Clearing out my office – and my life 8

Helen, Heading Out (5)

A series of articles about recreating identity after an all-consuming career

By Helen
University Professor of English and Women’s Studies
Retired August 2012 at age 63

When I took an unanticipated buyout retirement package in 2012, I was on sabbatical, with expectations until then of teaching particular courses and continuing particular research projects in the fall. My sabbatical ended and, a month later, my job ended. In 2011, I had left my office, my colleagues, and my students, expecting to be back in a year. Instead I returned only to clear out my office. So I missed that winding-down final year, in which I would have known that the end was coming, that I was teaching my last courses or last class. By contrast, I had a colleague who stood on his desk and belted out the Soviet Internationale for the last class he would ever teach. The conclusion of my professional life felt a little tattered, unresolved.

My department has a tradition of combining a September welcoming party for new graduate students with a farewell to retirees (I told you we had full schedules). So I didn’t just vanish from sight. The retirement party provided some sense of an ending. The Chair teared up over the departure of my colleague and me. A friend and fellow faculty member told sometimes apocryphal stories (“bra-burning in front of the US Embassy and of course the famous incident in the women’s washroom in the English department”) and gave surprising and touchingly generous praise. Two glasses of wine to the wind, I was able to applaud the department’s strengths and pass on my last advice to the new and continuing graduate students. I needed that formal moment of closure a lot – even that much abused term “closure” feels right here – and found it anything but a mere formality.

Then I went on to clear out my office. But not immediately. Buyouts were intended to reduce budgets, and so there was no replacement hiring and no pressure to vacate my office. That was sad in itself, for the University and the students. I had several months in which to ease myself out of the building.

Farewell to books

“Books do furnish a room,” to borrow a phrase from Anthony Powell. And they furnish academics’ rooms more than most. Students’ reactions to office walls covered in books are often an awed query, “Have you read all of these?” To which the accurate answer would be “Ten times this many.” My partner and I had already been though two purgings of our book collections. In 2007, in preparation for a move to our new smaller house, we’d donated box loads to the University library, spread out piles on blankets at yard sales, given books to friends, taken scores to a Toronto book dealer. Moved in, we still had hundreds more than the bookshelves could manage. Selecting more to sacrifice was too painful. We had to line up book spines in row after row on the living room floor and then choose only the most irresistible. Choosing which to discard was too fraught. Impossible. I tried not to look too closely at those remaining behind, unchosen. At that stage, because it was my field of study, I’d kept my Canadian literature collection intact, relieving some of the struggle.

Then, a year before my retirement, when my partner retired, we’d cleared out his office, an easier task, because his Native literature and history collection was mostly at home. But my US, British, and other world literatures collections had spilled over onto several long shelves in his office. In culling that down to two feet of books, I reassured myself that I could just use libraries for rereading old favourites.

Now I started emptying my office bookshelves by stacking rows of anthologies and paperbacks, knee high, outside my office for students to carry off. My collection of feminist anthologies and theory I donated to the Women’s Resource Centre. Although I had collected Canadian first editions, reading catalogues and keeping an eye open for rare copies, I’d already learned that the market for most books had been undercut by the Internet. Still, I obsessively identified my valuable copies, placing green ribbons in signed editions, red ones in those personally inscribed. I had a Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence that according to the book seller’s pencilled pricing thirty years earlier had cost $200. I had editions of Sinclair Ross’s novels made valuable because he’d signed them, a rare event, when I visited him in a Vancouver nursing home. The Toronto bookseller came to cherry pick the collection and, after I’d held back the few boxes of books I loved most, mainly by women writers, a local bookseller took everything else. The Toronto dealer paid $1000 for two boxfuls, the Guelph one $2000 for about thirty boxes. In retrospect, I think I should have given all these books to my junior colleague in Canadian literature.

Two pounds of paper clips

Painful though the book parting was, the more difficult process was still ahead. Easy enough to clear out my desk, packing up the kettle, the extra pair of pantyhose, the crackers, the letter opener, the stapler. A matter of moments to throw out old poetry recordings for classes and my personal list of essential work phone numbers. Letterhead and office supplies I left for the next occupant of the office, as an earlier scholar had left hers for me. Then on to tackle my files, winnowed already by moves from previous universities. Out with thirty years of student evaluations of my teaching, rough copies of dissertations I’d found pertinent enough to keep, research materials, department minutes, and university policies. Most anything to do with the administrative side of my job I took distinct satisfaction in dumping. Some documents – hiring files, provincial assessments for graduate student scholarships, old grades (I kept the recent years for letters of reference) – had to go to the Dean’s office for shredding. When I’d filled to overflowing the large recycling bin in the hall, office staff arranged for my own shoulder-high bin for paper. And I filled that too.

At home, over the years, because my partner was a nationally known author, I’d been maintaining records of his correspondence and drafts of his novels, for some future library archives. So dismantling the record of my own life felt counterintuitive. And unsettling.

As I discarded files, I kept stopping to peruse the history of my academic life. Although I’d earlier culled most of my notes from my student days, for instance, I still had those from classes taught by Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, thinking some scholar might find them revealing. I discovered too my old undergraduate essays, reminding me of what I’d forgotten, that we handed in these handwritten (!) efforts folded in half lengthwise. Professional letters traced long-ago efforts, advocacy, political skirmishes, and appreciations, sometimes names, moments, and work I’d lost sight of. I kept only a few pages on major university struggles, sending documents on the founding of Women’s Studies at the University of Lethbridge, for instance, to the current Chair of that department, whom I’d met recently. My file on the recent destruction of University of Guelph’s Women’s Studies program, and efforts to stop that, I could only pack sadly into one of the two boxes of materials I would keep, having no archive in which to deposit it. As I tossed away the records of many years, I stripped off paper clips and saved good folders. In fact, having just weighed them, I can report that I salvaged over two pounds of paper clips alone.

Death of a Workaholic

Along with my file of letters from Canadian authors, I saved my essential selection of theoretical definitions and quotations, and some information on Native literature. Just in case. And the reviews and articles I’d compiled on my partner’s writing. But my notes and resource materials on books I’d taught – hundreds of novels, dramas, collections of poetry; Canadian, American, First Nations, and other – went into the recycling bin. So did all my teaching files, dozens of courses, years of book orders, course descriptions, schedules, essay topics, and exam questions. Throwing it all away felt rash, ill-advised. It felt final, in a way that resigning somehow hadn’t, as though I were tearing down my scaffolding. Freeing too, I suppose.

I could discard my annual professional activities reports, telling myself that much there was preserved in my resumé. Notes for my published articles and books could go, since the end results at least were in print. Even so, other observations would be gone for good. Scrapping my reviews of other scholars’ journal submissions, conference and grant proposals, and book manuscripts was harder. As was jettisoning my assessments as external examiner on dissertations or as referee on tenure and promotion of colleagues at other universities. This already invisible work had no future life, once I tossed it. Browsing through the manuscripts, I was struck by the quality of the analysis that came from immersing myself in the texts, the informed articulateness that I could hardly believe I’d produced. So one startling and rewarding result of emptying my office was a reintroduction to my strengths as an academic, both the generosity and the intelligence of my past work.

Unfortunately, the metres of files to sort left little time for extended rereading (of my early writing as a student – and the chance, as a prof myself now, to consider the comments my own instructors had made–of my interactions with editors and fellow scholars, of my struggles to improve the institutions I’d inhabited, of my unpublished insights). Going through old correspondence and records was like flipping through old appointment calendars, being reminded of entire stories and relationships. I knew that once bundled home and stored in the attic, such papers were unlikely to inspire re-examination. And they were meaningful exclusively for me. Three years later, while not doubting the wisdom of my ruthlessness, I still feel uneasy about certain losses, mourn the destruction of my history, wish the details of my life mattered enough for their preservation. Yet I have dozens of publications on the record for future scholars. And thousands of students carry my imprint to lesser or greater degrees, in ways I’ll never know.

Attending my own wake

Recently I came up with a reflection about dying: it is not easy saying goodbye to yourself. Now it occurs to me that the same applies to retirement. Moving on from a lifelong profession is saying goodbye to yourself, at least to one important and longstanding version of yourself. Clearing out my office did feel painfully like presiding over my own wake. Alone. My reaction was unexpected, one of the first surprises of retirement.

Saying goodbye to myself

Finally, once my office was empty, I had to hand in my keys. Four of the eight keys on my keychain I handed over to the department secretary, as I said goodbye. I’d hoped to slip the key to the xerox/mail room to a colleague who’d bemoaned not having one, but institutional records apparently extend back into the mists of time. I could no longer enter my office or unlock my office building after hours. I was done.

And I’ll admit, I’m crying as I write this. That’s another surprise.