Retirement – Retaining agency 

I grew up thinking agency was a place where you dropped off your dry cleaning. It’s much more than that. It’s a game changer word now, meaning your ability to control your own life, make decisions and choices, and shape the world around you. For older people, keeping our agency is like winning Lotto, to borrow a trendy image.

It’s obviously valued by the 90,000 of us over 70’s who are still in the work force, and a much larger number active as volunteers and non-paid carers. All ways of holding onto your agency.

But the odds of keeping that power are against us with rising costs of housing, travel, food prices, and health care. Agency costs money. What ought to be a basic human right is increasingly unaffordable. And the places that promise to protect your agency, like providers of private health insurance, investment brokers and retirement villages don’t reveal the price tag in their ads.

Not so well advertised are the range of services available to keep older people in their own homes. You need to dig to find them. Citizens’ Advice Bureau can help, in the places where they haven’t lost their funding. Work and Income offer good information online, for those who find visiting their local office with a security guard outside a bit daunting.

There are all sorts of targeted and means tested offerings, from gardening help to medical alarms; ways to keep you alive and well at home, and still in charge of your life.

Agency is a priceless gift. We celebrate it when we try to stay fit and healthy but it can disappear in a heartbeat. I find my role models in the community of people living with disabilities, who are determined to keep every possible ounce of control over their lives. The Paralympics inspire me more than the so called main event.

Like it or not, the scope of our agency seems to shrink with age. I can’t shape big events like I used to, but I’ve still got plenty of scope to make things happen on a much smaller scale.

My garden gets a lot more attention than it did 20 years ago. So do my chooks who now enjoy five star housing and pecking space.

I have time to offer advice to friends (not the chickens), on things they need to know, and some of them are grateful.
Receiving advice from older people is not as high in the Pākehā skill set, as it is for Māori. In their culture, the role of the elder is highly valued. In ours, it’s more often greeted with, “Why hasn’t he retired yet?” And the growing bulge in numbers of older Kiwi wins more critics than congratulations on making it this far.

Maybe we need a national rethink of how we can make better use of all that accumulated wisdom and untapped energy.