Retirement Stress

RETIREMENT is acknowledged to be a stressful life event. When the habitual pattern of the working week is swept away, people often struggle to adjust to the loss of purpose and identity. For clergy and their spouses, there is the extra dimension of a move away from everything that is familiar.

Tina Cumberlege first became aware of this when she was working on the chaplaincy team at Burrswood, a Christian hospital in Kent, and met a number of clergy wives who were suffering pain and hurt as a result.

“For most, it’s a bereavement,” she says. “It’s well known that bereave ment can damage your health, so having to face the loss of home, status, income, community, church family, and, ultimately identity, all in one weekend, can take its toll.

  “And, because of the rule that you have to move away, you’re on your own and very isolated.”

It is the amount of change that happens all at once that makes it particularly hard to cope. Some dio­ceses offer pre-retirement courses, but their effectiveness seems only patchy. She thinks they should be offered earlier, to clerics in their 50s, and the issues revisited nearer retirement.

Housing is often a problem. The move from a four-bedroom vicarage to a smaller retirement home can take some adjustment. Some of those without their own homes have found the Pensions Board unsympathetic; and there can be a tremendous financial strain when paying rent out of a pension, particularly when council tax and water rates have to be paid for the first time.

Nor do all dioceses pay for the final move, and that is something, Mrs Cumberlege says, “that really bugs people. It’s as if they only pay when you are useful.” And while she and her husband received “a loving letter from the Bishop to thank us for all we’d done”, this does not always happen.

In response, Mrs Cumberlege has set up SOS (Supported or Sus pended?), a support network for clergy spouses around the time of their partner’s retirement. Last month, SOS held its first “encour­age ment day” at Burrswood, and she hopes more such events will follow.

www.supportedorsuspended.org