In retirement, a complicated mix of mourning and celebrating

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The first few years in retirement are often the most difficult. But they also can set the stage for how you’ll fill the years ahead—both financially and psychologically.

Stephen Kreider Yoder, 68, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, 69, in retirement in late 2022. In this monthly Retirement Rookies column, they chronicle some of the issues they are dealing with early in retirement. I walked into a room of welcoming elderly faces near Atlanta in September and joined the mood of celebration—and mourning.

It was my 50th high-school reunion, and we old friends were there to celebrate the remarkable few years we spent together more than five decades ago in a boarding school halfway around the world. And we were there to mourn our classmates who didn’t make it to 2025. “It seems like we’re doing a lot of this since we retired," I told Karen on the phone from the airport on my way home, “this celebrating and mourning." We did both while we were working, but the tug between gain and loss has grown as retirement makes us more mindful of what we have left.

I still mourn my career. Oh, I was joyous the morning after I quit, when Karen and I left the garage on our tandem bike to pedal to Florida from our home in San Francisco. When we got home three months later, though, I was surprised by the waves of wistfulness about what I wasn’t coming back to—the sense of accomplishment and purpose and identity, the newsroom camaraderie, the paycheck.