I think the feelings about not working have gone on all the time and it's only since I reached retirement age I've stopped feeling guilty that I wasn't going to work. But certainly what predominated with me was always a sense of loss, tremendous sense of loss.
I was very busy at work. I probably was reaching the top of my career, I was hoping to apply for a Chair at the University, but I'd certainly got to a position in my profession where I was recognised as having made a good contribution and had quite a lot to offer. I was not only helping head of the core, social course, training social workers, professional social workers and probation officers, I was director of a research project working with families, testing out different ways of working with families, including family therapy and various traditional social work methods.
And I was about to write up that research. I'd made some films, they'd been well received. I was lecturing at [university] and [university] on post professional courses. And I think there was hardly a University I wasn't lecturing at some point on the work that I was doing. And all this was suddenly taken away from me. Although I'd been struggling for some time I'd still managed to keep things going.
But I'd worked, in spite of the difficulties, with no thought that the, these things will be taken away from me. It was just like working with some kind of handicap. But then, when they were taken away, it was suddenly, absolutely suddenly, and no prospect of getting back in because the diagnosis was slow, the treatment seemed non-existent and when the treatment did come it was, it didn't seem to me to have been effective.
I know I felt this tremendous anger that I had this taken away from me. I had this tremendous sense of loss. And I had this tremendous feeling of guilt that I wasn't going off to work each day. And not only the loss, lose the work but apart from two or three colleagues, who I'm still in touch with, I lost a whole range of relationships right throughout the country. And this was difficult to cope with.
And until a couple of years ago when I reached retirement age, this was extremely difficult to cope with. But now I'm reconciled to it because I've reached an age when it's legitimate to have retired. |
