College Life of a Retired Senior: A Memoir of Perseverance, Faith, and Finding the Way

Seven years after she retires from the Royal Bank of Canada, ending a thirty-seven-year career, banker/author Yvonne Blackwood surprises her friends and family by returning to school at sixty-four to pursue an English degree. She craves knowledge and is motivated by four powerful reasons: to add texture to her writing; to ward off dementia by exercising her brain with her studies; to add ongoing structure to her life by attending classes regularly; to inspire her two young grandsons to attend university full-time when they graduate from high school. Blackwood attends York University, Canada’s third-largest university, and struggles with maintaining her established lifestyle, being in class with hard-to-connect-with millennials, and a shocking diagnosis in her final year. She stumbles upon several obstacles in her quest to earn the degree. They include two strikes at the university, one lasting 143 days; the lockdown of the campus when the WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic; and hospitalization. The university’s motto is Tentanda via—the way must be tried. Blackwood weaves this theme and the metaphor of climbing a mountain into the narrative. When some situations become almost unbearable, and she thinks of quitting, she perseveres and relies on her faith. She writes, “What I didn’t know was how much the pursuit of the degree would inform me, challenge me, satisfy me, and drive me to consider giving up on more than one occasion.”