One month after what would have been my fifth wedding anniversary, my divorce became final. At that point I'd been separated from my wife, now ex-wife, for nearly seven months. I was almost exactly your age at the time, Eric, but I didn't begin to feel old for another five years. Hitting forty wasn't such a terrible thing for me, mostly because I hadn't expected to live that long. After the failure of my marriage, I suffered from deep depression and anxiety which very nearly drove me to suicide.
The person who kept me going, who gave me a reason to live and love in the wake of my divorce, is why I survived beyond thirty-nine. At forty-three, a mere week before I was to pack up my entire life and move eight hundred miles to be with her, she had a change of heart which she could not, would not explain to me. Apart from the emotional devastation (my ex-wife had ended our marriage similarly), I was faced with an apartment I couldn't afford on my own any longer and dwindling finances.
I was also without work during the worst recession in Michigan history. I struggled to get by for perhaps eight months before poverty and eviction left me facing life on the streets. Now I'm forty-five, I live in someone's basement and have no life, no job, no money, no future. I've felt old for about a year and a half, and once again suicide has begun to look good. I survived Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas and New Year's alone, which is promising, but part of me still wants to wander off into the wilderness so I can die with dignity.
I feel like someone twice my age... all my friends and family gone, ready for the burden of life to end... and I don't like it.
“In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
-- Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy