Dad's Retirement

A week ago Dad found out that his company was going to be sold, and after some conversations with the HR department, decided that it was in his best interest to retire and claim full-disability.

We are all so proud of what Dad has done for our family over the past 44 years of his working life. We love him so much and are thankful that he can enjoy some time doing the things that he loves most.

Here is an email he sent to his co-workers (posted with his permission):


From: Paul R. Smith
Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2008 7:11 PM
To: *Paragon - Mpls
Subject: Time to say good-bye


Good-bye Everybody. I've loved being at Paragon (Years 38-44 of my working years) Special thanks to Cathy Caviness for alerting me to the job opening after my layoff from Citigroup, to Martin & Shari, who hired me, to the Cat Fund Team with whom I started, and to the Viking Team and Tech assistants , with whom I finished, also to my managers and HR who kept creatively giving me second chances when I wandered off the preferred routes to success, and to Shelley, who rescued me in the final weeks from my old one-person- per -car mode of getting to work. This little, fun, smart, hard-working respectful, unusual, unpredictable, determined company "P" and its kind, generous, non-micro-managing parent, "B", have been extraordinary as my employer.

Thank you all for your friendliness, your tolerance of my caps and loquacity. Thanks for your love, not to get sappy, but you know this place can really be a pretty tight family, and we DO share a lot, which is very cool in my view. OK, now go and make it a good day, because I'm starting to choke up.

Paul R Smith 11-14-2008


Fine print: My situation, (this is only for those of you that are interested in this stuff) is that in 2006, I began to have symptoms of “mild cognitive impairment” a term the neuro-psych people use to describe early dementia, and various thinking and memory problems. I was working on the FHCF (CatFund) team at the time, and it became obvious that I couldn’t do the work reliably any more, so they nicely put me into a technical assistant role where I could do copying, scanning, etc. That worked pretty well for a time, but then recentlyI began struggling with those duties also…forgetting key things, missing deadlines and email messages, getting mixed up trying to keep documents in order. I’m in a genetic group that is at higher risk for Alzheimer’s than the general population. I have been taking the 2 popular meds that have been shown clinically to help slow the progression of Alzheimer’s, but nothing has yet been shown to stop it or restore damaged brain tissue to former health. Science is very busy in the area, and many expect a breakthrough within 20 years or less. So my supervisors and HR looked at my situation and the reality that it was likely to get worse, and decided that this would be a good time for this 64 year old to say goodbye, apply for disability assistance, and bring in the people who can do the work. I agree completely, and I am TOTALLY on board with the decision. Martin, Shari, the whole HR team (Agnes S, Kim S, Lisa O,Ron M etc) have been proactive advocates for me and my situation, so although the time of departure was not something most of us had been focused on, it made a lot of sense when they figured out that waiting and doing nothing would make things worse for everybody, including me. So Friday 11/14 is my final workday (Note, this paragraph is a perfect example of my written loquacity! Good grief, I didn’t retain enough of our recent business writing course.)

Don’t feel sorry for me, God has been very good to me, and I am richly, richly blessed.

You are each a friend with face I should remember well, but not so well, your name.