We all retire some day. Some people retire voluntarily long before they reach their retirement age, and others involuntarily due to age limits and retirement rules.

Whichever your case is and whoever you are, the day will surely come when you have to pack your stuff and leave permanently. Cleaning up your vestiges at your workplace where you have spent your entire life, you are bound to feel a little lonely and empty, no matter how splendid your past achievements are. 

Elvis Presley once sang: “The world is a stage and each must play a part. Now the stage is bare and I am standing there with emptiness all around.” Your performance on stage is over at last, and the audience is gone. And it is about time you should allow them to bring down the curtains. That is life.

Customarily, we say “congratulations!” to retirees. It is a compliment to someone who has successfully fulfilled his lifetime of duties at his workplace. Nevertheless, it is a bit awkward to say “Congratulations!” or “Happy retirement!” to a person who faces the end of his career and the loss of his regular income forever.

Of course, he will receive a pension and certainly deserves some rest after years of hard work, and yet, undoubtedly there is a sense of subtle sadness lingering around his retirement. Thus “retirement” has now become a word that cannot be uttered comfortably. As a result, it might be referred to as “the r word” these days, just as if it is a dirty word.

Recently, my former professor Neil Schmitz, a legendary scholar of American literature, retired at age 75 from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Legally, he can remain at his job as long as his health allows, because there is no mandatory retirement age for professors in the States.

Although Schmitz is still energetic and vigorous, and looks much younger than his actual age, he decided to retire so that the department could hire a younger faculty member. For an American professor, it takes courage to decide to retire, and in that sense, Schmitz is undoubtedly a decent, caring person.

In his retirement speech he said, “Retirement, as you’ll see, is a hard word to pronounce. I’ve been working on it and I still don’t have a confident declaration.”

“I thought I might simply depart, avoid all the congratulations, all the repetition of the r word.” But he said his wife strongly opposed. “Margaret strongly disagreed. ‘They need closure,’ she said. ‘They need you to say the r word.’ So here I am, and I’ve said it. Thanks everyone.”

Since professors retire at age 65 in Korea, which is a bit older than the average retirement age of other occupations, Koreans envy professors. In order to teach at a university, however, professors need to spend 6 to 8 years to earn their M.A. and Ph.D.

Consequently, they usually begin their teaching career in their mid to late thirties, or even in their early forties. It would be a serious loss and waste of talent, therefore, to make professors retire at 65 when they are still young and vigorous. Moreover, as an educator and researcher, their influence is so strong and tremendous that there is a saying, “Professors never retire. They just fade away.”

The problem is that there are so many fresh young doctorates who are unemployed, so professors retire for the sake of the next generation. That is the circle of life.

When we hire a new faculty member, we say, “Welcome aboard!” In this age of worldwide economic recession and a tight job market, there are numerous unlucky young people who desperately want to hear the magic words “Welcome aboard!” after the job interview. The frustration of those excluded, “not wanted on the voyage” is boiling over in our society nowadays. On the other hand, older people reluctantly watch as their retirement day approaches, sensing vague sadness and loneliness.

As we approach retirement, we should be ready to depart despite the lingering sense of attachment. We should let it go and never look back. As King Lear said, retirement is “To shake all cares and business from our age/Conferring them on younger strengths, while we/Unburdened crawl towards death.”

Retirement, then, can be a reward and blessing for hard work and a lifetime of service. A few weeks ago, I visited Marcus Klein, my former professor who now lives in San Diego after voluntary retirement. I found him and his wife living in serenity like Taoist hermits surrounded by gorgeous flowers, evergreen trees and green valleys.

Someone once told me that you could think of being “retired” as being “re-tired,” or changing one’s tires. The journey is not over. Rather, you can begin anew and travel in different directions with brand new tires. Retirement does not have to be the end of the road. Severing the lingering attachment, therefore, we should boldly announce the declaration of retirement. 

By Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. He can be reached at sukim@snu.ac.kr. ― Ed.