The Gift of Living Forward

Karen Grosz remembers a man in the Phoenix neighborhood where she and Paul, her husband, once spent a winter as snowbirds: two and a half hours a day in his garage, television humming, just watching people walk past. Any longer upset the homeowners' association. "And that was his purpose every day," Grosz says. "Just to sit and watch people go by."

She's careful not to turn the man in the garage into a cautionary tale. Maybe that really was his contentment, and for some people a quiet chair is exactly the point. What she noticed that winter was something else: how many neighbors seemed uneasy at the thought that their late

r years had simply been chosen for them, drifting into being the person in the garage, or the chair, unsettled by the blank space where work used to sit. Others did the opposite, creating hiking clubs, joining knitting groups, finding new people to belong to. "The people who weren't doing it well were unhappy and sitting in little boxes," she says. "I just don't want to see anybody sit." The difference, she believes, isn't how busy someone is. It's whether they chose the life they're living, or fell into it, afraid of losing purpose they never named.

The question of choosing between those two versions of retirement became the seed of her newest book, What's Next? Retirement! The Art of Living Forward, written at her kitchen table here in Billings, turning over the same question she now asks people at the grocery store, or across from them at coffee: "What's next for you?" Grosz, a Billings author and speaker who founded the Nexters community for adults navigating retirement, has written seven books, but this one is personal: she wrote it so she and Paul could retire well together, rather than "kick one another under the table." Its six chapters trace an arc from "Rocket or Hammock?" to "Three Words," moving someone from merely curious about retirement to settled into it, guided by three words: discovery, contentment, and joy.

"I want people retiring to discover who they are and what they can do," she says. "I want them to have the contentment of decision, instead of the angst of 'I'm not doing enough' or 'I feel lost.' And then joy: the moments where everything in their world just clicks."

Grosz builds her case on more than sentiment. The book opens with a 2019 Journal of the American Medical Association study: adults who scored low on purpose faced more than double the mortality risk of those with strong purpose. Her takeaway is blunt: purpose has to work like a prescription. "People are so scared to retire because they don't know what they'll retire to," she says. "If you spend time thinking about it beforehand, that purpose becomes a prescription. And when you have a prescription, you have to do it."

Grosz calls that shift recalibration, not crisis. "Every day is going to be a Saturday" is the trap, she says: new retirees picture a great breakfast and a project daily, not realizing retirement is mostly Tuesdays. "You go through an arc, from initial enthusiasm, to 'oh dear,' to finally settling in. Without a plan, you get angry and make bad decisions." She compares it to learning to be a parent: not a finish line, but a new season.

That purpose doesn't have to be grand. One man on her website has a goal to shoot a million basketball shots, one at a time. Closer to home, her husband Paul, a reluctant mentor, teaches teenage boys to play Warhammer alongside their grandson, folding rulers included. "His purpose is sharing folding rulers with a new generation, and they get to teach him how to game," Grosz says. "That gives him a place to share his wisdom and gives the kids an adult they can talk to."

She's just as direct about the flip side of purpose: rest. Grosz keeps a hammock in her retirement plan, because so many retirees need explicit permission to stop. "We keep running with the 'I have to's' instead of the 'I get to's,'" she says. But she draws a clear line between resting and disappearing: there has to be a next waiting on the other side of the hammock. "You can sit in the hammock and read about your next. Just don't stay there."

None of that happens alone, which is why Grosz built Nexters, a free, low-cost community for people figuring out their own next. Retirees need to rebuild that circle, just as new parents once did. "Otherwise, you'll just go a little crazy."

And this work isn't only for retirees with resources to spare. Bring up someone retiring without much cushion, and Grosz doesn't hesitate: you are the resource. Her mother lived within two feet of her recliner and still found ways to give, hand-making small art pieces and delivering them by scooter to neighbors on their birthdays. "It cost pennies to share," Grosz says, "but that giving was so good for her, and so good for them."

What does she hope readers feel, not just learn, by the last page of her book? Grosz doesn't talk strategy. She talks about the electricity of graduating college, the whole future unwritten, and wanting retirement to feel like that. "I want them to feel that they're not alone," she says, "and that this can be just as exciting a time in their life as their career was. I get to retire."

That's really the whole pitch, and she isn't selling anything. Aging happens to all of us; getting old is a choice, and she isn't interested. It's less a line from her book than a standing dare to her neighbors, and now to you: not a five-year plan, not a bucket list, just one honest answer to the question she keeps asking herself. What's your next? Call the development office at 406-294-1588 to learn more.

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