Middle ages

I keep forgetting, often, that I am now in that place between old and young. I know that many people in my life think of me as a "baby," but there are many, many others who I now think of as really young.

I'm planning a trip for next year to Denmark. I will be 40 when I am there. The last 10 years have been incredibly fast, it seems. And things are good and I am hopeful that they will only continue to get better.

But things are also getting more edgy, if you will. My mother had her first heart attack when she was 41 and open heart surgery a year later. She's now almost 70 and, I learned yesterday, needs to have a knee replacement surgery.

I've had my firsts...first grey hair, first wrinkles, first hot flash...and I can acknowledge that I'm pretty firmly in the peri-menopause camp.

And I am at the point where I am wondering what I really want to get out of the next years of my life.

I watched a very depressing documentary tonight about what happens to people who die without next of kin. First off, ewww! There were some really unsavory scenes involving corpses that I was better off not knowing about. I'm not sure how people work in morgues.

There is a pretty fair probability that I will die without immediate next of kin. So this really brought home to me the need to have plans about what I want done after my death. But I'm a little sad that it may be true that I could have limited community toward the end. As an introvert, I'm going to work harder on cultivating that community.

I feel like I'm getting macabre in this post, but I do seem to be much more concious that I don't have all the time in the world anymore. I'm not going to drastically change my life, but I do feel a need to evaluate what I want and how I might go about getting that.

Not much to say beyond that tonight. Sleep well, blogland.