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a friend of mine from middle and high school passed away last week, liver failure, 50 years young. He is survived by his wife and 3 daughters, the oldest is 12
a very good friend and former colleague died unexpectedly from a heart attack in october, age 65. Very fit and active, swam daily, in his 30s he ran marathons under 3 hours, qualified for the boston marathon before turning 40.
Both were unexpected and shocking, in the case of my middle school friend, I had no idea he had liver problems.
I fully understand it. My friend was my "best friend" (sounds odd saying that as mid-50s man), but we shared a real brotherly relationship. A combo of full-on-acceptance paired with complete honesty that siblings share....so when he died it felt very isolating.
About a month or so after he died I had a very very vivid dream concerning him. One of those dreams where you wake really feeling like you just had a real conversation with someone....in the dream we were both sitting on the floor smoking cigarettes talking (we had long each given up smoking in our late 30s but in the dream we were still smoking)....we were talking about his death...very matter-of-factly ...he looked at me, pointing his cigarette towards me to make a point and said "YOU have to let me go....you gotta stop dwelling on this and just move forward". I woke up instantly feeling like it was really something he would say....and in a strange sense it did help me move on. I felt like I got that "one final conversation in".
Did you watch Six Feet Under (HBO)?
Not saying you should watch the entire 5th season but you should watch the last 20 minutes of the finale
edit: your story reminded me of Six Feet Under scenes, I think you did channel a few scenes!
Pretty scary, i suppose. My dad has cirrhosis of the liver, lifestyle-related, but i suppose statistically, the higher the decade, the more likely it is for people to start dropping , stlill a shock tho
definitely jarring
Great reply. I have a decade on you. I wish I could organize my thoughts better about this, but I lost two of my best friends in 2025, I lost another friend last week, and just got the news yesterday that another one of my oldest, closest friends is going into hospice. You kind of summed up my feelings.
i resonate with this, luckily i always valued spending time with the family and kids as soon as they were born, zero regrets.
20s for me were not super great in terms of career building, but man i traveled so much and had so many adventures, my passwort was full of stamps. once i had kids the travel stopped basically and my friends are in different countries now, but im super glad i got to do what i did, when i did. i would like to pick it up again when the kids are a bit older
Time compression is a real phenomenon. Mentally I pretty much feel like I'm mid-30s, but I'm actually 20 years older.
Looking back I would say my "hardest" decade was 20s. It was a time of starting with nothing, feeling fairly desperate, unsure what to do...then even when trying to "start my career" (whatever that really means), having to start at absolute bottom....being single after broken up with college GF, etc...the grand combo of personal + professional challenges all happen simultaneously. College was a better experience then most of my 20s and it all felt like a big let down....
Certainly as you get older (40s +) death becomes a looming issue. Parents and family start to die off....the feeling can be very isolating. Your world gets smaller and smaller. You realize that you're not going to make anymore "best friends". It gets weird, like you see that the world you grew up in literally begin to fade away (not just social changes, but people and institutions that shaped you disappear)...its monumental when these things happen. My best friend died we were in our early 40s (sudden heart attack), I would find myself sometimes googling his name afterwards, each time surprised there wasn't more written about him. My world had completely changed, a cornerstone had disappeared, but to the rest of the world it was just a small obituary in a home town newspaper...
At the same time there is a great freedom entering into your 50s. My parents each made it to their 80s and I hope and pray I can also. Seeing the end of the road up in the distance forces you to focus.
There becomes a real freedom in that. You start prioritizing your life in different ways. You blow off email proposals, requests for meetings, etc in ways that you never would've in your 30s. You stop looking at your work in the same way, it certainly stops becoming really defining of "who you are".
You do so because you realize "this idea they are pitching me is a 10 year idea....I don't have 10 years to spare trying to be part of this", so you pass. You start to realize that the most important things are all family related: A good dinner with the family (when the kids are home from college / work) is more enjoyable then sitting in another meeting with everyone talking about how much money we are going to make.
Personally I find more day-to-day satisfaction in my 50s then in previous decades. At the very same time I'm very often surprised that "another year has gone", the years start feeling like they fly by.