glamorous thing to have been, but it was a serious thing, and it was mine, and for three decades it had told me who I was before I’d finished my first cup of coffee — where to be, what mattered, who needed me.

When they gave me the cake and the card and the handshake, everyone kept using the word freedom, as though I’d been let out of somewhere, and I smiled and thanked them and did not say what I was actually feeling, which was that they had quietly removed the scaffolding from around a building and were now expecting the building to stand there on nothing.

I had moved across the state to be near my daughter, Deb, and her family, because it was the sensible thing and because I had told myself I’d have more time for them now.

What no one tells you about more time is that it is only a gift if someone wants it.

Deb had a job and two kids and a life that had been running fine without me in it daily, and I had arrived into the middle of it like a piece of furniture nobody had ordered, and we were both too kind to say so.

There is a particular grief to the end of work that no one prepares you for, because we are not allowed to call it grief.

Grief is for people.

This was for a self.

For thirty-four years I had known, from the moment my eyes opened, exactly who I was and what the day required of me and where the load-bearing walls of my life stood.

I had been the person they called when a dose was wrong at two in the morning.

I had trained a generation of pharmacists.

My name meant something inside a set of walls, and I had mistaken, as I think most serious people do, the meaning inside those walls for the meaning of me.

And then a date on a calendar arrived, and the walls were simply gone, and I discovered that I had built my entire sense of myself on scaffolding I did not own and could not keep.