It’s been a while!

It has been ages since I’ve posted. The good news is that I got very focused on a number of initiatives and the ‘retirement’ conversation started to feel stale. So I moved on to other things for a while, and now I feel a sense of renewal about the topic.

In the past 24 hours I’ve had two very interesting conversations about this period of our lives. One was with a funeral director about the importance of pre-planning our funeral. Definitely a topic that many people avoid like the plague. He made an interesting point: talking about planning your funeral doesn’t mean you are inviting death. Yet many people treat it as if it did. We spent quite a bit of time talking about the planning process and I’ll definitely be exploring that more in future postings.

My second interesting conversation was with a woman who provides non-medical services to those who want to remain in their homes as they age. She talked about a recent study that shows people are more prepared to plan for their funeral than they plan strategies for remaining out of long-term care facilities! So I definitely think that’s a conversation that is very worthy of having.

It might seem strange that both of those topics belong on a blog about retirement. But the reality is that for many people who don’t create a meaningful life for themselves when they leave paid employment, their health starts to fade at an alarming rate …and death moves onto the horizon very quickly.

Scary, eh? I hope you find it so because it may very well become your life experience if you don’t wake up and pay attention to the quality of your life!

~ by gwenmccauley on March 7, 2008.