I always assumed I would work until I was at least sixty-eight, perhaps seventy. People in the theater do not so much retire as get carried out, and I had every intention of being one of them—still building the calendar, still sitting in the dark through tech, still handing tissues to students weeping on the curb before their first technical rehearsal. The work was my purpose and my identity, fused so completely that I could not see the seam between them.

Then I got cancer, and the seam became visible.

In the summer of 2022 I noticed something unusual and frightening, and after a slow road through scans and referrals, I learned I had a mass on my cervix—which surprised me, since to my knowledge I no longer had a cervix, having undergone a total hysterectomy at thirty-five. An eight-hour surgery removed the mass, and then came six months of chemotherapy, one cycle every three weeks. I took a leave of absence from teaching and production managing, from September of 2023 through the following March. And in that long enforced pause, away from the only working life I had known since my twenties, I began to understand something I had spent decades arranging not to learn.

The leave that taught me I was replaceable

I am, by temperament and training, a great believer in cross-training. Every stage manager is. We leave our calling scripts at the theater each night in case “I get hit by a bus,” because the show must never depend on any one irreplaceable person. I had preached this for years. I had simply never applied it to myself.

While I was away being infused with chemicals, watching my eyebrows vanish and my hair go and cataloguing each loss under my running question—is it good, or is it bad?—my colleagues did something both wounding and liberating: they figured out how to run the season without me. They brought in a former student of mine, a stage manager named Simon Chau, to support the productions in my absence. And the school did not collapse. The shows went up. The students were served.

The greatest realization I had during my time away was that we are all replaceable. No one’s shoes are too big to fill.

I want to be honest about how that landed, because it is the hinge of the whole story. The ego’s first response to being replaced is grief. But underneath the grief was something close to relief. If the institution could survive my absence—if my shoes were not, in fact, too big to fill—then I was free of the obligation to fill them forever. And a stage manager who is always a proponent of cross-training cannot, in good conscience, cling to a post just to feel indispensable, especially when staying would only prevent the school from conducting the national search to find someone wonderful to replace her. The very principle I had built my career on now pointed, quietly and unmistakably, toward the door.

What the work had been crowding out

The other thing the leave gave me was the unfamiliar luxury of deciding what to do with each of my own days. After a lifetime of having every hour spoken for by a production calendar, I grew rather fond of sleeping in, of looking at a blank day and choosing how to fill it. And in that unstructured space I started to notice everything the work had been crowding out.

There were two granddaughters I wanted more time with. A son and his wife I wanted to be nearer to. There was travel I had postponed for years behind the always-reasonable excuse of the next season, the next show. I had spent so much of my life, I realized, letting the work feel so demanding that I ended up with no life beside it—a hazard so common in our field that “I can’t, I have rehearsal” was once printed on T-shirts as a badge of honor. I came, slowly, to a conviction I now hold without apology: the most precious things in our lives are the people, not the things, and not the tasks we perform to pay for the things.

By the time my blood work cleared and I returned to work that March, I had already begun to understand that I was returning in order to leave well. I announced that the remaining half of the spring semester would be my last. I retired on the fifteenth of May, 2024, at sixty-four—a good four years earlier than the version of me who got that diagnosis would ever have imagined.

Reinvention is not a clean break—it is finding the next words

People hear “retirement” and picture a door closing. My experience has been almost the opposite: a door I had been leaning against my whole life suddenly gave way, and on the far side was not emptiness but possibility I had been too busy to imagine.

Some of this I had rehearsed without knowing it. Years before, working with a leadership coach during the rawest stretch of my widowhood, I had been asked to imagine where I might be in five years, and I had culled the answer down to five points written on index cards: become a full professor; sixty and feeling fabulous; freelance writer; a lake house; and someone who cherishes me and makes me laugh. The specifics were less the point than the destination. What astonished me, looking back, was how many of them quietly came true—not because I forced them, but because naming a direction lets you recognize the opportunity when it taps you on the shoulder.

And opportunity does tap. In the very flurry of those last eight weeks before retirement, with my desk being cleared and my career formally winding down, I received an email from my dear friend Sandy Cleary—who had been my crew head on a wild, visionary production decades earlier—asking whether I knew anyone who might like to go to Croatia for a week in June to stage manage a show she could no longer take. I had not stage managed since 2015. The production looked complex. My brain instantly produced its catalogue of reasons to decline: the jet lag, the unfamiliarity, the old reliable refrain that I might not be able to call it.

I went anyway. I called the show in a nineteenth-century jewel-box theater in Dubrovnik, squashed into the King’s Box with the rest of the team because the com system did not work, and it came off beautifully. I had been retired for a matter of weeks, and I had just done one of the most thrilling jobs of my late career—precisely because I refused to answer the invitation with fear.

Opportunities arrive when you least expect them. Be alert to them, and never respond out of fear, or you will miss a great many spectacular things.

The shape of the after

This, I think, is the real texture of reinvention after a long career, and it looks nothing like the brochures. It is not leisure replacing labor. It is a rebalancing—the freedom to take the occasional international gig that genuinely thrills you while declining the grind that no longer does; the time to fly to Italy to see the boarding-school mentor whose door I once knocked on as a teenager, and who, fifty years later, hosts me at his farmhouse in Umbria; the room, at last, to write the book I had been promising myself for years.

I had long ago discovered that the disciplines of my profession could organize my personal life as well as any production—that I could reverse-engineer a fantastical goal into dated, achievable steps the same way I built a rehearsal calendar backward from opening night. So I did. Every Tuesday and Wednesday morning of those grieving, transitional years, my calendar simply read “Work on Book,” three hours a week, the same deliberate scheduling of deep work that successful people use to turn ideas into something they can hold. Retirement did not invent my new purpose. It cleared the calendar so the purpose already taking root could finally have the room it needed.

My most recent adventure in Brooklyn, as PM for my friend Yehuda Hyman’s Dancing Into Roses was an indicator that I control the shape of the work, the balance of the rebalancing. Working up on a ladder again steaming fabric, tending to front of house duties, along with an illicit cameo in the show showed me that I will make the choices that bring me joy. And greeting the dozens of Yehuda’s fans as they came to the theater to see his fresh perspective on his earlier life reminded me that we are all in the process of creative self-examination. And it is good.

Final Thought

I spent a long time believing my work was who I was, and it took a cancer diagnosis, a six-month leave, and the bracing discovery that the season could run without me to teach me otherwise. My work was important, but it never defined me, and learning that we are all replaceable turned out to be not a diminishment but a release. Reinvention after retirement is not the end of purpose; it is the search for the next words when the old script runs out—and I have found those words to be richer than the ones that came before, full of grandchildren and travel and writing and the occasional terrifying, exhilarating job in a faraway theater. The curtain came down on one career. It rose, almost immediately, on something I had not dared to plan: a life. I intend to spend it eyes forward, in sensible shoes, with no regrets.

Sources

1. cancer — https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/what-is-cancer
2. cervix — https://www.cancer.gov/types/cervical
3. hysterectomy — https://www.acog.org/womens-health/faqs/hysterectomy
4. chemotherapy — https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/chemotherapy
5. leave of absence — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/leave-of-absence
6. cross-training — https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/enhance-hr-effectiveness-cross-training
7. stage manager — https://www.berklee.edu/careers/roles/stage-manager
8. ego — https://dictionary.apa.org/ego
9. indispensable — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/indispensable
10. coach — https://www.icfcoaching.com/what-is-coaching
11. freelance — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/freelance
12. reinvention — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/reinvention
13. rebalancing — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/rebalance
14. replaceable — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/replaceable