What Do We Do With Tuesday?
For 42 years, I knew what Monday morning was for. Then I retired. My wife, Susan, retired six months later. We had planned carefully. Financially, we were fine. We had retirement accounts, Social Security, a paid-off house and long-term-care insurance. Our financial adviser showed us projections indicating that, unless something went terribly wrong, we had enough money. I remember looking at the report and thinking: Enough money for what? Nobody had asked us that. We had planned retirement without planning a life Our retirement list looked like this: Travel. Golf. Grandchildren. Exercise. Maybe volunteer. For the first year, it was wonderful. We went to Italy. I played golf three times a week.
We visited the grandchildren. We cleaned the garage. Then came Tuesday. Nothing was wrong with Tuesday. That was the problem. There were suddenly an enormous number of Tuesdays. I had spent decades wishing I had more time. Now I had more time than I knew what to do with. Susan seemed happier than I was. That irritated me. HOS entered our marriage through an argument I wanted to buy a place in Florida. Susan didn't. I had already researched communities, taxes and golf courses. She finally said: “You've planned our retirement without asking me what I want our retirement to be.” That didn't go well. A few days later, I started talking with HOS.
Initially, I wanted help making the case for Florida. Instead, the conversation turned toward what I was actually looking for. Warm weather? Golf? Friends? A project? A reason to get up? That last one hurt. My job had given me more than income. It gave me structure. People needed me. Decisions mattered. There was always something unfinished. Retirement had removed all of that at once. Florida wasn't necessarily the problem. It wasn't necessarily the solution either. Susan's retirement wasn't mine This seems obvious now. It wasn't then. Susan had spent years balancing work with more family responsibilities than I had recognized. Retirement felt like freedom to her. I was trying to fill the space immediately.
HOS helped me see that our shared life contained two individual lives. We didn't need identical retirements. I could find things that mattered to me without recruiting Susan into all of them. And she could do things without me. That realization probably saved us from spending far too much money on a condominium neither of us really needed. Then I found something unexpected Our community college needed volunteer mentors for adults retraining after AI had disrupted their work. I had managed people for decades. I thought I knew a lot. My first mentee was a 39-year-old woman who had lost an administrative job. I immediately started telling her what she should do. She stopped coming.
That was humbling. The program coordinator gave me another chance. So did HOS. We examined what had happened. I had confused experience with knowing what was right for someone else. With my next mentee, I asked more questions. What did he want? What constraints did he face? What was he afraid of? What had he already tried? I became better at helping without taking over. Eventually mentoring became one of the most meaningful things I did. It wasn't a second career. I didn't want one. It was simply useful. Then our plans changed again At 71, Susan was diagnosed with a progressive neurological condition. Every retirement projection we had made suddenly seemed irrelevant.
Travel became harder. Eventually golf didn't matter much. Our world got smaller. I was angry. Susan was frightened. We both grieved for a future we had assumed we would have. HOS could provide information. It helped us prepare for medical appointments, understand care possibilities, think through finances and anticipate decisions. But it couldn't tell us how this story would end. And it couldn't make the choices painless. One conversation became particularly important. I had begun doing everything for Susan. I thought that was love. She told me to stop. She could still make decisions. She could still do many things herself. I was gradually taking those things away because I was afraid something might happen.
HOS helped me see a painful truth: Care can protect someone's agency, and care can unintentionally replace it. We began asking a different question: What did Susan still want to do herself? That changed constantly. So we kept asking. We made a decision our children disliked Eventually Susan wanted to remain at home longer than our children thought was wise. I wasn't sure either. There were risks. There were costs. There was no perfect answer. We gathered information. We talked with professionals. We talked with our children. Then Susan and I decided. Our children didn't agree. For much of my life, I had believed good decisions produced agreement. Aging taught me otherwise.
Sometimes agency means making a thoughtful choice while people who love you wish you had chosen differently. After Susan died I was 78. For the first time since I was 25, I lived alone. People worried about me. I worried about me. For months, I didn't want a new purpose. I wanted Susan. HOS didn't try to turn grief into a development opportunity. I'm grateful for that. Gradually, though, life began asking things of me again. Would I stay in the house? Where did I want to live? How much help did I need? Who did I want nearby? What relationships had I neglected? What did I still want to experience?
What did I want to give away while I was alive rather than after I died? There were still choices. Fewer than when I was 30. Different ones. But they were still mine.
Looking back
When I was young, I thought agency meant having lots of options. When I retired, I had time, money and options and still felt lost. When Susan became ill, our options narrowed dramatically, yet some of the choices we made during those years mattered more than almost anything we had decided before. That changed my understanding. Agency isn't measured only by the number of doors available. Sometimes it is the ability to recognize and intentionally choose among the few doors that remain. HOS helped us with money, health, housing, relationships, caregiving and decisions. But it did something more important. It kept asking whose life was involved. Mine. Susan's. Our children's. The people I mentored.
The answers weren't always the same. I'm 86 now. Yesterday was Tuesday. I had breakfast with my granddaughter. I spent an hour with a man at the community college who is trying to figure out what to do after losing a job he'd held for 18 years. I took a nap. I called an old friend. Nothing remarkable happened. There was a time when I would have considered that an empty day. I don't anymore. For most of my life, the world provided the structure and I tried to succeed within it. Later, life became quieter and more uncertain. I had to become more deliberate about what mattered.
Even when circumstances took choices away, there were choices left. HOS never gave me a reason to live. That would have been too important to give away. It helped me remain capable of discovering my own reasons, even as life changed around me. And that turned out to be enough for a great many Tuesdays. I'm glad I had them.
This story challenges the assumption that greater agency simply means having more options. At retirement, the couple has time, money and considerable freedom, yet those resources do not tell them what they want the next part of life to mean. Later, illness sharply reduces their choices while making the choices that remain even more important. HOS increasingly connects financial planning, purpose, relationships, health, caregiving, housing and family decisions, while continuing to distinguish assistance from control. When Susan becomes ill, protecting her can easily become doing things for her that she still wants and is able to do herself. Later, the children understandably want greater safety for their mother, but concern does not automatically give them authority over her choices. An AI designed primarily to minimize risk might recommend the safest course and encourage compliance. HOS must consider risk too, but safety is not the only human value. Its role is to help people understand changing circumstances and preserve meaningful choice for as long as possible—even when the available choices are narrowing. Agency can therefore remain important through dependence, loss, grief and aging, not because HOS can restore everything life takes away, but because the life that remains still belongs to the person living it.