Maybe we'd even enjoy those senior years more, since studies show that retirees engaged in "productive" activities -- including paid work -- are more satisfied than the unengaged.
Delaying retirement, however, requires serious changes, some of them distinctly unpopular. It means, among other things:
(a) Modifying traditional pension practices and regulations that discourage people from working longer.
(b) Persuading employers to get as excited about retaining or hiring older workers as labor analysts are.
And (c) subjecting the societal expectations and sense of entitlement built up over 70 years to a fast U-turn.
The last one could be the hard part. After urging sixtysomething workers to relax and withdraw, to look forward to days without time clocks, to dance and play golf and volunteer and flee winter without guilt because they'd earned these years of income-without-work, America proposes to add a loud "Not yet!"
A few friends are coming over for a barbecue this evening, so Jim and Anna Martin hit the Old Town farmer's market this morning and picked up fresh produce and a raspberry pie. Now Anna is flitting around the kitchen making deviled eggs, while Jim -- aka "the grillmeister" -- attends to an important matter in their home office.
He's assembling several copies of a durable power of attorney (for Virginia) and a designation of health care surrogate (required in Florida, where Anna's mother left her a small prefab house they visit once or twice a year). "That little girl in Florida got us thinking," Jim says, referring to the late Terry Schiavo, who hadn't put her end-of-life wishes in writing. He and Anna now have, and he's folding a set of signed documents into an envelope for his son, Jeffery, in Little Rock, Ark. "We put one in the safe-deposit box, we have one here in the house, and we're sending one to him."
Task accomplished, he joins Anna in the kitchen; it's once more time to test his blood sugar. "One twenty-seven," he says. "A little high, but not bad, not bad at all."
He keeps his diabetes under control, Jim says with some pride. But managing that, and his other health problems, requires unrelenting effort, involving not only frequent doctors' visits but "every pill known to Western medicine." One of the cabinets holds a thicket of little bottles: For the hypertension he's had for 30 years, an ACE inhibitor and a drug to lower triglycerides. For the coronary artery disease, a beta blocker, a blood thinner and a cholesterol-reducer. Pills to treat acid reflux and nerve pain from his diabetes. Plus various herbal medicines and a host of vitamins and minerals.
Ten years ago, Jim had an angioplasty to reopen a blocked artery. "I haven't had any more problems with it," says Jim, whose discussions of this stuff tend to be matter of fact, even comical. "But whenever you get a pain anywhere in your upper body, you think, 'Uh oh, this is it . . . goodbye, cruel world.'" And there is pain. Five years ago, he had surgery to fuse several vertebrae in his neck. His diabetes makes simply walking painful most of the time, though he chooses not to dwell on that.
Under the circumstances, it's not surprising that his wife and his two children, from an earlier marriage, express mixed feelings about Jim's continuing to work. Anna, a decade younger and still teaching orchestral music in the Prince William County public schools, is in favor. "Business has been his life," she says. "It makes him feel functional." His son concurs. But his daughter, Laura, in Lafayette, Ind., isn't so sanguine. "He's worked long enough and hard enough," she argues. "People, when they get to retirement age, should be able to retire."
