HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: Generation X is entering our season of loss.

Get a notebook, she said.

Write down all the years you have left. 

Leave a few lines between them. 

How many pages did you fill? 

A shiver slithered up my arm. Why would I do that? I asked. 

To see how finite it all is. To focus the mind. To prioritise. To get things done.

These were the words of a wise woman I spoke to recently, and I can't stop thinking about it. It's become, along with Harry Styles' new haircut and Gwyneth Paltrow's poo cottage, my new Roman Empire.

Generation X are ageing. We are — according to our strict demographics — between the ages of 44 and 59, and we are in the thick of our second acts. You know what happens in second acts? A lot. 

If the first act sets things up, and the third act ties things up, the middle part is the meaty middle, where plot moves at pace.

You know how it works. Adventure and misadventure. Triumphs and troughs. Love and loss. 

We are in the era when stakes are high, and anything can happen.

And some of us don't make it to act three. You know how that works, too.

Watch: A Beginner's Guide to Grief. Post continues below.

So Generation X are learning about loss. If we were lucky enough to have had our elders around us as we grew, we're now in the heat of facing the limited lines they have left in that notebook. Or dealing with the reality of reaching their end. After decades of building our circles, they are now wide enough to have touched tragedy. And although we (hopefully, typically, with privilege and luck) are not yet in the season where funerals are as common as weddings were at 30, the robust confidence of treating life like a stretch of endless summers is gone. And when we look around, we're seeing our own experiences of loss echoed in the icons we came up alongside.

This week, Shannen Doherty died. A talented, brave, straight-talking actress who carried all of the complications of being a Gen X icon on her narrow shoulders. A child star on TV when being on TV meant everyone knew you, right there in the world's living room, along with our parents, siblings and flatmates. A spiky teen in Heathers, a cool-girl indie at the epicentre of pop culture. She was 90210's Brenda, the popular bad girl whose on-screen charisma seeped into Doherty's offscreen image. And, of course, Charmed, just one in a very long line of female TV casts who we chose to believe could never get along. A prominent entry in the "catfight" files. We were not nice to famous Gen X women when they were young. We're not really very nice to them as they age, either.

Shannen Doherty was 53. She had been in and out of cancer treatment and surgery for nine years. 

There's doubtless someone in your circle who's been dealing with something similar. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's someone you love very much. 

We lost Matthew Perry last year. A funny, funny, troubled man whose face was as familiar to us as our own. A man who had been succeeding and failing to get on top of his mental health and addiction issues for decades. 

There's someone like that in your circle, too. 

Is it terrible that when I watched the new Netflix documentary Brats, made by Andrew McCarthy about the iconic 1980s teen-movie stars, my first thought was "Wow, they're all still alive"?

Yes. Yes, it is terrible. 

But we have reached that age, Generation X, where we would not assume that luxury for the group. Not everyone I was young with is still alive. 

And nor are the age-adjacent peers of the Brat Pack.

Not Lisa Marie Presley. Not Sinead O Connor. Not Luke Perry, of course.

Yes, it's depressing, so let's get back to that notebook.

I interviewed Dr Jackie Bailey for an episode of the podcast MID. As a funeral celebrant and someone who helps the dying go well, she is a woman comfortable living in this space of a descending clock and limited time.

Listen to her remarkable story here:

She says she finds the notebook exercise — imperfect and presumptuous as it is, of course — supremely motivating. 

It's a little like a low-fi version of the bestselling book Four Thousand Weeks, Productivity For Mortals. Its author, Oliver Burkeman, wrote it to remind us that the average life is short (you might have guessed, 4,000 weeks) and that we need to choose how to spend those weeks more wisely to live the life we want.

Generation X, steeped in pop culture since after-school cartoons, is being reminded of this now by the celebrities around us, and how they're choosing to spend those weeks and hours. And whether they're having the pages ripped from their notebooks.

One thing about ageing is that your peers do it alongside you, and so do your heroes. That can be confronting, because we have a fixed picture of ourselves in our inner dialogues, and often, in that picture, we're 32-ish. That's why it's always a shock to catch a glimpse of yourself when you didn't expect it, like when you catch your phone camera looking straight up at you. Or you walk past a shop window and wonder who that old duck behind you is. And sometimes it's jarring because the beautiful people in our screens look different to us. They got a different set of rules and resources about ageing, at least externally. And sometimes it's jarring because they are reflecting your limited humanity back at you, by dying.

Would you pull out the notebook? Would you write the lines of dates, and what you'd like to do with each? What would you write?

"I'm not done with living," Shannen Doherty said in November last year. "I'm not done with loving. I'm not done with creating. I'm not done with hopefully changing things for the better. I'm just not — I'm not done."

None of us are. But the clarity found in the finite might just be the gift that fills those notebook lines.

After all, there's still the third act. And we go into it with a true appreciation of how fortunate we are to write it, with all the love to those around us who did not.

Feature image: Getty; Canva.