I retired sort of willy-nilly and only after I started writing the column did I suddenly discover there were all these things out there that I hadn't learned about. And so my mission became to try to educate future retirees about what they were going to face and what they needed to know.

There are things that I really am interested in doing that I can't do if I continue to do what I'm doing. And I - teaching would be a big thing for me. I'm an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins and teach business communications and ethics, so very different from what I do on a daily basis.

Now, it's been very hard for me to accept that. I never - I felt like - I always felt like I could blow it and nothing would never happen until this happened. So now, it's - no matter how hard I practice, it just seem like I can't do the plays I did.

But then the amazing thing is to look back. It looks like it all was a straight line. You can see the straight line of light and that makes us who we are.

So when I leave the court, I'm going to have more than enough to do, just to carry on, maybe telling something of our journey to people who didn't go through that.

I would try to keep myself going by inventing games, and I would sing songs, a song beginning with “A,” “Always.” “Because,” “Charmaine,” “Daisy,” go through the alphabet. ... I would try to remember the states in the United States of America.

I’d been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn’t understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you’ve got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud.

And into the darkness I said, “What happened?” and a woman’s voice said, “It was a car bomb,” and I collapsed into darkness again, but with a sense of euphoria. I’d survived.