This is the inevitable thread for ILxors in their forties

(My parents are around 70 and in excellent health but sheesh.)

(Sheesh at life not DJP)

I keep looking at all of the celebrity deaths where the celebrities in question were younger than my parents and cringing

Significant aging benchmarks for a sports fan are when you are older than the oldest players retiring and now older than many coaches being hired.

Tom Brady is younger than me.

Super Bowl Sunday, we were all "Well, damn. Brett Favre must've been like 47 when he retired."

Nope. That old goat was 41 when he played his last game.

I am forty. My sadness at this age is regret for the time I wasted on a stupid career (screenwriting) that fed my ego but not soul, and how my ambition in that career meant that I didn’t properly celebrate my successes.The joy of this age is finding little domestic pleasures everywhere, which sum up to something like contentment.

I know the next decade will be tough, as my older relatives die off. However, as I am watching work them through chronic illnesses now, I recognize that death is not the incomprehensible, total loss that I once thought it would be.

I keep looking at all of the celebrity deaths where the celebrities in question were younger than my parents and cringing

is it weird that one of the biggest reasons I've aspired to a successful long-term romantic relationship is so I wouldn't be alone when my parents die?

if it's weird, I am weird with you.

right? I'm going to need someone to cope with the wreck that I'll be.

I'm an only child so it's like .... worse? I do have a cousin that I'm close to though.

Both of my wife's parents are dead, and so is my dad. It was rougher when it was her folks (I didn't like my dad and he didn't like me). Especially her mom, who died of stomach cancer when my wife was in her early thirties, way too young to be losing a parent. Her dad lived another decade or so, then died of a whole bunch of things — emphysema, stomach problems, pancreatitis/diabetes, just kind of total bodily collapse over the course of several months. It was ugly and prolonged. My dad was a diabetic, and one day he suffered bleeding on his brain and went into a coma he never came out of. My stepmother pulled the plug on him on Valentine's Day, and I've never been sure whether that was a gesture of kindness or a fuck-you. (I haven't spoken to her since his death.)

My father died in 2008 after a month in hospital, my mother in 2019 after more than a decade with on-and-off lymphoma.
I worried a lot beforehand about their deaths, as a kid, as a teen, as an adult. Actually going through the experience is different than the fear of it, though. I found that dealing with the particulars of the situation is easier than fearing the unknown.
Also, as I mentioned above, it will give different perspectives to your own life.

the one takeaway from caring for my mother after a near fatal stroke: have your finances in order. i'm not going to say dealing with the financial mess she had going on was as upsetting as the stroke itself. but it was close.

if it's weird, I am weird with you

co-sign, whatever old age is I really would not like to face it alone, especially after this past year

I am ineligible for this thread but have perspective on sick/dying parents, i like remys takeaway and some of what halfway there but for you's experience chimes with my own in re the particulars carrying you along

Morbid to suggest a thread hey :/

Tehre is an "ageing parents" thread somewhere.

xp That's horrible, and I'm so sorry to hear it! This is a huge topic I'm always up to discuss. I'm having minimal symptoms/side effects but I'm also only mid-way through. If there's enough interest, should we start a thread?

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Monday, 22 February 2021 21:06 (three days ago)

would totally join this thread if it exists

fyi colette: There Will Not Be Blood: What Menopause Means to You

thanks ledge, I missed that!

This, then, can remain the male menopause thread.

Porter geezer men o pause

cholesterol was 252. got put on crestor temporarily.

weirdly, the LDL number was only 125, but I guess stuff like VLDL bumped the non-HDL number significantly higher.

I'm also heavier than I've ever been (217 pounds). I weighed 135 when I graduated high school, and I'm 6'0.

guess it's time to lay off the chips and cookies.

I have similar body (and wallet woes) of late.

Two visits. First, thanks to a heavily blocked right ear that refused to clear despite roughly four gallons of olive oil, to an audiologist who cleared it and charged me £95 for the bother. Second, to the optician, after some fatigue and headaches in the last month, to find out my prescription has changed markedly, I need varifocals and that'll be £365 for the two pairs thanks very much please bend over.

i'm not 40 yet but one of the weird ways i'm older than i should be is that i've already mourned the loss of my parents. i don't think watching them die will be sad for ne, other than bringing up old trauma and being logistically tiring. in many other ways i am still a child though.

I've worn glasses since I was 17, but having to get progressive lenses (I assume that is what varifocals are) was such a drag (not as much as not being able to read).

yyyyyeah, i'm sticking to taking my glasses off for the moment but this is a bummer

Oddly enough -- but in a way I can live with -- my doctor said it would be simpler for me just to have more than one pair! So I have my 'regular' reading glasses for every day, computer work and so forth, but when it comes to reading books I use a separate pair.

(And I've had glasses since I was like four or so, so this was no skin off my nose either way.)

I mean its probably cumulatively an enormous pile of skin off yr nose tbf

Ned, I did the multiple pairs of glasses thing for a few years (one for distance,one for reading,one for computer work,one for eating) until I also got sunglasses versions of distance and reading and that was one too many to deal with. To train my eyes/brain for multifocal lenses I started with lined bifocals, then moved to progressive lenses.

Ha, funnily enough I'm strongly considering the sunglasses route myself, just because. I think I can manage for the most part but we'll see. I also kinda like varying it up since that means having fun with multiple frames...

My only glasses right now are an "office pair." Computer on the top, reading on the bottom. Took some getting used to but now I love them and cannot function without them.

I still don’t need glasses for anything, fear my mutant power

Oh so you're the guy

I need glasses to drive as of a few years ago -- but just for one eye. ... did not fancy a monocle.

They’re due for a comeback

i mean ... maybe I could combine it with the Marlene Dietrich / weimar dapper cabaret style ... 1930s fashion is definitely on the rise

Grandad wore a monocle, he was born in 1903 however.

I've somehow managed to stretch a prescription from like, prior to a year ago through the last year. I think I had leftover contact lenses from prior to last year, and I keep reminding myself I need to go to the eye doctor, as my 'backup glasses' disappeared 3 years ago

I get motion sickness from all sorts of things (motion, mainly) so I'm assuming I'm going to feel really rough getting used to varifocals. Better than headaches, probably.

Chinaski - I don't have that problem, but I picked mine up on a Friday afternoon and that evening was ready to take them back - going down stairs in particular was hairy - but by the end of the weekend my eyes had completely adjusted. You will be surprised how quickly and automatically your brain adjusts.

Losing eyesight is so annoying. I'm nearsighted so I've worn glasses and contacts forever, but in the past two years I can't see the little print anymore--that is, print that I used to be able to read looks so little to me now. I bought a pair of reading glasses to wear over my contacts but they give me a headache. Last year the optometrist suggested that I get some updated form of more expensive contacts (bifocal/trifocal I can't remember) but I told him I'd rather wait. I think this year I will have to bite the bullet though.

Cheers PBKR that's really good to hear.

I'm 40 and I'm not sure how it happened. I remember a friend of my parents turning 40, and she was a proper grown up woman with a husband and kids and a house and they ran a golf club. A GOLF CLUB ffs. And she taught me the flute and played tennis on the weekends with my mum.

I really am not that person. In fact it feels like my life has been one of arrested development, either through lack of want to grow up or lack of open doors. Things like mortgages just haven't been as easy to access as they were for my parents. My dad was able to buy his first flat in his mid-life twenties before meeting my mum.

Still, perhaps it's a trade-off. I don't feel forty in the same way as my patents' aforementioned friend. I'm eating better and exercising more than I did in my early thirties, and if anything I feel healthier and more sprightly than ever before. Fingers crossed, I'm not experiencing any of the usual woes of ageing; bad knees, eyesight, thinning hair etc, and I'm thankful for that.

Lockdown has been a grind, but it's meant that rather than dolefully visiting the gym on my way home from work twice a week, I now look forward to getting out of my house and going for runs. I listen to online courses on my runs, so I feel like I'm getting fitter and smarter at the same time.

I just sometimes wish I felt more grown-up in mindset so I could assert myself a bit better in achieving all the things I want as a mature person.

I can't remember exactly when I went from feeling too young to be a proper grown up to feeling like I'm too old to be a "young person". Perhaps I feel both ways right now. Perhaps this is it.

Sorry for typos, maybe getting a better phone would open more doors for me

I have a wife and kids and a house (though for a long time - till i was in my forties! - i thought I wouldn't) and I don't feel like that person. I don't run a golf club though, maybe if I did I would. Or is it the other way round, do you have to be that kind of person to run golf clubs?

I was going into a rage the other day because I couldn't even read the tiny instructions on some washing machine cleaner fluid and then was even struggling to read it with my reading glasses on and shining an led torch onto the writing and cursing and shouting - it was like when you have an eye test and the optician puts up letters that are so tiny they might as well be ants. For goodness sake the fucking text needs to be much larger you ageist, ableist wankers at Dettol packaging design.

Xp well.. I have a house, it's just not mine. These friends of my parents were likely fairly well off, but not sure of their backgrounds really. Still, I don't think it was unusual for someone like my dad to have been the sole owner of a flat at his age. Being able to afford a mortgage certainly affects other life decisions that push one into the normative model of adulthood

Then again I don't think such a model was one I ever wanted to follow. I didn't have a particularly unhappy upbringing, but the comfy suburban family lifestyle wasn't something I ever really coveted since that was what I'd always known till I was ready to leave home