She Wasn't Happy About Retirement. But The Alternative Seemed Crazy

I wasn’t really thrilled with retirement. I wasn’t thrilled about coming out of it either

- Marilyn Delisle Strube

I thought retirement would be a sort of nonstop holiday. But here I was, Friday night, dozing through a rerun of M*A*S*H* with my husband, Joe, the end of another uneventful day. An hour until bedtime. Sleep was usually the thing I looked forward to most.

My phone pinged, jolting me awake. A text from the principal of Trinity Lutheran School: “Good news! Jim’s getting his liver transplant!”

“Awesome!” I typed back. I’d done some occasional subbing for Jim Chatel’s seventh-eighth-grade class that past fall and winter when complications from a rare liver disease sidelined him. Ever since I’d kept him and his young family in my prayers.

The principal asked, “Could you take over his class till the end of the year?”

Wait. What? It was late March. There were two solid months of classes left! Maybe I wasn’t thrilled with retirement, but no way was I going back to work full-time. Even temporarily.

Before I could tell him I wasn’t interested, he’d already sent me an e-mail outlining the job. I studied the colorcoded schedule. Two other teachers would handle math and social studies. I’d teach everything else: language arts, reading literature, science, and vocabulary. He added, “If you could squeeze in a couple of art lessons each week that would be great too.”

I reminded him I knew nothing about teaching junior high. I’d taught English composition at a university. That seemed a lifetime ago before my husband was in a bike accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury, forcing me to retire to care for him. Joe was fully recovered now, but still, I was used to teaching college students, not middle schoolers. Science? Art? I wouldn’t even know where to begin.