When Charley Locke embarked on a recent story for The New York Times Magazine, she initially planned to write about retirement traditions across different professions.
But there was one problem: No such standard “retirement ritual” seemed to exist. Once, some retirees were given a gold watch as a thank you for their years of service. Now even that practice has largely fallen by the wayside.
“There’s just very, very little infrastructure in the US around how to find an off-ramp to your profession,” Locke told The Sunday Long Read.
“I had to write about what this is actually like for people if that framework doesn’t exist,” she added. “What does the last day often look like?
After talking with hundreds of people in many types of jobs, Locke narrowed in on seven soon-to-be retirees, ranging from a firefighter to a D.J. to a fabric-store owner. Their retirement parties, like other big celebratory moments in life, typically included family and friends, food and music — and a range of emotions. Locke reported the piece alongside photographer Victor Llorente, who traversed the country for roughly a month to photograph each person’s last day of work.
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Locke is a freelance journalist who often writes about kids and elders in America. She regularly writes for publications including The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Vox.
The following interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
After doing all of this reporting, why do you think there’s this lack of common celebration or ritual for retirement? Is there an element of fear, that this is a scary transition for people, unlike something like a graduation?
I think that’s definitely part of it. I think, for one, work looks really different for people and definitely for Americans, which is the focus of the story. Less and less people are working one job or for one employer for 40 years, in the way that was a lot more common 50 years ago.
And also, union jobs and union production are on the decline. A lot of jobs that have that kind of ritual built in are union jobs. They both provide the logistical framework for retiring — where those are often the jobs where you have pensions and 401(k)s and stuff — and they also provide the kind of emotional framework around how you say goodbye to this big piece of your life, because people often work there for a really long time.
But I think that as fewer Americans have that kind of work experience, there’s less of a set path of how to end it. And then I also think you’re totally right: It’s a really, really bittersweet experience, and it’s often really sad for people to retire. It’s a big shift in identity. A lot of life’s big milestones are really clearly about one emotion. At a wedding or a funeral or a graduation, you can clearly say what the emotion is, but retirement is just a much more mixed transition.
It seems like when you retire, you’re confronting mortality in a big way, as in you’re thinking about the end of your lifespan or the end of your professional life. Was that a big emotion that was coming up for people?
Totally. I think there’s often the fear that retirement is a kind of diminishing. It’s a big step in a kind of diminishing in relevance and in energy. I don’t think that needs to be the case and I think for a lot of people that’s not the case. But I think a lot of people have that fear. And I think a lot of culture reinforces that idea, that people become decreasingly irrelevant as they get older and as they step out of the workforce. I think for a lot of people there’s a sense of confronting that this is still the last big chapter of their lives.
You told Times Insider in its “behind-the-story” piece that this was one of the most challenging stories you’ve ever reported. Can you talk about why that was?
It was shocking how hard this story was. So basically, just to lay out where I was at the beginning of this reporting process, I set out to find seven Americans who were very diverse in terms of career and background and socioeconomic status, and diverse in terms of where they were in the country; and were all in different fields who are all retiring within a three-week period; who were doing something special on their last day of work; and who would let us write about it and have a photographer there for the full last day of work; and whose employer would also let that happen. And just think for a second about where you go to find that.
I was doing real cold-call reporting, where every day I’d say, OK, I’m going to call 50 firehouses and 50 police stations and 20 zoos across the country. I’m gonna say, “Hi, my name is Charley Locke, I’m a reporter for The New York Times Magazine. I’m looking for people who are retiring in the month of April. Do you know anyone?” And people were always like, “Who are you? What is this? Why are you calling?”
Was there any specific emotion that surprised you about what people were feeling, that maybe you wouldn’t have anticipated before doing this reporting?
A number of the subjects told me that being a part of this story, and talking to me and having Victor, the photographer, there, ended up being the marker of retirement for them. And that this was a really meaningful way for them to honor the chapter of themselves as a worker, which was really lovely. I also think that retirement pushes people to reflect on their lives and their regrets and how they spent their time. And I found that a number of people brought that up, and were talking about regrets around working a lot and not spending as much time with their kids, or choices they felt they had to make about how they spent their time.
That’s interesting that during a retirement celebration you would be thinking about the fact that maybe you did this too much. You’re celebrating the work, and thinking also that you should have done less of it.
It’s interesting because what we do for work is such a big part of our identity. I mean in America it’s how we answer “what we do.” And yet, retiring is kind of turning away from that and saying, “Well, I’m going to focus on the other parts of myself and my identity that maybe I have not focused on.” Whether that’s being a parent or a mentor, or whatever it is, outside of work.
For this particular story, how did you match what was happening on the photo side with your own reporting? I assume most of your conversations were over the phone, and then the photo piece was happening in real time. How did you match the color that was happening between those two different pieces?
That’s a good question. Mostly by asking a million questions in a way where you sound kind of deranged. I talked to all the subjects a bunch of times, and I talked to them before their last day, where I asked them a bunch of questions about how they were feeling, what the day would look like, what we wanted the photographer to shoot, and that kind of thing. And then I would talk to them immediately afterwards, and hopefully talk to them a little bit later, asking: “OK, when you were getting dressed that morning, what were you thinking about? And how many slices of cake did you have? And how did you pick out what kind of cake you wanted to have?” You’re asking these questions that feel ridiculous, but that’s part of the job.
You write a lot about youth, and then on the opposite end of the spectrum, elders. When did you first become interested in that spectrum?
It was a little bit of a happy accident. During the pandemic, I was laid off from Pop-Up Magazine, where I was working. I started writing a lot for The New York Times for Kids and also reporting for the podcast 70 Over 70, which is from Pineapple Street Studios. And so during the pandemic, when we were all in such isolation, I spent most of my time talking to people under 10 and over 70. And it honestly helped keep me sane through the pandemic, talking to these two populations that are earnest and curious and live outside of the kind of scrum of figuring out what your life looks like in the middle.
I realized, kind of being half-time for both of those, that I really liked reporting on those two groups and that they had a lot in common. And also that there’s not a lot of reporting about either kids or elders, in part because we don’t think of them being in the midst of life, of needing coverage. They’re often seen as kind of irrelevant on the outside. And also because it’s often harder to interview both of those populations. I really like doing that work, so I’ve kind of built those dual beats.
When you were reporting this retirement story, were you thinking about retirement in terms of the next generation, many of whom won’t have one specific job for many decades? Or in terms of your own freelancing career?
I hope I get to retire one day. I think it’s gonna be really interesting and I’m looking forward to covering it for the decades to come before I reach that point. I hope that we figure out some answers before I get to retirement age, because it’s really messy right now. And I think that it’s going to get worse before it gets better, with how many baby boomers are aging. I think there will be kind of a moment of reckoning around elder care and social services and retirement benefits and what that looks like. And I’m hoping that the reckoning happens and we figure it out before I get into my 60s.
So maybe this is a story that you need to revisit every 10 years or so.
It’s very funny — my parents talk about how happy they are to have a child who is basically reporting out aging for them. And eventually I will be reporting on aging for myself.
Compiled by Amanda Ulrich. Photos courtesy of Charley Locke and Mike Lawrence/Creative Commons via Flickr.
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