Retiring

I cleaned out my UNC office yesterday. A bittersweet moment. It didn't hit me until we were all done and I walked back to get my Carolina blue umbrella in the otherwise empty office.

35 years and now I've taken my hand out of the water. James, my husband, in a sort of supportive way has said not to worry about being replaced, because, of course I will be replaced. He said retirement is like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water -- you should notice how quickly the place where your hand was fills back in.

I'm not so worried about that -- I've seen how quickly my colleagues who retired or died were forgotten, their offices filled with someone else's books and busy-ness. I've vowed not to be like my retired colleagues who opine on our faculty listserv, as if they were still a part of the day-to-day work of the School.

As I emptied my file cabinets of all those folders from past classes and copies of journal articles that are all now online I felt relief that I don't have to think up the next project or stay current on the literature, that I don't need to write another syllabus for this semester's class.

I have helped train a couple of generations of young scholars who will do good research, much of it better than anything I ever did. Most are good teachers, too, cause they like young people and they embrace the world of 24-7 media access and social media. I'm still in the dark ages, loving the visual eye candy of women's magazines, humming 60s songs, and still not sure about the allure of Facebook and tweets. Time for me to go home so I can read the print edition of the New York Times with my tea in the morning.

Some of it was harder to toss -- all those qualitative interviews that we never fully analyzed, the drawer full of tape recordings of adolescents in their bedrooms -- the stuff that should have resulted in a book that I never wrote. Actually I couldn't bear to throw all that away so I packed it up to send to  my former doctoral student who did the work with me, got her dissertation out of it, and now has tenure. She said she wanted it, but she's in the middle of a fight to adopt her second child -- she's never going to look at it again. At least it will be hers to discard -- probably when she cleans out her office 25 years from now.

I'm going to send some of the bound dissertations to their writers, other former doctoral students, most of whom wrote wonderful notes of thanks in the front. I hope they think my returning their dissertation is a good thing rather than a sign that I don't care anymore, even though that may be the truth.

Now I know why a former colleague who shared my office for a couple of years after retiring from a long career at the National Institute of Mental Health, eventually declined any offer I made to include him in research projects. He said, "I've been on the front lines for 30 years, it's time for others to do it now."

I'll miss getting to know new students, getting to help them think about their futures. I was happy to be the "nicest person on the planet" in the school as my good friend and colleague Cathy Packer put it in her introduction before my last lecture. I'm glad I stayed long enough to not care about the politics, to just be helpful and for students and junior faculty rather than thinking only of my own career. I'm glad to be going while folks still like me and think they'll miss me, even though it won't take long until they don't.