Midlife

My wife and I joke that we don’t want to live in a world where Harrison Ford gets old.

But Harrison Ford is getting old and he’s not the only one. Here in “midlife,” people who were “always there” are starting to not be there anymore.

For the first time in my life, I can’t deny that a time is coming when everyone who was “always there” won’t be there at all.

I see a world coming that is empty of the people who made my world.

On the night before I graduated from Christian college, I hung out with a buddy of mine who lived next door to me in the dorm. We rode around town in his Chevy pickup truck. We talked about what we were going to do with the grownup lives we were about to begin. I had a job lined up at a Fortune 500 company. He had a scholarship to go to grad school. He wanted to be an English professor at the same Christian college that would give us our degrees the next day.

Five weeks later, he drowned.

My Christian teachers taught me that God would take care of people who walk “the straight and narrow.” What is more “straight and narrow” than wanting to be an English professor at a Christian college?

I flew down for my friend’s funeral. I don’t remember much about it. What I do remember is sitting alone in my hotel room a few hours later.

I sat in a chair and stared at the carpet. Words came out: “God, how?”

I couldn’t make sense of my friend’s death, so I told myself it was a glitch.

Just a glitch.

But in “midlife,” those “glitches” are getting awfully common. Awfully normal.

A few weeks ago, my childhood best friend took his own life.

As boys, we played in make-believe worlds of wonder.

As a man, he stopped believing he could go on wandering in this world.

For another dear friend, cancer is turning “midlife” into the end of life. I do not want to imagine what it is like to think about my son’s class party at the same time that I am thinking about my own funeral.

I could go on. Family and friends are dying more often.

I feel my own body trending that way.

This is “midlife.”

We joke about “midlife crisis,” but it’s no joke. And I don’t think we should call it “midlife crisis”; we should call it “midlife grief.”

A crisis is a problem we can solve; there is no way to solve grief.

“Midlife” is the start of grief that will grow until it takes all that I have.

In my 20s, I punched a wall and broke my hand. I broke it so bad that they could not set the bones straight again. I met with a surgeon. He told me he could fix the bones in my hand, but that fixing the bones could ruin the tendons that make my fingers move. So I let the bones in my hand set as I broke them. Today, I have full use of my hand, but it is deformed.

That is what grief is like.

Our “always there” people die. We go on living without them, but life is deformed. Every move we make reminds us of what we lost.

The biggest loss of all is the loss of myself.

Of all the “always there” people in my life, I am “always there” all the time. In “midlife,” I can see a time when even I will not be “always there” anymore.

I am grieving the “me” I dreamed I would be someday. In “midlife,” “someday” is here and I am not who I thought I would be. The “me” of my dreams dies in “midlife.” It’s too late for him now.

I am a walking mausoleum filling up with the bones of my youthful dreams.

“Midlife” is grief. It is when I face that life will be grief from here on out.

Youth is its own gospel. All it needs is dreams because it has all the time in the world to make them come true.

But in “midlife,” I need a different gospel. I need a gospel that does not come from having plenty of time or a young body.

In “midlife,” I need a Gospel like this one:

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you will also be revealed with him in glory. (Colossians 3:2-4)

Grace and peace.