A non-planner on the importance of planning.

I just saw a Victorian children’s book at the antique store. It said, “Slovenly Kate,” and was a cautionary tale against being a messy young lady, and it reached up through a hundred years of history and smacked me right in the ego. Because I’m not tidy, I’m not a planner, and my favorite thing is to live in the moment and not worry about the future.

My mother can attest to this; around the age of fifteen she gave up making me clean my room and brought in bare-bones requirements of putting all the dirty laundry in one place and making my bed. The piles of books, papers, and beautiful stones stayed, and so did my scattered creativity.

I would have argued at one point in my life that prioritizing planning for retirement at my age - whether I was in my twenties or thirties - was a Type A sort of thing to do, and that there was lots of time; hurrying to make sure I was saving a lot or finding ways to compound what I had seemed like a controlling emphasis on the future and a lot of time away from what I truly loved.

Then, my Dad got sick. Really sick. He had battled non-Hodgkins lymphoma for ten years and was in remission, and the fact that he had spent his retirement and all available lines of credit on staying afloat during that decade didn’t matter, because he was alive. But six years ago he was attacked by a new assailant, glioblastoma, had other plans, and he passed away three months after his diagnosis.

My mother, who had a Master’s in Social Work but had not worked since I was a child, had massive debt, a house she could not upkeep, and her drenching grief to contend with while she scrambled for a way to eat and a place to live.

She found a minimum wage job at the jewelry counter at TJ Maxx, but that didn’t touch the bills. Her Social Work certifications outdated, she couldn’t get any work in the field and took overnight shifts as a CNA, breaking her small body against the weight of her often-unruly patients. Still, the house had to be sold, the bills sent to collections; even her own grave plot she had pre-purchased she sold to keep herself alive.

The good news is that she was able to buy it back. The good news is that while she fought to stay alive through her trauma and grief, she found out a lot about herself. The good news is, my siblings and I can all open our homes to her, and she lives with my brother now across the country. She is safe and functioning.

But I can’t help but wonder, if there was a plan in place that accounted for life’s brutal curveballs, if she had known what situation she and Dad were in at the time of his illness, if she had some independence and goals going into all of this, if those choices would have had to been made for her. Or whether she could have set a path that she would not have to fight for every day, but one that would fight for her.

And now as I look at my future, with retirement seeming so far away as to be another life, I am gentle with myself about where I am but firm that I will (and am) taking steps, making choices, to offer as much of that precious thing as I can to my family and future self (creative, and scattered though she be): peace of mind. - Kate Madore