Goodman's Last Column: 'I'm Letting Myself Go'

Ellen Goodman signs off on her final column today in the Boston Globe, a career that spanned Gerald Ford to Barack Obama, not to mention a 7-year-old daughter to a 7-year-old grandson. While she'd like to "fulfill the fantasy of a summer on my porch in Maine," she has the usual reservations about the word "retirement." Instead, she'd like to put a different twist on a familiar line: "I'm letting myself go."

"I love the idea of reclaiming that phrase," she writes. "After all, where will you go when you let yourself go? To let this question fill the free space between deadlines in my life has been quite liberating. It suggests the freedom that can fuel this journey." She notes that she and her fellow baby boomers are redefining what it means to be a "senior citizen" and laments the lack of a label for the "early, active aging." So what's next? "We'll see."
(More Ellen Goodman stories.)