Middle-Aged* warning depressing

This is horrible. Kafkaesque. I woke up with a sudden realization—I’m not a bug. Much worse. I am middle-aged.

I expected to feel this way after my parent’s death early last year. I’ve been feeling slower, not as enthusiastic about exercise—something I never went two days in a row without doing. I wouldn’t get into running shoes for anything less than 5 miles. But I suspect it wasn’t this that nudged me into melancholy.

Perhaps when a friend mentioned he was having cataract surgery. What! No worries, he responded, it’s outpatient! Or when a Facebook friend from highschool announced that he was retiring from teaching at the end of the school year. Congratulations! Or that a good friend, even younger than I, was gifted with their first grandchild. Mazel tov!

These are significant milemarkers. We gauge how far we’ve come and where we might be going next.

Where are we going next?

I think what I’m feeling is a brittleness, a great uncertainty. That what I once thought might not actually happen has happened. My husband and I are finding ourselves often sleepless, fearful of the future. This confession in itself is middle-aged. I can’t remember once worrying about social security when I was 30. Really. Mostly when I was younger, I worried I might not have time for all the things I wanted to do like graduate from high school, college, get married, have kids, go to Europe.  

The sun rose and set, and I graduated, got married, had the daughter I dreamed of, we’ve traveled (See European Schedule).

In my thirties I began to worry about my friends. Would we finish the journey we began together? Then in my forties several of the people I’d gotten closest to moved away. All the promises about raising kids together, being there for one another collapsed under other obligations, other visions. Quite a few divorces, a few have shocked me. The kids have lost touch with each other, finding little in common. A few of those bright beautiful children of my friends have passed away.

Here we are now, middle-aged. We stuck it out. Yet we are wide-awake.

And I suspect we are not alone. There are teachers and firefighters wondering if their pension will evaporate. All of us are concerned that social security will become a bone thrown to placate those wishing for A BALANCED BUDGET. That, along with raising the minimum age for Medicare, we will be toothless and decrepit before eligibility. Brittle and broken.

I see it all around me, safety nets unraveling. The seniors we serve at Friendly Towers (http://www.friendlytowers.com/) and the epidemic rise in elderly homeless especially at CCO (http://www.ccolife.org/). Many of these people lived lives with few expectations anyway, on the margins. But now they are discovering that even the bare basics are not going to be enough. SSI, Social Security, a monthly pension will not magically make affordable housing appear, re-instate food stamps mysteriously revoked, or cover the ever-increasing co-pays. Then there are the constant scams.

God forbid they get really sick.

Jeremy Nicholls has written at his blog Setting Prisoners Free of the disabled and elderly homeless that he has worked with. (http://freeingprisoners.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-mysterious-disappearance-of-very.html)

My fear is that I will end up like those I have helped, Les Misérables. God help us.

Graceland Cemetery--down the street from where I live in Uptown, Chicago