Midlife and Mortality: The Surprising Truth About Living Fully

4 min read

When I first read the Theodore Roosevelt quote, “Old age is like everything else…to make a success of it, you’ve got to start young,” I took it to heart. I’ve been preparing for old age since I was 30, which is why—now that I am old—I’m able to embrace it with such joy and gratitude.

I celebrated the year I turned 75 as my “Platinum Jubilee.” I dubbed 78 my “Big Trombone” year, inspired by the popular Broadway musical The Music Man. Having just celebrated my 77th birthday, I’m now embarking on my “Sunset Strip” year—named for the classic detective drama 77 Sunset Strip that I loved in my youth. Unable to come up with anything clever for 78 and 79, I’ve decided to lump them together as my “DNE” years—Damn Near Eighty.

That acronym makes me giggle and now that I think about it, it is clever! I mean, who wouldn’t rather be DNE than DOA—Dead On Arrival?

Mortality Is the Price of Admission

Ah, mortality! The spectre of it is hard to live with, but you don’t get to live without it. It’s just part of the existential deal.

As my pro-age activist friend, Elizabeth White—author of the best-selling book 55, Underemployed, and Faking Normal—likes to remind me about women over 50: “We are now closer to the exit than we are to the entrance.”

I first took serious notice of the exit sign when my cousin Angie died at the age of 43. In the prime of midlife and in excellent health, her sudden passing shocked me out of the complacency I had settled into during my twenties.

Angie had been the saving grace of my childhood. For the first four years of my life, our families shared a two-flat building on the South Side of Chicago. Angie was a teenager then, and I was her toddler mascot—entertaining her and her friends by mimicking the popular TV performers of the day.

Later, she championed my pre-teen dreams of becoming an actress. Out of her own school librarian’s salary, she paid for my ballet, piano, and drama classes at Roosevelt University’s Saturday program for children. She was the first person who truly made me feel special—and she never stopped encouraging me, even when my parents dismissed my theatrical ambitions as a phase.

But in the time it takes to say, “God, help me, I just can’t take it anymore,” she was gone. Kaput. Finito. Pressured by her mother to stay in an unhappy marriage because it was “the right thing to do,” her prayer was answered—and she died from a brain aneurysm.

From Anti-Aging to Happy Aging: How To Reframe Your Mindset

The Morning That Shifted My World

It was 4:45 a.m. when I got the call. There were no cell phones back then—just a single landline in the living room. After hanging up, I slipped one arm out of my bathrobe sleeve and buried my face in my lap to stifle my sobs, trying not to wake my husband or my son, Chris. It was a trick I had learned in childhood to shield myself from my parents’ constant arguments.

When I looked up, I saw Christopher padding down the hallway into the living room, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The image is frozen in my memory: he wore powder-blue jumpsuit pajamas with a yellow satin bunny down one side and white plastic feet worn thin from washings. He stopped in front of me and stood very still waiting. He had just turned four.

Eventually, I stopped crying.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” he asked. I shuddered. How do you explain death to a four-year-old? But I tried. “Remember Cousin Angie?” I asked. He nodded.

“Remember when she visited last summer with Max, Martin, and Morgan, and we all had such a good time?”He nodded again. “Well, she… she’s… (I paused, at a total loss for words) gone.”

“She’s gone?” he asked. I nodded. “Where did she go?” My heart pounded. I proceeded with caution.

“She’s up in (pause) heaven. See, heaven is the place you go when you (pause) die. Everybody goes there eventually, so it’s not a bad thing. It’s just that (pause)… I won’t get to see Angie again until I get there. And that probably won’t be for a very, very long time. And… I’m really, really going to miss her.”

I held my breath. Christopher stared at me with his big dark eyes—now glinting in the light of the breaking dawn like two little chunks of coal. Slowly, he stepped forward and softly placed his small left hand on my clenched right fist.

“Don’t cry, Mommy,” he said gently. “You have to die so that you can live. Because if you didn’t die, you wouldn’t live.”

Then, like a little Buddha, he turned and walked (not shuffled) back to his room and went to sleep.

The Wisdom We Forget as We Age: Living Fully

I’ve often heard that we come here knowing, and the longer we live, the more we forget. This was a firsthand experience of that truth. Christopher’s tiny hand on mine was electric. He knew something.

His words jolted me into questioning the demoralizing thought patterns and negative conditioning that had to die in my life so that I could truly live.

Getting into therapy was the first of many changes. Learning to say “no” was the second. Seriously pursuing my acting dreams was the third. I won’t list them all, but rest assured—there were many. I tackled them using the “How do you eat an elephant?” Method: one bite at a time.

The moral of this story is simple: What do you need to let die so that you can truly live? Is it a job you hate? A toxic relationship? Your own negative self-talk? Whatever it is that you “just can’t take anymore”—let it go. If you don’t, it might just kill you. But even worse, you’ll die without ever having truly lived.

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