Retirement brings Love!

I have a coworker who is the funniest lady I believe I have ever met. She is elderly but also full of life and extremely adventurous. She is always telling stories about her children and how she used to date when she was younger and how she would never use an online dating service today had she been divorced.

The stories I love to hear the most are the ones about her and her husband, their vacations together, the road trips they take, their daily lives and best of all, their love (which she doesn’t realize is very rare). She is never sappy and overdramatic, she just tells the story and with pure genius, she makes everyone laugh every single time. The sad thing is, soon I will be unable to hear her stories because she has put in the paperwork for the decision to retire. Although very sad about her decision, she once again puts a smile on everyone’s face and her own with a story.

Yesterday, I asked her how she felt about retiring and she said, “You know what, Liza? I don’t know what I feel about it yet. I really didn’t think I wanted to because it is going to be weird for awhile plus there are a lot of things that are undecided right now and won’t be finalized until I see what the outcome is of other things. Sometimes you just go to go with the flow.” I let her know that I understood what she was saying and I said to her that she must be planning tons of traveling now. She said, “ I do not want to use up all my time for traveling, because then soon I’ll be tired of it. I want to be happy while I’m traveling not travel just to since I have time. ‘ So then I asked her if her husband was retired. She then said, ‘He retired three years ago and he’s apart of the reason why I am retiring now. He wants me home, he begs me to stay home when I wake up in the morning and leave to work. But I continued to go to work because there are some things you just don’t know about…like finances. I mean right now, we’re okay but the way things are going with the economy who knows if we always will be ? I tell him that all the time and you know what he tells me Liza?' I looked at her waiting for her to say, she takes a deep breath and then says, ‘He says he made a promise to my mother and my father that he would take care of me till death do us part the day he said ‘I do’ and he said, and I always will. I will never break that promise I made to you and your family. I will take care of you until the day we die.' And then she started laughing saying, ‘Ok, then I guess I will retire if it means that much to you! Hahahahaha!’ I began to laugh as well telling her it was sweet. While she walked back to her desk, then did I realize just how sweet it truly was.

People get married, sometimes divorced but the true loves of our lives, the ones who stay forever make a promise that they will actually never break. To love us for who we were, who we are, and and who we will become. Now that’s love.