My boss resigned. He was 20 years my junior. I valued his experience in the sector, I relied on his mojo to jolt me into action, I enjoyed our work partnership.
He named an interim successor, a further 10 years my junior — a cumulative 30-plus years younger than me. He works hard, delivers. Reporting to him is akin to my current boss reporting to a 10-year-old.
Age polarizes us. He is younger to my older, single to my married with adult children and grandchild, starting out to my longer marathon. But he is the future — as Robert Frost wrote in What Fifty Said: “Now when I am old my teachers are the young, what can't be molded must be cracked and sprung."
I get it. I am the oldest employee. I’ve told myself I stay young working with young people. I’ve wondered sometimes how my co-workers feel working with someone their mother’s age. I remember, in my 30s, making time for Bob — the oldest employee, who would shuffle into my office wearing a three-piece suit or trench coat and a signature cheap fedora covering thinning cotton-white tufts of hair. He would take a seat, coffee in hand, and give me no escape from a long-winded chat about the insurance business or something he’d read in the Lancet. To my mid-30s self, he might have been 80, but he was likely mid-60s, poor health and lack of exercise giving his avuncular persona a wizened lacquering. His wife had passed away. He had time on his hands. I made time for him because that’s what you did.
When I was 30, climbing the corporate ladder, I was fierce. I took on the President role of a volunteer organization, gave birth to my daughter, and swiftly returned to work after four months to show my bold career stripes. I hired older women. I remember one — an accomplished writer, tasked with our investor newsletter. To my 30, she might have been in her 60s, but was likely mid-40s. I let her go in favour of a younger, full-time hire. I regretted it quickly. He was playing the organization — freelancing while on my payroll. Over the years I’d occasionally see his byline and shake my head. I had wanted the filly, not the mare. I was wrong.
I have never wanted to believe my age would signal ready for pasture, just as I never wanted to believe being a woman meant a glass ceiling. I went back to school in my early 40s for an MBA. I extended my shelf life. I became a proud mare, mentoring younger foals I’ve watched go on to flourish.
And yet.
The other afternoon, I said something at work — I don’t even remember what — and a colleague responded without missing a beat: Oh, my father says that all the time. Her eyes didn’t bulge in malice. It was reflex. Casual. The kind of thing you say about someone who exists in a different category, someone you’re fond of but don’t quite see as a peer.
I smiled. I might have laughed it off. I don’t know what else I did. But when I return to that moment, I realize it’s likely one of many. Because that’s the thing about aging in the workplace — it doesn’t announce itself with a memo. It arrives in a colleague’s offhand remark, in the slight recalibration of how someone looks at you, in the growing awareness that your departure simply becomes an opportunity.
Have I become Bob? Not his fedora or his shuffling gait. But his role — the elder in the room that younger people make time for out of decency, while quietly planning around?
I stay because I still have things to say. I stay because a blank canvas terrifies me now in a way it never did at 30. I stay because I’m not ready to turn the page and stare at emptiness I’d have to fill on my own terms. What I’m less sure of is whether staying is an act of indecision or an act of fear — and when I’ll accept my next act.
Frost concluded, “I go to school to youth to learn the future.” I know that there is no pathway to youth from my sixties—not from school, not from work, not from poetry. I am not sure I will ever make peace with aging. It is its own job and one I am learning to navigate every single day.
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