Extreme Adulting

The last couple of months have been rough.

My dad and a couple of friends have died.

It makes you think.

You think about your own place in the world and you contemplate your relationship with the people who are still living.

As part of the contemplation process I'm trying to be spontaneous, go with the flow and get in touch with old friends.  This isn't easy, as I'm exhausted.  I go to the High Street for coffee, planning to pop to the bank before I come home but when reality kicks in I'm too tired after talking to people for a while and going to the bank doesn't seem very important.

The Long Suffering Husband was nagging about booking a holiday (he's always thinking about holidays). It became a bit of an issue. I snapped, cried and we booked a short break in Dorset a few days before we left.  The day before, he mentioned that we were driving past my friends' house.  When you haven't seen someone for two years is it acceptable to invite yourself to stay the day before you arrive?

Luckily, I have friends that are exceptionally good hosts at a moment's notice.  They even had tea and coffee making facilities in the spare room and a dog bowl, despite not owning a dog.

People say that the sign of true friendship is that you can not see someone for years and still have things to talk about.  Within a few minutes we were talking as we used to at college.  We were looking words up in the dictionary (Calceiform - I remembered it!), discussing the state of the world and laughing about life. We had discussed Brexit, motorbikes, the depressing play for today, socks, cars, exhaust systems and our children with the kind of eye-rolling resignation parents in their fifties have about the life choices of their new adults that they still feel responsible for. Our children are 'adulting'. They are trying out adult activities for the first time: travelling on their own, renting a flat, paying bills, doing their own laundry.  They are doing the things we take for granted; the things we have been doing for so long that we've forgotten how difficult they were the first time.

My friends are also recently bereaved (a favourite Aunt) and have been dealing with her estate.  They suggested that the jobs around a death should be described as 'extreme adulting.' It's the BMX racing to popping to the shops on your sit-up-and-beg bike with the basket on the front.  The list of extreme adulting tasks include filling out a probate form, talking to a bereavement officer at a bank who can't say the word 'dead',  reading the inheritance tax literature, paying a solicitor's bill, choosing music for a funeral, writing a eulogy, taking out a mortgage to pay for funeral flowers and organising a party where the guest of honour is missing.

It has started me wondering, though, if there is another level to look forward to when we reach our seventies.  If adulting is sport and extreme adulting is extreme sport, do we have the deadly adulting to look forward to.  I remember reading about the rise in popularity of extreme sports that are killing people.  The man who paracuted into the London Olympics dressed as James Bond died in a wingsuit accident and Russians are taking parkour to extremes that are killing grandmaster chess champions by the dozen.  These 'deadly adulting' tasks could be things like learning to drive a mobility scooter or negotiating the correct dosage of pain relief.

That's something to look forward to.