A 50-something colleague recently told me a story over a cup of coffee. When she was 45, her doctor informed her that the pain she was experiencing was arthritis.
“That’s not right. I’m 45, not 85.”
My friend kept great care of herself, was trim, ate sensibly and hailed from a long line of long-lived females.
Her physician explained that it is not uncommon to start seeing arthritis in one’s 40s. That reality took almost a year for her to come to grips with. Subsequently in the months following her doctor’s news, her lady friends all shared similar tales of “premature aging.”
“I’m forgetting things. I never used to lose stuff. And I’m forgetting names and words, too. I’m worried about it.”
“I just found out that my best friend from grade school died of skin cancer several months ago. She was only 47 — my age. We went to the pool every day in the summertime.”
“My Mom died last year. We all thought Dad would go first. And Mom was only 74. It’s been really hard not having her around to talk to.”
“I had a positive on my latest mammogram. They found a lump. I couldn’t even feel it. If the next test confirms this, I’ll be having some kind of surgery.”
Sociologist and author Gail Sheehy in her popular books “Passages” and later in “New Passages” talks about the years 45-50 as the “passage of Little Deaths.” She explains that these are the years when our bodies and life’s circumstances teach us an invaluable lesson about life:
It ain’t going to last forever.
Oh, and by the way … it’s not the end of the world.
That’s right. We start to feel “old” in this passage around years 45-50. Our knee gets gimpy. We can’t seem to shed these extra pounds. We need reading glasses. Hearing aids. New hips.
And yet these first hints of our mortality are normal. Little Deaths often include messages other than from our bodies as well. We experience the death of some of our most dearly-held dreams in life during this 45-50 passage. The death of dreams such as …
We probably won’t make Corporate Vice President or get that corner office.
We probably won’t make a raging success out of the business that we started. In fact it might not have a success at all.
We probably won’t meet Mr. or Ms. Perfect.
Our kids probably won’t grow up to be Meryl Streep or Bill Gates or Barack Obama.
Each of these little deaths are body blows — wallops, but by around age 50, we realize that we are still standing. We are not giving up. We have recalibrated and are moving on.
In fact, we are stronger for them. Wiser. We appreciate the blessings, luck and fortune that come our way all the more. We have a revised outlook on life and with these altered horizons, we start to smell the roses again.
We’ve successfully moved into the Second Half of Life.
Bill Morton has a Certificate in Gerontoly from the UW and is the author of “2H: The Official Second Half Handbook.” He’s lived on the Eastside for 20 years.
