Heroic Retirement
Retirement is a major milestone in most of our lives, culminating many years of work life. Though retirement comes as reprieve, it’s also a time of anticipatory change. Monetary inflows turn into outflows. We find ourselves spending far more time at home than we used to. We wonder what we’re going to do in our “golden years” (other than watch Judge Judy).
But retirement is also a time for reminiscence and introspection. With increased leisure on our hands, we have time to watch the grass grow and reflect on the life we lived. Did our life turn out as we had expected (probably not)? Were we good enough husbands and fathers and friends and colleagues (probably so)? Did we accomplish the things we hoped we would (perhaps)?
But another question sometimes lingers as we reflect on our lives. How did we measure up to our heroes? Were we anything like those heroic figures that stirred our youthful imaginations — King Arthur, Robin Hood, Zorro, d’Artagnan, Superman, Aragorn, James Bond, Luke Skywalker? And what about those real-life heroes we admired — Eliot Ness, Audie Murphy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. How did we do?
Joseph Campbell, in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (and discussed by him at length in the Bill Moyers special The Power of Myth), describes a common pattern of hero stories that pervades world mythologies:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Chances are our lives did not fit Campbell’s heroic pattern. We never left the world of common day. We did not face fabulous forces, much less win a decisive victory. Boons for our fellow man? What boons? Our lives were rather mundane.
Most of us lived lives patterned after a different sort of heroes — Dale McKussic, Ivan Locke, and Hercules heroes. “Excuse me?”, you say, “I know something about that Hercules guy, but who are McKussic and Locke … and what do they have to do with heroes?”.
Dale ‘Mac’ McKussic, played by Mel Gibson in the movie Tequila Sunrise (1988), is a “retired” drug dealer. A drug dealer wouldn’t normally qualify as anyone’s hero. But Mac had been putting his drug-dealing days behind him and was struggling to start a legitimate business and do right by his son, an ex-wife, a love interest (Jo Ann Vallenari, alluringly played by Michelle Pfeiffer), a high-school buddy now a cop (Kurt Russell), and even a former colleague in the trade (Raul Julia).
In one of the key turning points of the movie, Jo Ann asks Mac why he hadn’t gotten out of the drug business. When she inquires as to why he didn’t “just say no”, his response is:
“Nobody wants me to quit. Cops want to bust me. The Colombians want my connections. My wife wants my money. Her lawyer agrees. Mine likes getting paid to argue with them. Nobody wants me to quit.”
Those lines are delivered with a sense of resignation with which many of us can identify — no complaints, no anger, just acceptance. Mac was simply dealing with his reality. I suspect many of us have felt that way at some point in our lives — those times when we wanted to quit but nobody wanted us to. We didn’t quit.
The entire movie Locke (2013) takes place at night inside Ivan Locke’s (played by Tom Hardy) BMW automobile. The only character we see during the entire film is Locke himself as he leaves Birmingham for London, England the night before a large concrete pour he was to supervise the next day. Locke has decided to leave (accepting the consequences of being fired) to be with a woman with whom he had a one-night stand, and who had called to tell him that she was prematurely giving birth to their child.
During a series of phone calls from the car, Locke reassures the mother of his child, confesses infidelity to his wife, and talks to his son. Even after being fired, he coaches his former assistant to prepare for the next day’s pour. Locke is a compelling story of a man who takes personal responsibility by trying, as best he can, to set things right. Not a superhero story, just a committed hero story.
Hercules is a hero of the McKussic and Locke variety, more so than the mythological heroes of the Campbell type. Hercules didn’t choose a life of heroic adventure. He is not remembered for the Twelve Heroic Deeds of Hercules. He is remembered for the Twelve Labors of Hercules. The Hercules story is one of betrayal and suffering by a man committed to his labors, even though compelled as a fallacious act of atonement. Hercules was the ancient Greeks’ most beloved Hero.
To the Greeks, Hercules is known as Heracles, meaning “Glory of Hera”, a rather ironic name given that the goddess Hera was responsible for his suffering. Hera was the wife of Zeus, king of the Greek gods, and goddess of marriage and the commitment that comes with wife. Zeus was the archetypal husband with a wandering eye. He had numerous affairs and dalliances, fathering many children (both mortal and immortal) along the way.
Hera is the understandably jealous and vindictive transgressed wife. But her jealous rages are not directed at Zeus. They’re directed at the various paramours and children that Zeus fathers, including poor Heracles. Heracles’ birth was a consequence of Zeus’ affair with a mortal woman (in a love-making session that purportedly lasted 36 hours!). Even while he was still an infant, Hera abused poor Heracles, cheating him out of his birthright and sending two poisonous snakes to kill he and his brother.
Though Heracles grows up to marry a king’s daughter, Hera continues to seethe. She induces a fit of insanity in Heracles that causes him to kill his beloved wife and children. Realizing what he has done, he seeks atonement from Eurystheus, who, as a consequence of Hera’s vindictive intervention, sat in Heracles’ place as king of Perseus’ empire. It is Eurystheus who assigns Heracles his Twelve Labors. They’re not ordinary labors.
Even after his Twelve Labors were complete, Heracles continued to suffer. He was enslaved to a second wife. And a third wife gruesomely tortured him with a poisoned shirt. To end his agony, Heracles finally chooses a voluntary death in a funeral pyre that burns away his mortal parts so that only his immortal self remains. As a full god, he then joins the others on Mount Olympus and marries the goddess daughter of Zeus and Hera.
Even those of us who lived good lives undoubtedly faced a few onerous labors along the way. Many will recognize Hercules’ metaphorical labors among our own — finishing important tasks only to find that two more have been assigned in their stead; cleaning up thirty years’ worth of somebody else’s shit; finding ourselves at the gates of hell. We didn’t live the heroic lives of Robin Hood or Eliot Ness. We lived the committed lives of Mac McKussic, Ivan Locke, and Hercules.
In the end Mac McKussic got the girl, Ivan Locke arrived in London in time to be with the mother of his child, and Hercules took his place among the gods. These are stories that applaud dutiful commitments. Our dutiful commitments may have felt like a grind at times, but in the reminiscences of our retirement years, they give us solace as a job well done.
Retirement also gives us the time and opportunity to reflect on the commitments of the ancestors who preceded us. After we’ve finished Judge Judy, we should take time to thank them … and then call our kids to thank them for taking such good care of our grandchildren.
