My FI-age why
March 11, 2019
I’ve been impatient and grouchy.
Reading Work Optional brought me back down to earth a bit. I should be grateful for being where we are today, after so many years of work and saving and fighting.
Truly, I am! I’m ever so grateful for the opportunities we’ve had, for the fruit our hard work has borne, for our little family, for our wide network of loved ones. For the useful things we have, like running water and plumbing, for a sound roof over our head, for a furnace. For the pain relief that my diet has brought me so that I can actually move day in and day out without more than a trace of a limp or a cacophony of crackling when I actually bend my joints. We even tackled the garden as a family over the weekend and may I say, we ripped out an impressive amount of weeds and weed roots. There’s enough blessing and joy to fill a week of gratitude journals. So … whence the crabapple attitude?
It finally struck me on a drive home. It’s the number. The number that’s lingered in the back of my psyche for these past several years like a whisper you can’t quite hear. (I didn’t try to hear it, naturally, I’m really good at blocking out subtle noises to concentrate.)
Mom got sick when she was in her 40s. She had several chronic problems, including dementia which is incredibly hard to handle on every level. We struggled to get diagnoses and/or treatment but nothing was terminal. (Feels familiar.) Then at 55, she died of sudden cardiac arrest.
55 means death, not a reasonably early retirement.
Now it makes sense.
My health path has had such similarities with Mom’s that I’d subconsciously mapped my timeline to hers, too. Hitting my 40s means running out of time. No wonder the idea of ten more years before retirement feels awful. Ten years from now takes me into my late 40s and right up to that Death Number.
I’ve been planning for our finances to cover many years, possibly sick and in pain, but my gut has been firmly wrapped around 55 as The End.
I don’t want it to be the end. I don’t want to work this hard all my life to drop dead before we can enjoy any of it just like my mom did.
There are so many ways that I strive to emulate her – her courage, her vision, her ferocity in fighting for a better life for her children, sometimes fighting with us children to make us grow into better people. This is the one path I do not want to follow.
To be honest, that revelation is still a bit of a surprise. 20 years ago, survival to this point and this age was a remarkable wishful thought.
Now that I’ve made it this far, it turns out that I actively want to be here for much longer. I want to keep taking long walks with PiC, exploring grocery stores, gasping can you believe how much bananas cost??, to see JB grow into adulthood and become a wonderful human, adopt lots of dogs, garden, have days where I do nothing but eat and read. I want to wear wooly socks, enjoy warm sun and warm rain, and listen to good music. I’d also like our world not to disintegrate because of climate change.
This revelation doesn’t do anything to speed up our progress, we’re already doing our best to maximize our savings and investing without forgetting to live today, it just gives me better insight into what’s been driving my tizzy.
My husband’s father and grandfather both passed away at 46, and my husband spent a lot of time convinced that he would die at that age, too. He saw his father’s health deteriorate for years and he was afraid of following the same path. This may not help you, but–I think what helped my husband was thinking logically about where his father was at the same age that he is now. His father pretty actively resisted taking care of himself, and his family’s financial situation and rural location complicated their access to things that could have helped his father do better. My husband’s entire life situation is so much better than his father’s that it just doesn’t make sense to look at his mid-40s as automatically doomed.
Maybe your mom’s core health situation was similar to what you’re experiencing yourself now, but–like my husband in relation to his dad– I think that your mom’s life situation was a lot harder. There were undoubtedly health things she didn’t know to do or couldn’t do. I know from things you’ve said that your own family’s financial situation is worlds more stable than yours was growing up. And I think that PiC is a completely different kind of partner than your father was. All of those are things you shouldn’t underestimate in terms of how they’re going to affect your own path. I think it can hard to believe, especially when you’re experiencing something as impossible to ignore as chronic pain, but– I do genuinely believe that you’re going to have a better future than your mother did.
(One other thing, which is not specific to this topic, but could help– whenever my counselor was trying to get me to think differently about a belief I held that was getting in the way of my life/happiness, she would ask me what I was getting out of the belief. As unhappy as the belief made me, she said that I was holding onto it because it was giving me something on some level. Sometimes to change the belief or change what I was doing, I first needed to think about and challenge what the belief was giving me.)
Thank you for these kind insights. You make very good points. We currently have much better access to information and better healthcare than Mom did. Even if there is no cure for the problems that I have either, I have finally found some ways to reduce the pain and therefore give myself ways to increase healthy activity. I have doctors who actually listen to me and work with me, which even I didn’t have until ten years ago.
PiC’s active support is priceless – he is an active coparent and goes out of his way to accommodate my health needs.
Thankfully this was more nailing down a spooky feeling / fear than it was identifying a belief, so I should be able to work through those feelings.
That doesn’t sound good. Keep taking care of yourself so you’ll live longer. Hopefully, medical advances will help too.
My parents are in their 70s now and they’re having some health issues. Dementia really scares me. I’ll have to proactively try to avoid it. Eating well and exercising seems to be the key to keeping that at bay.
Best wishes.
Thank you for giving me some much needed perspective. I need to appreciate the life I have now more than I do: to enjoy the walks and the little outings and all the stupid little stuff in the days I have left.
My grandfather is 83 as of a couple of days ago. And his mom lived into her 90s. On the other hand, my grandmother died at 68 of cancer, which I’m terrified of. And I’m not planning on retiring until 70, so that terrifies me. And my biological father was never in the picture, so that half of my DNA is a big ole question mark.
Mildly terrifying as I’m now 40 and having to figure out when I can/want to retire.
Point being, there’s no specific age I have in mind. But I also don’t know that I’ll have many years of retirement to enjoy. Here’s hoping I take after my grandfather.
Thanks for providing that all of us should do every once a while, take a step back and appreciate what we have now because nothing last forever. My parents are in their early 70s and hopefully they will be with us for at least 10-15 years so they can see BwC and Baby #2 grow up until they get to high school.
They are in great health right now, both go running almost every morning and watch what they eat. So hopefully they can prolong their life into their 90s by staying in shape and in great health.
I think about this every time a close relative passes away but I should do it more often, it provides an better perspective of what we have around us.
Best wishes to you as you think about these things. It’s a very difficult issue. My grandparents were long-lived, got to their early 80s or even 90s before serious health problems set in. I have one grandparent whose dementia set in fast, and that was really hard to grapple for my mom, who was taking care of them. I don’t worry as much about my physical health (a bit of hubris because my family members have tended to be in good health until fairly late in life), but I’m scared to death of dementia.
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Great post. My husband struggles with this as well because his dad died young too. I suspect that as he gets closer in age to when his dad died that it will be even harder for him. We’re also planning on retiring when he’s 55 so I’m going to work on being prepared a bit if he does have a rough time. Like you said, something there’s nothing you can do differently, but awareness does help you understand and process your feelings better!
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