Let’s Talk Mortality.

Nobody likes to ponder their mortality but remembering that our time here is finite hopefully makes you live each day to its fullest.

In midlife, you come face to face with mortality and it gets very disconcerting. I have had a number of friends die over the last few years for different reasons. It’s different when it’s a grandparent or other older family member but when your peers start to pass, shit gets real.

I’ve had a friend commit suicide. I’ve had two friends die of breast cancer. I’ve had three friends die because alcohol had so ravaged their bodies that an otherwise survivable incident wasn’t something their system could handle. I’ve had a friend die of an overdose. I’ve had a friend die from leukemia. A friend of Scott’s died from an undetected heart condition. Unfortunately, the list will continue to grow. Now lest you think I’m a walking cloud of bad luck, to be fair I say friends but most of these were people I went to high school with whom I didn’t have day-to-day contact anymore but because of social media, I was connected to them over the miles. I cared about them as people I’d shared formative years with and enjoyed seeing where their lives had taken them. The trap of social media is you think you know the whole story. From the posts I saw, they all looked happy and healthy. 

Now I can see that life happens to all of us. And midlife brings with it some of the consequences of years of choices. Midlife also brings diseases we sometimes have no control over. Midlife brings the unrelenting reminder that our days are numbered. We all hope that number is large and our days are long but that isn’t guaranteed for any of us.