While traveling few days ago, our bus made a brief stop at a place and the passengers alighted to eat, shop, answer the call of nature or just stretch their legs. I stood at a corner and behind me were two passengers who had been chatting all through the journey so far. At this point, one was telling the other of how he built a luxury house in Abuja which he intended to serve as the retirement home for him and his wife. However, he was regretful that things did not work out as planned as he and the spouse have now settled in Lagos since he retired from the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), Nigeria’s defunct petroleum industry primary regulator. “I recently rented the home to a Turkish man at 5 million naira per year, and I’m feeling a sense of loss because it is a place would have loved to live in and not rent out. I built it for myself, equipped it to taste including installing a Jacuzzi there,” he said, betraying a genuine regret.
“You built without consulting us experts,” the man he was speaking with told him straightaway. This speaker introduced himself as an engineer and estate development expert and added, “When we plan a retirement home for people we consider a lot of things including keeping it small and simple. We consider the age of the person. A lot of those things that excited.one when they were younger may no longer excite them at old age. Swimming pools are for people who are still young enough to have the energy to swim. How many of the rich men who have swimming pools use them? An old man or woman does not need an apartment with too many rooms. Who will be cleaning them? They don’t need such unused spaces that will be breeding cockroaches and other elements that will constitute health risk for the aged.”
This man said a lot of other things and at a point asked two very pertinent questions: “Do you like swimming? Do you swim? His interlocutor answered “no” with guilt visibly colouring his face. It seemed to have dawned on him that the swimming facility he installed would have indeed been useless to him.
Many of the things we equip our homes with are indeed motivated by the desire to keep up with what is fashionable and not an actual need. I can recall having visited houses of rich individuals to find swimming pools that are visibly abandoned. There is no need talking about rooms that are obviously surplus to requirements with TV sets and other home facilities inside them also wasting away.
If some of these acquisitions can prove practically useless during our younger years when we had the bodily strength and mental vibrance to savour them, talk more of what becomes of them when we have aged. To be sure, one who has aged enough to retire from active life does not need those things that they found useful only because those aligned with their youthful disposition. The person would not need the kind of mansion where they would have to struggle to climb stairs everyday – a bungalow may be ideal.
More so, an aged person will likely never be in need of things which have never caught their fancy up to the time of their retirement. If they were not the swimming type, what would a swimming pool be doing in their retirement home? If they were not the drinking type, what would a private bar be doing in their retirement home? If they were not arduous in reading books, what would a library be doing in their private home? People don’t suddenly develop a new taste or likeness when they want to retire; rather the more likely thing is that they go into that phase of their life retaining those tastes and other dispositions that have defined their life all through.
The above can serve as words of wisdom for those of us planning for a retirement. Make it really a home and not a historical monument preserved not for use but for admiration of others. Many houses and facilities in them are unfortunately more of monuments than homes. In many villages, we find many of such mansions inhabited only once in a year, usually for the one week or so of the Christmas season. Even some are not that fortunate to be so inhabited annually, as the owners are either too far from home (overseas) or dead and the children have no interest in visiting the family house – it is not a home for them, but a monument.
Make your retirement house a home or it will end up a monument.
This is my meditation this midweek.
Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.
