Every once in a while, someone tells me that they heard a rumor that I’m retiring, which of course is news to me.

"Retiring?" I ask, incredulous.

I still wonder when I’m going to be done with puberty. Besides, I’m only 55 years old. And besides that, how can I retire from cardiology when there is still so much more to learn? 

I usually finish my day in the office around 6:30 p.m., and sometimes I call my Dad on the drive home. About half the time, he picks up and says this: “Hi, Jon, listen, can I call you back in a little bit? I’m just rounding in the hospital.”

My father, Alexander, is 83 years old. He starts his day, like me, around 7:30, and he’s been working like this for as long as I have been alive. Last February 1 marked his 50th anniversary as a physician practicing at Hartford Hospital. His biography is worthy of a book. After WWII, he came from Italy by boat at age 11 without his Mom and Dad (they came later). He went to Yale for college and med school, then Harvard for residency, and then he brought retina surgery techniques to Hartford Hospital in the infancy of that specialty and has specialized in retina disease ever since.

When I asked, “Pops, when are you gonna retire?”

He answered, “Oh, you will read about it in the obituaries.”

According to my brother Paul, also an ophthalmogist who runs Eye Disease Consultants with my Dad, Dad is still at the top of his game with superb clinical judgment. When I ask him why Dad works so late, Paul says, “You know Dad. He takes his time. Makes sure his charts are perfect. Chats it up with his patients.” He is not slowing down. He's always been this way. He’s just not that guy who thinks “time is money,” and so he’s not one to rush through the important stuff.

I see patients every day on the verge of, and excited by, the coming of their own retirement. Sometimes, when I see them a few months after their retirement, they tell me that they are a bit let down, find themselves “out of the flow” or “out of the rush and stream of things.” I think of my Dad, and I’m really not surprised that he won’t retire. He’s the kind of doctor you want your doctor to be.

I wish, in so many ways, I could be half the doctor he is. He may not be rushed, but in a crisis, he’s decisive and quick. He reads all the latest literature, participated actively in research and taught at Harvard Medical School. And he still feels that seeing his patients is like visiting with old friends. Raising three sons, he was pretty strict. But as a physician, he was a study of compassion and aequinimitas, that clear judgment in moments of great peril; he remains so to this day. (Can you blame me if, when I got a detention or crashed the car when I was a kid, I went to tell him at the hospital or in his office?)

My Dad’s been a jogger since before jogging became a “thing.” I would go with him when I was young, and usually I’d start out a lot faster than he. Sure enough, after about a quarter of a mile, I would be out of gas and he would catch up to me, walk with me till I got my breath and then remind me: “Slow and steady wins the race.”