I retired three years ago and last month someone at a party asked me “so what do you do” and I opened my mouth and nothing came out — not because I forgot but because for the first time in my life I didn’t have an answer, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing I’ve heard since the day I cleaned out my desk and turned in my badge and became a man without a title for the first time in 41 years
For forty-one years I had the same answer to "what do you do," but when someone asked me at that party, I discovered something terrifying: without my work title, I had no idea who I was anymore.