THE CORE OF THE MID-LIFE CRISIS AND ITS CATALYST: DEATH

Enrico Banducci is not alone in his reactions. “You hear so much about deaths that seem premature,” one man comments soberly. “Time is now a two-edged sword,” another observes. “To some of my friends it acts as a prod; to others, a brake.”1

These comments reflect a painful reality: The realization that one is mortal is at the core of the mid-life crisis and frequently its catalyst as well.

“The simple fact of the situation is the arrival at the midpoint of life,” says British psychoanalyst Elliot Jaques. “What is simple from the point of view of chronology, however, is not simple psychologically.”2 The most disturbing paradox, he explains, is that just when a man reaches the prime of life he is also forced to recognize that this time of fulfillment is limited—beyond it is death.

“The awareness that time is finite is a particularly conspicuous feature of middle age,” states Bernice L. Neugarten, who chairs the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago, where more than two thousand adults have participated in extensive studies. “Life is restructured in terms of time-left-to-live rather than time-since-birth,”3 she says.

Significantly, Neugarten found than men talk about this changing time perspective more often than women do, and experience it differently. The onset of middle age is usually perceived by women in terms of events within the family circle, most commonly children leaving home. For men, however, the cues are picked up from the outside world. The first signal often comes, as it did to Enrico Banducci, from the deferential behavior of younger people at work—the door suddenly held open, the package suddenly carried.

Men generally respond to this new awareness of fleeting time by becoming more concerned with their body. They refer to biological changes and health concerns far more frequently than women do, says Neugarten, and regard them as important “age markers.” Too, they express their fear of aging by giving anxious attention to their physical functioning—”body monitoring.” Women, on the other hand, become more preoccupied with their husband’s health than with their own.

“While these issues take the form of a new sense of physical vulnerability in men, they take the form of ‘rehearsal for widowhood’ in women,” Neugarten says bluntly. “Women are more concerned over the body-monitoring of their husbands than of themselves.”