BLOG: Birthdays and retirement
April is such a special month of the year for me for several reasons.
Well, you guessed right; it must be my birth month. Granted, April was my birth month, many months ago, 756 months, to be exact — my birthday being (today), April 20th.
Perhaps a birthday is not a real milestone for an individual simply because a birthday comes every year. But some birthdays may be considered a milestone birthday, for example, a 60th birthday.
This April does mark a milestone for me, a milestone in my career. This April, I have become eligible for retirement from Michigan State University. Last August, I received the standard notification letter from the dean announcing my eligibility for retirement (Figure). Am I feeling too old? Is it time to retire? I am not sure. It is bitter-sweet feeling!
To be clear, this retirement is so-called early retirement per MSU’s regulations, at age 62, once an individual has accumulated the required years of service. Does that make me feel better? Not feeling that I am getting old? I don’t know.
Deans’ retirement notification letters are standard in academia. In general, they do not imply that a university is asking a faculty member to retire and leave — I hope. And clearly, every individual knows that he or she is approaching retirement. A retirement age of 65 to 70 years has become standard or 55 years in some jobs/careers. In my case, I have been pondering about this milestone for the last couple of years.
So, this April I have completed 15 years of service at MSU. What am I planning to do? That is another story for another day.
But I am not planning to retire at this eligibility threshold. Interestingly, from personal observations, a good majority of doctors almost never retire early, if they retire at all. I have seen colleagues still working, often full-time, through their eighties. It seems that for doctors, medicine “runs in the blood.” I always have discussions with my patients from all walks of life about retirement. I have always admired those who retire in their 50s, such as auto workers and teachers. It seems most of them never regretted retiring, enjoying life after retirement.
There are other special things about April in our family.
April 20th is not only my birthday in our family. It just so happened that my youngest daughter, Malak, was born on the same day, April 20th.
Malak was a special heavenly birthday present on my 39th birthday. She was also a heavenly compensation after we had lost her older sister, Jinan.
The funniest thing about Malak’s shared birthday is what happened 3 weeks after her birth. We had planned a trip to Jordan that summer, so we needed to obtain a passport for Malak. I went the post office and filled the passport application. After about half an hour, a woman from the post office called me. She said, “Sir, you made a mistake in the passport application. You wrote her date of birth as 4/20/1959.” I laughed to myself. I explained why it would perhaps take me a while to learn to write 4/20/1998.
Not only is April 20th my birthday and my daughter’s birthday, but my grandson, Mohammed, was supposed to have the same birthday, but he did not. Mohammed was supposed to be born on April 20th, 2019, but he opted to be born a week later, on April 27th.
So, you see how April is such a special month, in our family.
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