AGEING: Retirement doesn’t have to cool the fire

Marsha Barber, Torstar contributor, Feb 1, 2026

[ This article has a slant favouring older women and retirees. Not that there is anything wrong with that per se, but it does give one the feeling of exclusion. Exclusion of men and of younger people. But writer Marsha Barber has justifiable intent in her singing the praises of older women. Just because there’s snow on the roof top, doesnt mean there’s no fire in the furnace below.]

In the U.S., Feb. 1 is an unof­fi­cial hol­i­day: “Spunky Old Broads Day.” The day was star­ted by Dr. Gail Car­son, an Amer­ican life coach, to cel­eb­rate and sup­port older women. Car­son then declared the entire month of Feb­ru­ary “Spunky Old Broads Month.” Now that’s an event I can get behind.

As Canada’s older pop­u­la­tion con­tin­ues to grow, it’s time to cel­eb­rate the eld­erly and, in a related vein, to rethink the concept of retire­ment.

In fact, I know a poster child for the “spunky old broads” move­ment. My friend, Cana­dian poet Ruth Abrams, who writes as Ruth Rifka, pub­lished her won­der­ful second book last year. It won a Cana­dian Jew­ish Lit­er­ary Award. She pub­lished her first book two years earlier. There’s noth­ing unusual about that, except for the fact she’s in her mid­90s.

Ruth is in good com­pany. Folk artist “Grandma Moses” star­ted paint­ing ser­i­ously in her late 70s and stopped paint­ing pro­lific­ally only a few months before her death at 101.

Laura Ingalls Wilder began pub­lish­ing her “Little House” series in her mid­60s.

At the gym, I see octo­gen­ari­ans lit­er­ally walk­ing circles around me on the track.

These are women who are tak­ing full advant­age of their retire­ment years. The word for retire­ment in Span­ish is “jubila­cion,” from the Latin word “jubil­are,” to shout for joy. In Japan, retire­ment is some­times framed as “dai­ni no jin­sei” or second life. In Italy, retir­ees are the “saggi,” the wise ones.

We have retire­ment all wrong in the Eng­lish­speak­ing world. The word con­notes with­drawal, pulling in the draw­bridge, stand­ing at the peri­phery.

As a pro­fessor who plans to retire from my day job in five years, I know words mat­ter.

The phe­nomenon of retire­ment was ori­gin­ally con­strued as a reward for years of labour. The Roman Empire provided a pen­sion to those who had served in its mil­it­ary. In the late 19th cen­tury, Ger­man chan­cel­lor Otto Von Bis­marck ini­ti­ated pen­sions for those older than 70.

Canada insti­tuted the Cana­dian Pen­sion Plan in the mid­1960s, when aver­age life expect­ancy was just under 72 years. Work­ers would become eli­gible for the pen­sion at age 65.

Gran­ted, not all work­ers find that retire­ment is “jubila­cion.” Being retired, with its con­nota­tions of being put out to pas­ture, and its health and fin­an­cial chal­lenges isn’t neces­sar­ily a pic­nic.

A sur­vey con­duc­ted by CPP Invest­ments for Fin­an­cial Lit­er­acy Month in Novem­ber found that approx­im­ately six in 10 Cana­dians worry they’ll out­live their sav­ings.

The U.K. Men­tal Health Found­a­tion estim­ates that one in five seni­ors in the com­munity suf­fers from depres­sion. [makes one wonder, “Why.”

When my dad retired from his career as a film dis­trib­utor at MGM, that cer­tainly seems to have been the case. He lived in that most stim­u­lat­ing of cit­ies, Lon­don, Eng­land. But life became smal­ler, even­tu­ally con­fined to read­ing and listen­ing to music as he sat on the couch. “After all,” he said, “there are only so many times you can visit the same museums and art gal­ler­ies.”

So bey­ond the ques­tion of fin­ances and men­tal health, an equally press­ing ques­tion seems to be who retir­ees are going to be in the world once they’ve lost their work­ing iden­tit­ies.

James Gam­bone, who calls him­self an intergen­er­a­tional con­sult­ant, has pro­posed the term: “refire­ment,” with the emphasis on “fire.” He writes about how retir­ees can take “a pos­it­ive and optim­istic approach for how we live the last third of our lives.”

That sounds pretty good. Wouldn’t most retir­ees rather be refired, with all the heat, trans­form­a­tion and pas­sion that implies, than forced into with­drawal in a life phase where their con­tri­bu­tions are no longer val­ued?

This month, it’s time for “spunky old broads” to blow up out­dated notions of retire­ment. We should all take a page out of Ruth Abram’s book and never cease explor­ing the pos­sib­il­it­ies.

It’s about time to cel­eb­rate the poten­tial of old age and to retire the tired old concept of tra­di­tional retire­ment.