Some years I ago, while speaking on the topic of age and aging with a friend who had recently retired after a forty-four year school teaching career, I was told, "If you can get through your fifties without any chronic health problems, you're laughing."
I thought a lot about this in the weeks and months that followed, noting those who, in their fifties, suddenly announced that they had to take insulin or statins or any number of drugs pertinent to a chronic condition. I thought also about something I said in advance of what my friend said, where I quoted the shockingly high death rate among school teachers within the first five years of their retirement, wondering if I had brought on his comment -- in the form of a curse!
For me, now in my early-mid-fifties, the condition is hypothyroid, for which I take thyroxine.
At bottom is a passage near the end of the opening section of V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987), where the nameless narrator (Naipaul was in his early-fifties when he started the book) falls into a choking fit while reflecting on the life and work of his former neighbour Jack on a walk past Jack's old farm. Eventually the fit subsides, only to return full-force that night, making him "seriously ill."
"This was the illness that did away with whatever remained of youthfulness in me (and much had remained), diminished my energy and pushed me week by week, during my convalescence, month by month, into middle age." (83)
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