THE MIDLIFE CRISIS? TRY THE THREEQUARTER-LIFE QUANDARY.

Black men's life expectancy is short, thanks to history. At 49, am I on the downslope?

- mitchell s. jackson

THE CLOSE OF A DECADE! THE ADVENT OF A TOO-SWIFT descent!? The week before I turned 49, I lay on the bed of a Dexa Body Scan machine, a contraption that measured my body fat, lean muscle, weight, and BMI. The week before I turned 49, an optometrist broke the news that my astigmatism had worsened to the point that bifocals would help. Don’t worry, they make them now where you can’t see the bifocal lenses, she tried to assure me. The week I turned 49, I got a physical and told my doctor that I’d developed a nagging pain in my shoulder to accompany the chronic pain in my groin, that the muscles in the sole of my right foot seized on the regular. The week I turned 49, I ended months of procrastination by completing the paperwork for my living will and trust. But of course it forced me to assess my lesser-than-they-should-be assets. What I hadn’t predicted, though, was the dread of filling out a durable health-care power-of-attorney form (autopsy? organ donation?); ditto for the morbid angst of DNR and end-of-life elections. (Did I want my life prolonged if diagnosed with a terminal condition? And if so, for how long and in what ways?)

My God!

Ever since I was knee-high to grown folks, soon as I turned an age, I’d contemplate the next one. Turn nine, what will ten feel like? Turn 21, how underwhelming will 22 feel, how overwhelming 25? On trend, no sooner than I turned 45 did I begin imagining the big 5-0.

Like the masses, I’d been indoctrinated to view 50 as the arrival of middle age, maybe the most important milestone in all of grown-ass-manhood and, as such, the primest age for commemoration.