We are, indeed, at the age when shit happens. This year that just passed, here’s a pretty shitty litany:

•        I almost died from a heart attack.

•        A friend of almost 40 years did die, partly from a heart attack, partly from internal bleeding when he fell and wasn’t discovered for days.

•        A very energetic friend—same age, of course—fainted in the street and had to have surgery for a previously undiscovered genetic heart condition.

•        A friend who was minding her own business got run over by a car in a supermarket parking lot and was knocked unconscious for several days.

•       A friend who swims and dances was in the cardiac intensive care unit and on a ventilator with the sudden onset of takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome.

      There’s more, alas, but you get the idea. The surprising thing about all this is that … well, maybe there’s nothing surprising because what do you expect when you get to a certain age?

      Sure, good stuff also happens when you get older: grandchildren get born, long-planned trips get taken, family reunions are held, interesting new websites are launched. Days can and frequently are filled with joy and accomplishment and, maybe, if we’re lucky, restorative naps. Plus, we’re at an age where some of us can do what we want when we want and how we want. We’re no longer beholden to restrictive schedules or exacting deadlines or relentless ambition.

      Still, at this age, we don’t suddenly get healthier.

      If we get phone calls in the middle of the night, it’s not to tell us that a relative just aced his stress test. When we receive a hastily-dictated text message, it’s not announcing that a friend just completed yet another marathon.

      Instead, we get emails telling us that so-and-so slipped and broke a hip or fractured an ankle or had to go to the emergency room because of a cold that had turned into a cough that had become pneumonia that just wouldn’t go away. We get telephone calls explaining that the spinal surgery didn’t quite work and another operation is planned. We get together for lunch and listen to stories about trips and falls and still more sessions of PT and rehab and knee replacements and antibiotics and pre-cancerous this and pre-diabetes that.

      More and more, our conversations, according to one friend, have become a kind of organ recital as our bodies continue to deteriorate, no matter how many stories and books we read about increased longevity and healthy aging and making it to 100. It happens no matter how determined we are to hit the gym and practice what we learned in Pilates class and eat less red meat.

      No matter how hard we try, the arthritis that started when we fell a few years ago and broke a wrist continues to worsen. The stiffness in the back, maybe from years of leaning over a desk, gets a bit worse. The trip up the stairs becomes more challenging. The blood pressure inches up while the bone density trends downward.

      And then, at our age, one day, real shit happens. It isn’t, really, unexpected.