Two Pensions, Two Failures
We’ve folded every version of family financial obligation into one word, “black tax,” and the word does us a disservice. There’s a difference between the mother stretching a broken pension and the uncle who’s learned that guilt is a renewable resource. One is a debt we’re honoured to repay. The other is a subscription we never agreed to and are too afraid to cancel. Calling both of them “culture” lets the second one hide behind the first.
My mother’s pension is too small to get her through a month. My father’s is bigger, and it barely matters.
Between them, I’ve come to understand something no financial advisor ever put plainly enough: retirement doesn’t fail one way. It fails at least two, and most families are only ever one of them away from the other.
Hers
is the failure we talk about, when we talk about this at all. Thirty-plus years in government service, a fixed number waiting at the end of it, and a modern month that costs more than that number was ever built to survive. She didn’t mismanage anything. She trusted a plan that was designed for a shorter, cheaper old age, and then kept living, which, it turns out, is the one variable nobody priced in.
His
is the failure nobody warns you about, because it isn’t about the number at all. My father’s pension is genuinely better than my mother’s. And still, most of it disappears into medication; the tail end of a twenty-plus-year fight with diabetes that arrived, right as he stepped into retirement, as a muscle degenerative disorder. He built a house. A real one, the kind you build imagining a particular version of the years ahead: a certain porch, a certain way of moving through your own rooms. Then the rooms had to change. Wider doors. Ramps where there used to be steps. A retirement plan can survive inflation if it’s generous enough. It cannot always survive the body changing its own terms without warning.
This is the part I don’t think we say out loud often enough: we plan for our parents’ retirement as if their health is the one constant. We budget around the pension, the house, the land, and quietly assume the body will hold steady enough for all of it to matter the way it was intended to. My parents are proof that it doesn’t have to. One of them ran out of money. The other has the money, and ran out of the version of life the money was meant to fund.
When we build our house, the lower floor will be designed for a person of determination; wider doorways, no unnecessary steps, room for a wheelchair to move without negotiation. Not because I expect to need it. Because I watched my father need it, at sixty, without warning, and I’m no longer willing to build a home that only works for one version of the future.
Here is the part that still catches in my throat when I let myself sit in it. At my wedding, my father didn’t walk me down the aisle. I wheeled him down it instead — my mother holding my gown’s tail, my father holding my bouquet, present in every way that mattered, just not the way either of us once pictured. I don’t think of that day as the day illness took something from us. I think of it as the day I understood, finally and completely, that dignity was never in the walking. It was in him being there at all, still proud, still giving me away in the only form his body would allow.
Dignity was never in the walking. It was in him being there at all.
That’s the whole argument, really, distilled into one afternoon. We build our plans — financial and otherwise — around the version of our parents we’re used to. The version that walks, that saves enough, that stays the same shape. Retirement, illness, time — none of them promise to cooperate with that picture. The only real plan is the one flexible enough to hold both versions: the parent who was, and the parent who now is, still worth building a home, an aisle, a whole life around.
This is Part [1] of a three-part series on retirement, dignity, and the generation quietly holding it together.
Rael.