Turning 48 While Writing About Death Feels Appropriate

Mortality math, midlife hormones, and the absurd beauty of staying alive

Honestly, birthdays are a little morbid if you really think about them. You gather everyone you love, they stare at you, sing something strange and off-key, then you blow out fire and feed them cake. It’s not that far off from a funeral, if we’re being real. Just with better lighting.

At 48, the absurdity starts to hit different. The body does things now. Weird things. A hip aches for no reason. A word vanishes mid-sentence and refuses to come back. My hormones are auditioning for experimental theater, and my nervous system seems to be stuck on a loop that says, “Is that a heart attack or just gas?”

I went looking for answers this year. Labs, scans, late-night rabbit holes. I’ve got charts. I’ve got color-coded supplements. I’ve got a blood sugar monitor, a full Notion symptom tracker, and a dedicated document titled “The Vibe Is Off.”

All roads led to the same shrug from every professional: normal aging.

Which is somehow both comforting and infuriating.

I wasn’t looking for immortality, just something I could fix. Some neat and tidy solution that would let me feel like myself again. But apparently, this is myself now. This tired, forgetful, occasionally wobbly version with a very expensive supplement cabinet and a Notion app full of symptoms.

Some days, I feel like I’m living in a haunted house that used to be my body. Something creaks, something flickers, and nobody else seems that concerned. They call it perimenopause. I call it a full-scale system reboot with no instructions and terrible customer service.

There are moments when I grieve how sharp I used to feel. How fast my mind could work when it wasn’t busy buffering. There are moments when I’m terrified I’ll forget something important and not even know it. Seriously, just three days ago, I went to fill up my water bottle only to find it was filled to the rim. I have been replaying that morning in my head for THREE days, trying to remember when I filled it and even contemplating the idea that I have a water fairy trying to help me meet my daily hydration quota. Honestly, this is one of those moments that pop into your head for years to come. I can promise you I will be sitting on the toilet in a couple of years, trying to figure out how that bottle got filled on the morning of September 14th, 2025.

And then there are moments when I laugh so hard I nearly pee a little. Which, for the record, is also normal aging. Sneezing and coughing are also two things I try to avoid for the same reason.

So yes, I’m 48. I’m writing about death. And I’ll be eating cake later with digestive enzymes like a responsible adult.

Because I’ve started doing the math. Not in a morbid way, but in the way people do when they’ve lost enough to know there are no guarantees. If I get as many years as my mom did, I have six left. If I get more, I want them to count. If I get fewer, I want to know I didn’t spend them Googling “early dementia or just tired.”

It’s not that I think I’m dying. It’s that I know I will, eventually.
And there’s something about being this age, this exact stretch of late 40s, that makes death feel a little closer. In a very intimate way.

I think about how many years I’ve lived already.
I think about what I’ve done with them.
I think about how many were spent inside someone else’s idea of who I should be.
How many were spent hustling for approval, spinning in anxiety, grinding my body down for other people’s gain.

I can’t change that. But I can stop now.

Bone & Bloom is where I tell the truth about grief, aging, anxiety, and all the weird beauty of being a still-living human. It would be a lovely birthday gift to have you follow along as a subscriber. It’s free!

That’s what this birthday feels like. A pause. A choice. A moment where I look at the second half of my life, however long it is, and ask: What do I actually want this to look like?

What do I want to be known for?
Who do I still want to become?
What am I tired of performing just to stay palatable?

I don’t want to spend the rest of my time trying to outrun my mortality.
I want to be present inside it.

That’s the strange thing about this work I do.
I talk about death for a living, and still, it sneaks up on me in new ways.
Not in the hospital rooms or the advance directive conversations.
In the mirror. In my memory. In the way my joints respond to stairs.

Mortality doesn’t always arrive with sirens. Sometimes it shows up as a calendar reminder to refill your blood pressure meds.

And still. There’s a kind of freedom in it.

Once you accept you’re not going to live forever, you stop wasting time pretending you’ve got time to waste.

I’ve started letting go of the things that never really mattered.
And I’ve started holding tighter to the ones that do, even when they’re small and ordinary and don’t look like much from the outside.

A quiet morning. A ridiculous meme. A really good peach.
Someone saying “I remember you told me that,” and meaning it.
The soft weight of a cat across my legs at 2 a.m., when I can’t sleep.

This is what I want to remember when I forget the big stuff.
Not whether I accomplished enough.
But whether I noticed it while it was happening.

I don’t have a big takeaway this week. No grand birthday wisdom.

Just this: I’m still here. Still figuring it out. Still writing it down.

And this year, I’m celebrating with cake, an ice pack, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing I remembered all my passwords.

Which, frankly, feels like a win.

Love today,

Heather 🌸