In March, after a dull day in Kingston, Lin said, “If PAL Vancouver calls tomorrow, tell them we’ll take it.” I laughed. We’d been on their waiting list for 14 years, and had never heard from them. The next day, PAL called: an apartment was available.

PAL is a Performing Arts Lodge: an apartment building with subsidized rents, mostly for older folks who’d wasted their lives in the arts and never made much money. Because we’d wasted half our lives in the arts and spent half making modest amounts as a publicist (Lin) and teacher (me), we qualified for a less subsidized but manageable rent – and in the most beautiful real estate in the world: at the entrance to Stanley Park.

But when PAL did call, the first thing we said was, “We’re not doing this, are we?” “Nope.” It was too much work, exchanging our big, four-bedroom Kingston house, crammed with decades’ worth of stuff, for a one-bedroom flat without enough space for the two of us.

But then we talked all afternoon about it. Were we being lazy? Cowardly? We’d both complained that our lives in retirement weren’t interesting enough. We’d contemplated different scenarios, including other PALs in Toronto and New Westminster. And we’d budgeted for a Vancouver vacation this year. So if we said no to this, we might forever regret chickening out.

Vancouver was where, for 30 years, I’d had the time of my life, working in theatre, TV, radio and film, and mostly hippie style: on my own terms and my own hours, self-employed, freelance and part-time. I got married twice, had a third relationship common-law, and raised two kids. Then, in 2000, Queen’s offered me a job and we moved to Kingston.

I loved the Queen’s job, and we’ve made some dear friends in Kingston, but our annual return visits to Vancouver were heartbreaking. This was our home! Ontario was exile! Over the years, that feeling subsided a little as the city grew bigger, glossier and more expensive, but it, and family and friends, continued to exert a pull.

So, the day PAL called, we finally changed our minds: we’d give it a try after all. Their rental agreement called for only 30 days’ notice to move out. So we could stay for at least several months. Lin started budgeting. I would go in April; she would join me in May. In our 70s, we were embarking on an unpredictable adventure.

Alas, we had no clue! We were so young and naïve, way back in March! The sudden stress was enormous. Each day, one or both of us would say, “Forget it, this isn’t worth it.” Even after we signed the rental agreement, we still considered kissing good-bye to a month’s rent, the plane fare, and what we were spending on furniture. Sometimes the challenges brought us together more, and we appreciated each other anew: after all, this was something we had to do together, or it wouldn’t happen. At other times, the project seriously threatened our relationship and our health.

There were the legalities and finances: renting out the house and arranging insurance, plane fares, furniture purchases, utilities and internet. We listed the house for rental on a website. We bought a new hot-water heater. We upgraded our insurance – a surprisingly huge hassle. Photographing our cleaned-up, freshly-staged rooms, and writing a listing describing the place in glowing terms, we wondered why we were leaving our beautiful home. We replaced our old nostalgia for Vancouver with a new nostalgia for Kingston.

There was the physical job: disposing of decades’ worth of stuff, storing our more precious belongings in the attic and basement, staging the house. Lin turned her home office into a bedroom, for the website photos. Against every instinct, I gave away large amounts of books. We put out extra garbage bags every week and frequented the recycling centre and Value Village.

And there was the dog. At 17, he seems too old and tired to subject to the ordeal of a plane flight and unfamiliar new surroundings, but not old and tired enough for euthanasia. We finally decided to leave him in Kingstown with our lovely dog-sitters, at least for now.

One task which stands out for me as a symbol is the Emptying of the Filing Cabinet. For years it collected material I didn’t want to deal with: bank statements, investment reports, insurance papers – stuff I would open and glance over cursorily and then file and forget, thinking that when I retired I would decide which of those papers to keep and which to toss.

That never happened. Suddenly we were throwing these important-looking documents from serious institutions, barely glanced at, into garbage bags, which I then took up to the recycling centre and dumped forever. All the paper I had carefully hoarded, to pass on to my more mature, more financially-responsible self, had instead come to this.

And there are the writings, dating from my childhood to today, which still sit in Kingston, waiting for me to decide whether to offer it to Queen’s archives or to leave it for my kids to sort through. And Lin has huge bins full of photos, negatives and contact sheets to deal with, courtesy of her deceased ex-husband, a professional photographer.

We realized we were summing up our lives to this point: taking stock of all we had done or left unfinished, and facing the big existential questions: what, after all, matters? What remains? Can we throw out those books I always thought I would read or re-read? What about my cringe-making teenage writings, or my 1980s critical reviews of plays nobody remembers any more? Will anybody ever read them? Will they affect how posterity thinks of me – if it does? Does anybody care? Do I care?

But then, rather suddenly – with the work unfinished and those questions unanswered, as yet and perhaps forever – I packed my bags, left Lin with her 100 pages of remaining to-do lists – and headed for the airport.

(To be continued next month, in “Return to Vancouver, Part 2: Elysium, the Gilded Cage, the Belly of the Beast.”)