A late retirement is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, it should be celebrated

Can you think of anyone who isn’t actually better in work than out of it? My mother took early retirement – I mean, early for Ireland where the retirement age was 65 for both men and women (and given that women live longer than men, how did the iniquitous disparity, whereby women live longer than men but retire earlier, last this long?) — and I can date her decline as a person from that point. She loved her work as a secretary. I can think of men who retired from the paper I work for as soon as it was commensurate with their having a final salary pension, but it didn’t make them happier. For most of us, work is tantamount to an answer to the question: who are you? Perhaps some people can still answer that question with the answer: wife and mother, or, just A Creature Made by God, but it’s vanishingly few nowadays.