Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers. Sara Geber

found herself going daily, after work, to her mother’s apartment to visit and care for her. She did all the shopping and meal preparation as well as helping her mother bathe and dress. On weekends she did her mother’s wash as well as her own household chores. The all-consuming job of being her mother’s caregiver lasted three full years. During that time, Marion’s fiancé felt neglected, and was emotionally disturbed by the cancer. He finally broke off the engagement and walked out of Marion’s life.

      After three years, Marion’s mother fell and broke her hip. Because she needed strength to heal the broken bone, the chemotherapy treatments had to be stopped. However, those treatments were all that had kept the cancer at bay and once they were discontinued the cancer raged anew.

      When her mother died, Marion, at thirty, was emotionally and physically exhausted. But as the weeks went by, her body and spirit healed and she rededicated herself to her work. The job began to require quite a bit of travel, limiting Marion’s ability to meet another potential marriage partner. However, the fulfillment she found at work more than compensated for the loss of that prospect. She considered having children out of wedlock and raising them herself, but with her demanding job, raising children didn’t seem to be a realistic plan and she abandoned the idea. Instead, Marion continued to travel and enjoy the benefits her high-profile job afforded. As she thinks about winding down her career now at sixty-two, she has no regrets about how she pursued her life and how things turned out for her.

      The life path for most child-free baby boomers has depended on several factors. Among more educated women with higher-paying jobs, being without children at midlife has meant more freedom to come and go at will, living alone or with a companion of their choice. Single or married, they have established social networks that include a personalized mixture of friends and blood relatives. Men have followed similar paths, but theirs have typically relied more on work-related networks and connections and less on contact with family members.

      A growing number of men and women today, regardless of age, are choosing to remain single for life. The age at first marriage is now in the upper twenties for both men and women, and appears to rise every year. In the United States today, as in much of Western Europe, one hundred million people—almost 50 percent of the population over eighteen—report as “single” in the census rolls.2 Some unmarried women now raise children they have adopted or birthed, but among baby boomers the majority of single people remain child-free, especially men.

      “Conservative estimates suggest that there are more than 3 million LGBT people age fifty-five and older in the US—1.5 million of whom are sixty-five and older. This over-sixty-five segment will double in the next few decades as millions of Americans enter retirement age. Unfortunately, due to a lifetime of discrimination, many LGBT people age without proper community supports, in poor health, and financially insecure.”

      —Advocacy & Services for LGBT Elders (sageusa.org)

      A very large proportion of the LGBT community does not have children. Around twenty percent have kids, either from previous heterosexual relationships, or through adoption or artificial insemination, but the majority of LGBT boomers do not have children.3 Today, same-sex couples are legally allowed to marry, and those unions are becoming increasingly accepted in society. This acceptance has opened the doors for more parenting among gay couples, either through adoption or surrogacy. However, most gay men and women in prior generations are child-free, like Ken:

      Ken, born in Cleveland in 1938, went to private schools and an eastern college, then to the University of Michigan Law School, as a good background for politics.

      After graduation, he joined a small firm in a midsize Northern Michigan city, and was soon elected to the state legislature. After three terms, he decided he would be happier in the executive branch of state government. He then worked in the governor’s office for five more years before burning out on politics altogether. He felt adrift, not only with regard to his career, but also his sexual orientation. He knew his life had to change in some fundamental ways.

      Ken took a year off, and then went into teaching at a Michigan law school. He dated women off and on, but never let the relationships get serious. At thirty-nine, he decided he needed to explore, once and for all, whether he preferred men. On a winter break, he went to Key West, Florida, where the gay lifestyle was already openly happening.

      Ken returned to Michigan sure of his preference for men, and began to discreetly explore the gay scene in the town where he taught, which proved to be both frightening and unsatisfactory. He returned to school for a master’s degree, then landed a teaching job at a college in Miami.

      Life was better for Ken in Florida, with its larger cities and greater opportunities for self-expression, including sexual preference. He developed a deep and devoted relationship with a man. Both in their mid-forties, they discussed the possibility of adopting children but decided they were too old to start a family. Now retired from teaching, Ken lives in Key West, where he remains active, working to integrate the gay and lesbian communities into the larger population.

      Those of us that are child-free may be married, divorced, widowed, or single. We come in all colors and represent a wide variety of backgrounds, but all of us need to prepare for our later years without the help of adult children. That’s what makes us unique. Today’s outlook for the senior years promises many choices—for parents as well as non-parents.

      When asked about options for a rewarding older adulthood in the early twenty-first century, I like to say, “This is not your father’s retirement!”

      We still fear the big three health challenges, but most people now survive heart attacks and strokes and can live for years, even decades, after cancer treatment. Life expectancy across the United States has been increasing steadily and now hovers in the early- to mid-eighties, so we must stay as healthy and positive as we can in order to enjoy what gerontologists Lynn Peters Adler, Ken Dychtwald, and others have called “the bonus years.”

      Jean Houston, teacher, author, and leadership guru for the United Nations, calls this stage of life “the great turning point.”4 She goes on to suggest that we “don’t know a darn thing till we are about fifty-five or sixty. The years after that are the years in which you can bring your humanity to bear upon the great issues of our time.” She includes, in this new way of thinking about older age, the pursuit of lifelong education—both learning and teaching—and reminds us that we have lived through more history of the human race than our grandparents could ever have imagined. Wow! What a positive way to think about our post-fifty lives.

      “Life without a script” provides another way of looking at these bonus years. Specific expectations were at play for all earlier stages of life. Here’s how the life script reads: from ages one through five, we are in strong growth mode. We are learning how to get from one place to another in our environment. We are learning about rules and danger and how to express ourselves. Our “job” at that time of life is learning about our separateness from the others around us. Once we enter school, our role is to learn, to achieve, and to earn rewards. We also have to learn social skills during that time. We have to navigate the waters of love, indifference, and hatred, and resolve complicated relationship and sexual questions. And we have to cut the ties with our parents. Once out of school we have to learn to live on our own and support ourselves. Most people’s scripts include finding a partner and, for many, starting a family. For those without children, the next part of the script involves nurturing our careers and pursuing activities that are interesting and fulfilling.

      This last part of the script takes us up to around age fifty-five or sixty, at which time the script ends. What now? In American society, the script ends when we leave our careers. For parents, a partial script exists, which involves being a grandparent. However, the main actors in that production are the younger parents themselves, so grandparents play a supporting role at best, unless the parents are incapacitated or unavailable.

      Most of us age in stages. If you are reading this book, you are probably in the early stages of older adulthood: fifty-five to seventy. In those years, statistics are on your side. Many people today live healthy lives well into their seventies and eighties, in fact, more and more people are aging to triple digits every year. However, 70 percent of us will need some level