After retiring at 64, says a former teacher, “for the first six months I felt “completely invisible”. It was “not because people ignored her, “but because I finally understood that my entire identity had been built on being useful to a system that replaced me in three weeks”. Her moving reaction, described in a new article, is likely to strike a chord with many other people undergoing similar change. It underlines the importance of providing older people with fresh horizons, not least the prospect of further employment. She realised that “my identity had been on loan from an institution, and the woman underneath the title was someone I’d never bothered to meet until retirement forced the introduction”.
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