The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - This is Not Your Grandparents' Retirement

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

After a long, successful career in journalism, Cathrin Bradbury was at loose ends, post-retirement. How should she spend her time and still-abundant energy? In her latest book, "This Way Up: Old Friends, New Love, and a Map for the Road Ahead," she charts a fresh direction, including a new identity as a writer, grandmother, and freer spirit.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. After a long successful career in journalism, Catherine Bradbury was at loose ends post-retirement. How should she spend her time and still abundant energy? In her latest book, This Way Up, Old Friends, New Love, and A Map for the road ahead, she charts a fresh direction, including a new identity as a writer, grandmother, and freer spirit.

And Catherine Bradbury joins us now for more. Great to have you here. Thank you, thank you so much. We've been in concentric circles for a very long time. Yeah, like parallel tracks, concentric circles. And barely know each other. Yeah. So good to have you here.

Well, I know you better because you're Steve Bacon. Is that a fact? Yes, it is. Why wasn't I told? I get to watch you. Oh, okay. My first question is a little weird, which is, what's the story with your first name? How come you can't spell Catherine properly?

Somebody said to me once, your mother must have been a very efficient woman. So it's C-A-T-H-R-I-N, no E's. And I will say this to any parents who are naming their children, don't mess with the spelling. Like everywhere you go, people put Catherine with an E and I'll say, well, there's no E. And also even worse is my parents followed the Irish tradition of making my middle name first. So I'm Mary Catherine. So that's not fun on passports, doctor's offices. You know, I'm sitting there and I'd be like, Mary, Mary, Mary.

Like, oh, yeah, that would be me. You are old enough to change it to the regular spelling if you want to. Well, at this point, it's too late. No, it's too late. I've come to like it. Okay. Let's get into this.

What were your initial plans as you thought about retirement from your journalistic career? I had two ideas and the cognitive dissonance of these two ideas still astonishes me because I stayed on this parallel track with both of them. One was to go back to my 17-year-old self and travel the world. I was free. I was free. I would set out. I would do... I'd go to Greece. I'd go to Ireland. I'd go anywhere I wanted to for as long as I wanted to. And I really believed that. And the other was I was going to go into a hut which I was building in my backyard and write. And I held both of these ideas right up until the minute that I was in a retirement, I had a retirement party in my backyard.

And everybody came from my career. I worked at the Globe and Metro and the Star and McClain's and CBC. And I'm standing on my back stoop. And in the back of the yard, there's the new hut I've built. But the whole time I'm talking, I'm kind of imagining I'm Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings.

I'm going to put on a ring, and off I go on my adventure. And the next day, I walked the 33 steps to my hut, and that's what I've done pretty much ever since. So I chose the stay where I am option. But I'll tell you what, you can dig very deep by staying still. You can have a lot of adventures. You don't have to go out and travel to have an adventure. There's a lot to be discovered just by digging in.

Maybe you should describe the hut, because we've got Bilbo Baggins' hut in our head right now, and I suspect it's not three feet tall. So it's 10 by 10. It was a shed, a garden shed, falling down. And my nephew Sam is a carpenter. And I said, you know, I'd just like to turn into a hut. I like French doors here.

And I'd like a sloped roof here. And I'd like. And he said, Aunt Catherine, whatever you do, it's always going to be a garden shed. So I decided to order a prefab, 10 by 10, little hut. It's cute. It's really cute. It does have my French doors.

It does have the sloping roof. It's got windows that open onto the house. And it's in my garden. So there's something, you know, the room of one's own. Like, I kind of, I certainly have rooms in my house, but there's something special about going into this place that is mine and seeing what comes to me when I'm there. Does your brain literally transform

as you go into this different place? A little bit. A little bit. That sounds a bit woo-woo, but a little bit. I allow it to relax into doing nothing in there but writing, or sleeping, or doodling. What's the winter like out there? Too cold. But only one month it is heated it has a

heater so you know 25 below no but but otherwise it's good yeah do we call you grandma Katherine now or what is that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah my name is yeah yeah yeah yeah which is Spanish mean, different cultures use it. But my grandson is three. And yeah, you have grandkids, right? I do, yeah. They live a long way away, though. I rarely get to see them.

But yours lives where? He lives on the other side of my house. So there's the house. Beyond jealous. There's the path. There's the hut. And there's a fence. And I put a gate into the fence.

And so he can go from through that gate from his place to my place they rent an apartment in the house on the next street over. Do you know how jealous I am right now? It's really fantastic and I have to say here's the thing about the grandparent relationship we live in the lawless present like my job is not to say, you better put a jacket on before you go out, or you brush your teeth. I'm not setting the rules here. So his future is too vast,

and my future is too short for us to find ourselves in the future. So we just locate ourselves in the present. And there's something almost meditative about it. I'm not going to worry outside what we're doing right in that minute. It's kind of grounding. Well, that's not your job anyway, right? No. Yeah.

No, I'm not doing it. I've done it. I did it. Exactly. And they've done that. We did it. Got that t-shirt. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's do a quote from the book here, shall we? Optimism, an inherited condition my whole family suffers from. I long wished for an uncanny upbringing on a bleak moor. No such luck. We wake up happy. We're optimistic about getting old too, which may help us age better. Positive views of aging result in improved performance

on hearing tests and memory tasks, as according to Yale psychologist, Becca Levy. The author of Breaking the Aging Code, Levy wrote about the need for an age liberation movement to acknowledge how we become more creative and productive later in life. You can't create beliefs, but you can activate them by exposing people to words like full of life

instead of grumpy or helpless, to describe older adults. Boy, we still live in a society that prizes youth, right? And there's something kind of disgraceful about aging that we're still trying to get our heads around. As you sort of, and I have to say right off the top, I won't say your number if you don't want me to. Go right ahead, I've lost my vanity. Okay, you look phenomenal for 70.

You're 70 years old, Okay. And yet there's still this thing about getting older that we fear. You've obviously, well, you're getting your head around this right now. What are you finding? You know, remember Succession, the great TV show, and the people who were kind of 60 up in the corporation. Remember they called them the Grays? Yeah. And every time they had a scene with them, they were like putting compression socks on airplanes and adjusting their glasses. And it's funny, it's hilarious. I laughed all the way through. But it does continually reinforce that we become enfeebled.

And I haven't found that at all. I say this to people and I mean it. I loved my 60s. I've just moved out of them into 70 but I found them productive, exciting, full of new opportunities. Like I really loved being in my 60s. In some ways it was the most like my teenage years and that I became very open to new experience in a way that I didn't have time to be when I was in you know the striving 30s and 40s and 50s when you're so busy. But in my 60s I became open again. But the difference is that at 60, at 17 you're crashing around with an underdeveloped personality and underdeveloped brain. But at 70, your brain is actually kind of functioning and you know who you are. You're all there.

But the question is, can the body keep up with what the head wants to do? Well, you know, yeah, we hope so. I mean, that's not wood. But so far, we have to work on it, right? But yeah, I mean, I wrote a piece in The Walrus on retirement and had a lot of ageism in it. And I'm going to quote that next.

OK, OK. Well, one of the things one of the people I talked to said was that, you know, we make these jokes, but we just have to be careful, especially in the workplace. For instance, during COVID, when we all were suddenly doing all of our meetings online, you know, and often in those meetings, people 16 up were on mute or the camera wasn't on their face. And I said, you know, you had to admit it was a problem for the older people. And she said, I'm sorry.

I don't buy that at all. She said, how many times did somebody who was 30 have a cat walk over their computer? And it was true. There you go. It was great. Right. We each have our particular type of anomaly.

Yeah, but we jump on. we find that charming, but we jump on the over 60 year old as being inept. Okay. Well, here is, you mentioned you do write for the Walrus and here is from your piece entitled, The End of Retirement. Sheldon, again, the graphic if you would. Roughly a thousand people are retiring each day in Canada. Fraser Stark, president of the Longevity Pension Fund at Purpose Investments in Toronto, told me. That's about a million currently retired. Ours is the largest generation in Canadian history to move into retirement.

And we tend to get distracted by the sheer number of us snail-ing through the system like a row of snowplows on a four-lane highway. But the bigger issue with retiring at 64, which is the average age Canadians leave the workforce, can be summed up in one increasingly terrifying word. Longevity. 64, when we were kids, seemed ancient. But we've got to get our heads around this, right? Yeah, yeah. I want to come back to this idea of longevity, but you know,

that optimism point that you were talking about, one of the functions of being optimistic is that we keep putting old age further ahead of us. So when you're 60 you might think of 65 as old. Studies prove this. There's a lot of research been done. When you're 65 old goes up to 70. When you're 70 old goes up to 75. And when you're 75 old goes up to 79. Like we just keep pushing it back but that'll actually help you age a bit better. But longevity, yeah. Okay. So when retirement pensions came in, good old Bismarck in the 1880s,

when he decided that Germans who'd worked hard for the state deserved a pension, it would kick in at age 70, he said, which sounded a lot more generous than it was because the average age was 42. 42 at the time. Most people were going to be long dead and never get it. And the same thing in Canada. When Lester P. Pearson, thank you for my monthly CPP check, decided that we needed to help Canadians who were older and give them proper pensions, those kicked in at 65 but the average age when they started in the 60s was 68. So you know we are going to live a lot longer. If you have access to health care, I'm talking about the privilege here,

but in Toronto we're surrounded by incredible health care, great hospitals. If you stay fit, if you have reasonable genes, then you could live well into your 90s. The longest lived Canadian is 116 right now. And you've been told. You could have 50 more years. You've been told you're going to live to 94. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is an actuarial calculation.

But that sounded great at first. And then you're like, ooh, 94. I better keep my life in order. I better keep working. And I'd love to touch on the whole idea of the word retirement, which to me is a ridiculous word. Because?

Because the root of retire means to recede, to withdraw. From the French? Yeah. The Huitiguet. Yeah, to decline. See, I couldn't say the accent as fancy as you can. But to withdraw. And that's not what you do. I mean, I like the word unretired, like undead, or maybe just people who work.

You know, you keep working. The main difference now is that I don't get a salary. I make money, but that nice salary rolling in isn't there. That's the adjustment. So I don't work for paid salary anymore, but I work and I work at things I want to work at. But again, people our age growing up probably thought, well, you know, if we get to 75 or 80, that's pretty good.

But now we're being told we may live into our 90s, which means you need to have enough money left for another 24 years maybe. Does that concern you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's partly why I'm still working. left for another 24 years maybe. Does that concern you? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's partly why I'm still working as hard as I can. Yeah.

And it's not just the money. We know now that having some kind of engagement with the world, doing something, makes us live longer. It's right up there with don't smoke, don't over drink and have some kind of engagement and that's often work. It doesn't have to be paid work but it's very important for our well-being to keep working not just to make money. Well you talked about this in the piece the number of people who whenever they're 64, 65, 66, they decide to retire and they're dead within a few years, right? Especially in journalism.

Journalism insurgents, those people who work and work and work like maniacs and then they retire and they don't have anything to do. I thought it was apocryphal but it's actually true. Because they derive too much of their identity in what they do for a living. Yes. Which is a mistake. Which is a mistake. It's what you do, but not necessarily what you do for a living. Who you are.

Yeah, who you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Precisely. Okay, here's something else you wrote here. I didn't know that bringing real people into the story would alter my relationships with them out in the world. Yeah. Meaning what?

So this is nonfiction. This Way Up is a nonfiction book. And it's got my siblings in it. It's got my children in it. By name, there's only one person who's only initialed, but otherwise there's people by name. And I was very conscious of the ask that I was making of people. You know, it's my sister Anne, who I describe as a poker in the book,

which she doesn't love because she pokes you when she talks. Sorry, Anne. She must know. Yes, but she said, you know, it's like being snapped by a photographer. And yes, you look like that in that moment, but there are so many other ways you look. But once you're put in a book, that version of you is there. So I don't write gotcha stories. I'm not trying to hurt people.

I'm trying to understand people and understand relationships. So it was very important to me that everybody in the book had a chance to see themselves in the book. Not journalism the way we used to do it, right? Like the whole sort of gotcha doorstop cameras running, get the story at any cost. That's fallen out of favor now for good reason and also for a book like this. I really wanted people to have a chance to say that's not the way I saw that conversation or have you thought of this? Mostly they were very generous. But sometimes people wanted more substantial things out

and wanted to talk about why I saw them that way. And so I'm writing in real time and I'm talking to people in real life about what I'm writing. It gets really crowded. I can understand why people switched to fiction. Well, you don't have to give people a heads up when you're writing fiction. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. Just do whatever you want. Now, did Anne tell you anything based on what she read ahead of time that made you say, oh, OK, I'm going to go back and rewrite that? She said to me, I didn't rewrite it exactly, but she said, you know, Catherine, as she was poking me, she said, you moan in your sleep we go on these sibling trips I have four siblings and

even in our 60s and 70s we still travel together in this last trip out on BC and and I ended up sharing a king-size bed and I said I don't moan in my sleep she said yes you moan in your sleep and I said well and if you were writing this book I'd be a moaner but I'm writing the book so you're a poker. Well you do get the last word. I get the last word yeah and I'm conscious of that so. And this is not exactly a Molly Jong fast book about Mother Erika right? No. I mean you're not carving anybody a new you know what in this book. No no no and I yeah that's not who I am or what I want to write about.

Now you did consult map experts during the course of writing this book. OK, talk to us about why you felt the need to do that. Well, I woke up at 3 AM at the beginning of this book, and I thought, I need a map to my old age. Like, I wanted to see it on a map. I know it doesn't make sense as an idea, but I very strongly felt, and so I bought a map

instead to where I began, which is St. Catharines and that part of the world, St. Catharines, Grimsby, Hamilton, where you're from. Which also can't spell itself properly, but that's another story. Yes, that's right. And so I got this map to where I'd been. I thought, let's start with where I began. And I decided to just call map experts

to ask them if they could tell me about where I was headed as a woman of 68. And here's the thing I love about map people. Like they don't say, well, obviously there's no such thing as a map to old age. It's like you've said, can you give me a map to Perry Sound? They're like, yeah, yeah, come on in and talk. A map to old age, why not?

So I talked to fantastic people, a wonderful map curator at McMaster University. They have an incredible map library if you've ever been. It's really cool. It is just thousands and thousands of maps of the area, the formation of Hamilton, St. Catharines, all those places. And so they were very enthusiastic about the journey, whatever form it took. They didn't care where it was going. It wasn't until I talked to a guy from UBC who said that he taught this Hereford mapamundi to his students every year at the beginning of the year.

And it's got like 500 different images on it of animals and, you know, Garden of Eden, etc. etc. And he would ask them what the most interesting part of the map was. And they would never notice that the four letters east, north, south, east, west were M-O-R-T, death. And he said, well, that's where our map is going. It's death. That's true, but. It is true, but it's not something we want to dwell on too much.

So just finally then, what's, if you've got 24 more years to go, what's the big mission that you still want to accomplish? Well, I don't know. And I'd like to, I kind of want to stick with I don't know because I'm, I'm pretty open to whatever comes next. I think I am. I think I've come to believe what I found at the beginning of the book when I built

my hut, which is that there's a lot to be discovered where you are. And in a really positive and interesting sense, I was appalled to think that on a literal map, I'd moved an inch from one side of Lake Ontario to the other. And then I thought, you know, more and more when I go out and travel on big trips, I have a sense of alienation. Like the planet can hardly bear it. The world of tourism I find alienating. On this little trip I take at the end of the book from Toronto through Hamilton,

and Stony Creek and Fruitland, and Grimsby, and Beamsville and St. Catharines, I made incredible connections and discoveries of thought and insight into what matters and what doesn't. I think the place I came to at the very end was where we are now is who we are now. And so I hope in my future I keep that sense of location and identity and adventure, but not having to mean wide world adventure, but adventure right here, here. And you're about to start your own incredible adventure. Congratulations on your brilliant career, seriously, and what brillianess is to come, which I can't wait to see. Well, we'll see. Don't put too much pressure on me, okay? Your last answer was brilliant, as is the book.

So let me remind people it's called This Way Up, Old Friends, New Love, and a Map for the Road Ahead. Which we all need. Catherine Bradbury, so great to have you here. Thank you. Thank you so much. My pleasure.