I'm 52 and another peer of mine died a few days ago, a friend a year

younger than me. This makes about the fourth in two years that I know of; middle-aged people, life let them down in many ways, but this girl was beautiful. Prior to this, it's been guys. Drugs, booze, this one is still a mystery. It's been asked, can someone really die from a broken heart?

Anyway, rest in peace, Tricia. :hug:

it's tough to hear about my own.

I'm 52. Got a note from a friend going to my 35 year High School Reunion and telling me of how many have passed away. When I see almost 40% of them gone, it really shocked me! Makes me realize how fragile life really is... Here's a :hug: for you!

Many people die shortly after a spouse, with no real prior health problems. :cry:


I hope you will find peace soon.

Many people who have been married for decades follow each other into That Good Night very closely. I would surmise that number goes up if you factor out people who have been married more than once.

It's a very natural thing. Very sad, but very natural.

Edit: Ignore the ugly man below and accept my deepest sympathies.

Where did the time go??

Anyhow, rest in peace, dear Tricia and a :hug: for babylon.

have died the last 3 years. They were young and had young children. Losing jobs and life pressures do it to you. These are hard and dark days we are going thru. Looking forward to a better future and more stability.

BTW depression kills.

through odd diseases and circumstances.
Each loss wakes me up to this life.

The passings make us more alive
because of our grief and loss
and hopefully we will no longer
take life as a commodity.

I'm sorry for your loss.

Stress kills.

My SO says that if you cannot be an inspiring example, be a horrifying lesson. So here goes.

At forty five I had a stroke and two heart attacks on the same day, two years before that I had my gall bladder perforate and give me peritonitis.

Before all that I had not be diabetic, today I take four shots of insulin a day.

I take four different anti hypertensives. Three medications for chronic nerve pain. I cannot understand speech if there is any noise at all. I have a visual deficit, panic attacks, and I cannot do math anymore.

And I still can't get Social Security to believe I am disabled.
I can't get health insurance.

I think it had to do with those sixty hour weeks, the stress of flying to a different city every week, and solving expensive problems involving software.

And I know it had to do with the stress of being away week after week from my beloved, and feeling our relationship strain against my absence.

Like when my boss canceled our life's dream to visit Europe on vacation for more work...

When I was castigated for having to abandon a contract site to bury my brother...

When I wrote 120 pages of documentation in 4 weeks and was told I was not being productive...

When they sent me to a six week boot camp and I had to pass a certification test on a new product every week to retain my job...

When I thought I was going home, and they sent me across the US for another two weeks of teaching programming...

All that happened in sixteen weeks, and I had the stroke the day I got home. I am a fragile fifty two.

Yes, a broken heart can kill like a glock. Stress can kill like an improvised roadside device.

The moral of this rant. If you can, de-stress your life. I know, many cannot.

Please consider taking a low dose aspirin regimen at the very least. I sincerely wish I had.

I also worked in the IT industry for over 30 years. In September 1999 (remember Y2K) I was handed a 3 month project and had 6 weeks to complete it. OK, one more round of 70 hour weeks, I can do it, I've done it dozens of times in the past. One week later I couldn't read the documentation. I couldn't see the road when driving. I was having trouble speaking. Diagnosis - neurological illness myasthenia gravis. Cure - none. Often brought on by extreme stress. At age 51 I was put on disability by my employer. There are meds that help, and I did get approved for Social Security Disability after the second try.

Your moral - de-stress your life. 1000% correct.

I'd add: and make it easier for people to join unions and get decent working conditions so they don't have to work 70 hour weeks until they break.

and health return!

Really, my heart goes out to you.

Be strong, and keep a handful of hope around at all times.

I think I am one of the best disabled cyclists in the Kansas City area. It is the silver lining of my life, health wise.

Thank you for sharing. I am not stressed, but do wonder about people who die so young without any obvious reasons. Perhaps my friend was more stressed than I ever knew. She'd had lots of personal problems, like her parents dying, a nasty divorce, etc., but who knows?
Take care of yourself, realpolitik. I hope SS comes around.

And that is a good thing for us that you are not stressed.

You do far too much good here for us to lose you.

was she kept getting younger and younger friends! She outlived 3 different sets of card-playing buddies, but was always warm and welcoming to making new friends, even very late in life. I think being around younger people kept her feeling younger, too. Too many seniors wind up dwelling on "who died" or "who's sick" as their peers lose their health.

If only we could all draw inspiration from the likes of Mother Jones!

I remember my Mimi telling me how sad it was to see friends die (before she did), and now my 80-year old dad is doing likewise. I had no idea I'd be bemoaning this part of life at such a 'young' age. :(

:grouphug: to you all.

Hekate

Life is more difficult for those of us over 40 unless we are lucky to have a career which is somehow "tenured" and most of us over 40 do not and we are lucky if we even have some level of consistency in our careers. Add the additional stress of increasing costs of living and the constant worry of possibly not being able to cover it all and you can see the truth behind the warning that stress kills.

And broken hearts do as well at times. Sometimes someone else is all we have to make it all worthwhile. And suddenly, they are gone.

Life under the Republicans the past 28 years has not been that good although during the Clinton years it seemed a little better. We at least had a little hope. And perhaps after November we will have a little hope again.

For most of us, regardless of how old we are, life at times sucks. It's a matter of keeping your head above water while submerged. Something a stalking survivor, as opposed to a stalking victim, told me not long ago. We do survive. Some of us do anyway.

It's hard to lose a friend. As we get older, it gets harder to lose them. Been there, and am still doing that.

can be very injurious. I have survived some grim events but another factor is that I was toughened by a rather Dickensian childhood which makes me mourn lost friends and dear ones while I continue to struggle along anyway. A study of philosophy has also helped as well as an intense curiousity to see how things turn out. Actually there are a lot of things that keep us going and some are decidely more honorable than others!

It really does.

All you can do is get up every day, smell the roses and remember the good things about those now gone.:hug:

:hug:

I'm in my mid forties, and my group of friends from college have already lost a couple people. Our grip on life is so tentative and fragile. I wish we'd spend our lives pursuing Arts and Sciences and give up this endless pursuit of wealth and power, which serves only to drive our collective stress level sky-high and makes the vast majority of us very unhappy.

I'm also 52...and I've lost several close friends in recent years or seen several go through some very rough changes. I try to justify that this is part of how life works and that when you're 20 or even 30, death and incapacity are things that happen to others. Many abused their health thinking they could "fix" things later or tried to avoid their own mortality.

Also our generation has had to endure a crumbling health system. Most have either had no insurance or were under-insured...and medical care now is like a cattle call for most, another reason to try to ignore a health problem rather than confront it. My father was a General Practioner...my childhood memories are full of late night phone calls and house calls to patients...people didn't hesitate to call. In the end, my father closed his practice when he was 84 and still had a good number of patients who were older than him. The bonds remained strong...but it's something very alien to our generation.

Can someone die from a broken heart? Most definitely. I think the best example of that is the statistic of the elderly that when one spouse in a long-term realtionship passes, the other will follow within a year. I've seen how stress and lonliness have made people bitter and that affects their outlook on life and ability or desire to fight an illness.

May your friend rest in peace...growing old ain't fun...especially for a generation that grew up never trusting anyone over 30 and thinking we'd live forever.

Cheers...

realize. :hug: fucking serial killers.

Take care and breath deep. Yes people do die of broken hearts, but it need not be so. I wish for you peace of heart and mind. It is so hard to lose our friends. I've lost so many so young, and I feel with you.
Peace

and my condolences to you. I truly believe that we are going to the Doctors less and less due to medical costs and just surviving has become a priority. Many middle-class americans just can't afford the check-ups needed in order maintain better health. Not to mention how many can't go do to no insurance.
I had a friend who was 45 who had a stroke on mothers day at her job. She had high blood pressure and was on medications but do to no insurance I'm sure she was not seeing the Dr. like she should. She was life flighted from her waitress job and was in intensive care for three days in a coma...and then told they could do nothing. She was on life support with no insurance the family was told there was nothing more that could be done. Two days later I was reading her obituary. Not all of us have Dick Cheney Insurance.

him to let them know; only to realize everyone I knew who also knew him have already died. A very strange feeling.

I had a good friend from my high school write that he wasn't paying sufficient
attention to his high cholesterol. He dropped dead from a heart attack a month
later while playing soccer in Spain. He was 38.

A good friend of my wife's got cancer at 36. She wad dead two days after her 38th
birthday. She smoked like a fiend and took birth control pills. We used to chide
her that statistics showed that women who took the pill and smoked were over 20
times as likely to develop breast cancer as women who didn't smoke. She used to
laugh at us until she got one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer. She
was beautiful and intelligent, but never kicked her addiction. She also lost her
husband to suicide a few years earlier. This guy never got over the death of his
mom, and never figured out how good he had it. Men descended on his widow like
flies to honey, but never the right one, and she might well also have listed a
broken heart as her cause of death as well as cancer.

For that matter, at age 52, I almost dropped dead of a heart attack, and only
prevented it because I sought out a cardiologist on a hunch that I might have
something. I did have something, like 2 anterior coronary arteries that were 99%
blocked, and I was hours away from a possible fatal heart attack. I never had one
(yet) but that was dumb luck.

On the other hand, my maternal grandfather lived to 102. I called him from Europe
to ask if he had time to receive us for a visit when he was a "mere" 101. He answered
with his usual humor, "Of course I have time. Everyone else is dead!"

At least with the taxes, you know to expect them.........

:cry: