The job titles came easily. The life underneath them took a little longer.
I could write the working-life paragraph of my obituary without lifting the pen very often.
Firefighter. Police detective. Ship’s captain. Later, marine consultancy. A respectable collection of nouns. It suggested a man who had been useful in several kinds of bad weather and occasionally indoors.
Then I got to retirement, and the pen slowed down.
He enjoyed walking. He read. He wrote in the mornings.
Nothing wrong with any of that. I enjoy all three. But after the first paragraph, with its uniforms and decisions and places reached by air, the second looked rather like the activities section of a brochure.
He participated enthusiastically. He caused no trouble.
I hadn’t intended to write an obituary. I had read a short one and been startled by how thoroughly a long life could disappear into a few lines. Not the death, for once. The compression. Decades reduced to where somebody worked and what they liked doing afterwards.
Naturally, I decided to test the format on myself. There are probably healthier ways to spend a morning, but I had already cleaned the sink.
The result made me worry, briefly, that I needed more impressive retirement. An expedition. A qualification. Something sufficiently substantial to persuade an editor to allow a third paragraph.
Then I noticed what I was doing.
I had retired from being assessed and immediately appointed an imaginary obituary writer to carry on the work.
An employer at least pays you before deciding whether you have achieved enough. This fellow was expecting me to produce a late-life performance review at my own expense.
Perhaps the problem wasn’t that my days were thin. Perhaps the form was.
There is no sensible place in an obituary for the pleasure of making tea when it is raining and you don’t have to go anywhere. No column for a book that keeps you in your chair longer than you intended. No useful heading for remembering how to tie a bowline while looking for a different pair of glasses.
Yet those things are part of the actual texture. They are how a life feels while someone is inside it, rather than how it looks once someone else has to summarise it.
I tried again. Less employment history, more person. A man who liked a long walk with no efficient destination. Who could be ridiculously pleased by a good pork pie. Who still wanted to find out things without having to turn the answers into professional expertise.
I also included a half-finished jigsaw of the Forth Bridge, which, like the bridge itself, appeared to require maintenance in perpetuity.
That was the first line I actually liked.
There is room left in these years. I don’t mean room for a heroic final act designed to improve the paperwork. Room to be interested. To be bad at something without risking a career. To go somewhere simply because I would like to see it properly this time.
I want more of that. I also want to resist turning it into another set of targets, complete with a disappointed manager at the end.
The draft is in a drawer. There is space beneath the second paragraph.
I don’t know what will go there. For once, that seems less like a failing than a reason to get up tomorrow.
Before you wander back into the ordinary noise of the day, do one small thing with this.
Not a grand reinvention. Not a ten-year vision board. Just a quiet refusal to drift.
Because later life has a habit of becoming whatever is left after everyone else has had their say: the pension provider, the calendar, the family WhatsApp, the old job still living rent-free in your head.
The danger is not that you fail to make a plan.
The danger is that you inherit one by default.
If this piece nudged something uncomfortable but useful, I’d start here:
The Second Act Playbook is for building the shape of the next chapter before life fills it in for you.
The Retirement Identity Check-In is for the quieter question underneath it all: who are you becoming when the old labels loosen?
One is Free the other isn’t I will leave it to you to have a look. Neither is about panic.
They are about not waking up five years from now with a tidy pension and a life that somehow forgot to include you.