In retirement, a complicated mix of mourning and celebrating

Steve

I walked into a room of welcoming elderly faces near Atlanta in September and joined the mood of celebration—and mourning.

It was my 50th high-school reunion, and we old friends were there to celebrate the remarkable few years we spent together more than five decades ago in a boarding school halfway around the world. And we were there to mourn our classmates who didn’t make it to 2025.

“It seems like we’re doing a lot of this since we retired," I told Karen on the phone from the airport on my way home, “this celebrating and mourning."

We did both while we were working, but the tug between gain and loss has grown as retirement makes us more mindful of what we have left.

I still mourn my career. Oh, I was joyous the morning after I quit, when Karen and I left the garage on our tandem bike to pedal to Florida from our home in San Francisco. When we got home three months later, though, I was surprised by the waves of wistfulness about what I wasn’t coming back to—the sense of accomplishment and purpose and identity, the newsroom camaraderie, the paycheck.

Those waves have flowed and ebbed ever since. Some weeks ago, I joined erstwhile colleagues in the San Francisco bar we once frequented and felt oddly envious of those still on the job—still in that special place where we were dead serious about the work yet often felt like irreverent college students.

I glanced up at the windows of my old office as I biked back toward home, then wove among buses and trolleys on Market Street thinking of how I missed even my commute. The feeling passed at 5 the next morning, when Karen’s alarm went off and I remembered that I could go back to sleep without anxiety about an error I might have let creep into a story that was about to publish. I wake to that celebration daily.

Some of the mourning and celebration is over little stuff. I’m sad that I mustn’t climb tall ladders anymore, per an agreement with Karen. I’m glad I can finally allow my cheapskate self to pay someone for house repairs that require climbing.

Last month, I mourned the passing of my motorcycling days as I prepped my 1973 Honda CB350F for sale. I gapped the tappets and points, checked the oil, flipped the choke, hit the starter. It came to life with the inimitable growl of a vintage straight four that took me back to my teenage self with a rush of sadness.

Then, I celebrated when I shut the engine down and turned to work on the drive train of the steed that enriches our life today—the 2005 Co-Motion tandem bicycle that reminds me I can be grateful for the good health that has allowed Karen and me to pedal around America since we retired.

Health brings mourning, too, what with the sure signs of loss—my slightly blurred eyesight from posterior vitreous detachment that ophthalmologists say is permanent, the slowly increasing volume on my tinnitus that the audiologist says is permanent, the growing forgetfulness that everyone says is most certainly permanent. It will get worse, so best to grieve now.

“I guess we need to mourn to be able to move on," I told Karen the other day, “and we have a lot more moving on to come."

The deepest mourning is over people, and we know we must get used to that grieving. In October, I thumbed through snapshots my mother had stashed in albums, envelopes and shoeboxes. Photos of Mom as a little girl on the Texas Panhandle prairie, as a college student in Kansas, as a young missionary mother with little me in 1960s Japan, as a dear friend with smiling women’s-group members, as a happy grandmother—hundreds of photos that gave a glimpse into her world that ended when she left us in 2023.

Yet I could celebrate as I cradled those photos, because there with me to treasure them—and explain them—was my 94-year-old father, who, with Mom, took on the huge risks and sacrifices of moving to a distant shore as missionaries in 1961, giving me a priceless life as a kid in Japan and placing me in that 1975 graduating class in Tokyo.

“Thank you for the times when we were well and happy and busy," Dad prayed over the turkey dinner Karen made for the three of us at his Iowa duplex in November. “And thank you now for the peace we have here."

Karen

My mom died not long before I retired. I still get an urge to call her—to talk about a recipe, to discuss a quilt idea, to ask about how she navigated her early retirement years. She was a rock to lean on through my first six decades, and the urge to call her is a hard one to break—an urge that brings a ripple of grief even now.

But I have a way to celebrate her and my late father. I log onto Zoom for a 90-minute chat with my four siblings, something we began doing monthly just after Mother’s death.

On a recent Saturday, we gave our updates, cheering each other along on our aging process and adventures—a recovery from a stent operation, touring a Greek mountaintop monastery, celebrating a new volunteer gig, a coming retirement and the satisfaction of clearing out an extra room. One sister talked of drafting her family timeline, which led to chuckles about our unanimous disdain for Dad’s obsessive family timeline so many years ago. We mourned and celebrated simultaneously.

Nowhere do Steve and I face the mourning/celebrating tension more often than in storage rooms. We’ve written about the struggles of downsizing before, and we’ll doubtlessly keep struggling. It’s one of the most nagging tasks for many retirees, for good reason: We need to grieve over our stuff—and what it represents—before we get rid of it.

We have spent hundreds of hours since retirement going through boxes and shelves and drawers. Our book-downsizing was a matter of my opening each of 20 boxes of books and pulling out any I couldn’t live without. In the end, I gathered a fraction that we still have—“The House at Pooh Corner," a gift to my 5-year-old self from my grandparents, and the Kreider genealogy book Dad wrote—and most fit on our limited bookshelves.

There’s almost always a celebration as we let go.

Back in Iowa in November, we spent a morning in Steve’s parents’ storage unit. While Steve’s dad leafed through documents and letters—stopping to exclaim or lament a bit—and Steve went through still more photos, I dug through his late mom’s sewing supplies. I found the most beautiful, and still-sharp, Japanese sewing shears.

I opened a box of her dishes. I found her treasured chopstick holders that she displayed in her dining room wherever they lived. I found her mother’s Depression-era glass serving dishes, still intact. I found her nametag from work as a docent in a historical museum. I found her collection of Nativity scenes, reminding me of our own boys’ playing with the olive-wood manger scene, retelling the Christmas story when they were little.

In the bottom of a chest of quilts were nestled her collection of mugs. I pulled them out to take back to Steve’s dad’s apartment. We’ll use them for our daily coffee. We all three mourned over these artifacts that attest to the entwined histories that we can celebrate now.

We need to prepare for much more of the grief-to-gratitude transition.

We will mourn as fellow retired friends leave San Francisco for good, and we’ll celebrate when we meet again. We will mourn when we sell our Victorian house in the middle of San Francisco, and we will grieve deeply when we eventually leave our magical city and the friends who remain. We will grieve when we need to stop cycle touring and when we must quit traveling altogether.

But then we can reminisce with gratitude. Reminiscing is mourning and celebrating.

The Yoders live in San Francisco. They can be reached at reports@wsj.com.