Russell Smith is going blind.

In his attitude, fashion and fitness, he’s always seemed a little younger than he is, and as a result, he’s always been one of the elder members (he was born in 1963) of an especially brilliant cultural generation that includes Naomi Klein, Derek McCormack, Andrew Pyper, Evan Solomon, Liz Renzetti, Doug Saunders, Camilla Gibb, Brendan Fraser, Michael Winter, Clement Virgo, Keanu Reeves, Celine Dion, Russell Peters, Annabel Lyon, Sarah McLaughlin, Kenneth Oppel, Sarah Polley, the Barenaked Ladies and Rick Mercer.

Though it’s come to emcompass anyone born between about 1961 and 1981, I prefer Coupland’s implied — and probably somewhere stated — notion that there’s a lost generation born after the baby boom but before the first Boomers’ children, the “bust” generation to use certain demographers’ terms. It’s not a generation that’s really coalesced. And as far as this particular subset of the generation is concerned, I don’t think I’ve ever seen those names put together in a list before, despite the fact that all of them were born within about 48 months of each other.

All of them except Smith, that is. He was over thirty when his first novel was published. But How Insensitive was about the twentysomething scene in to the Toronto of the mid-1990s, and since it was also a scene Smith was part of, and since there was no particular commercial interest in making a big deal out of the fact that he was as much as a decade older that the people he was writing about, and since he seems to have taken rather good care of his skin, the generational tag stuck.

And now, with his essay in the latest issue of Toronto Life (and an e-book version of the same story), he’s come out as one of the first of this generation to be facing his own decline.

It’s not been a good couple of years. First, his father died, just before Smith would have been able to tell him he’d be a grandfather. Then his son was born with the same complex syndactyly both Smith and his father had, requiring several surgeries to make his fused and twisted fingers usable. Then, as he describes in some of the most fearlessly, or possibly angrily, frank writing I’ve seen in a Canadian magazine in ages (probably ever, really), his alcoholic wife started drinking again, which led to their relationship falling apart.

But that’s not the bad part. Most people in their 40s have gone through some, possibly most of the same tribulations. It’s the stuff that separates the men from the boys, or at least, the men from the young men with their clouds of glory still trailing behind them. The generational significance of this piece of writing comes in the form of the very real intimations of mortality that prompted Smith to do this public aeration.

A couple of years ago, a few months after his son was born, Smith tore a retina. The cure forced him to lay flat on his stomach, not moving his head, for at least 50 minutes of every hour for two weeks. Then his other retina tore. They were able to fix that one, too, but not without severely damaging the writer’s eyesight, giving him 20/200 vision (meaning, as he helpfully explains, that things that are 20 feet away from him seem to be 200 feet away). And it seems it’s only going to get worse.

There are always generational outliers when it comes to mortality, people who die early from heart attacks, aneurisms or some other form of anatomical terror, congenital or random. And this same cultural generation has already had a few of these sorts of losses, including Jeff Chapman, aka Ninjalicious, who died from cancer at 32, and Quill & Quire editor Derek Weiler, who died three years ago at 40, the result of a congenital heart defect.

But Smith’s not one of those. Smith is the first of his generation to be publicly senescing.

Aging is comprised of a series of events, some traumatic, like Smith’s, others slow agglomerations of back trouble and foot pain to complement the grey chest hairs and loosening skin around the knees. People age at different rates, of course — to take an example from a slightly earlier generation, Barbara Gowdy didn’t seem like she was more than 30 until she was well past 50 — but by the time 40 hits, most of us will have at least of few of these reminders that we’re probably as far from birth as we are close to death. With the help of dyes and unguents, and a vow to never again go swimming except in the company of those who have already seen us naked, we can, if we like, keep these signifiers discreet. But eventually, something will happen that we can’t hide or explain away, something like Smith’s torn retinas. Though they may be random infelicities, he spends some time speculating they may be the result of years of heightened bodily stress brought on by things like cocaine use.

Since I began writing this, another member of this generation has hit the same sort of major health bump that will become more and more frequent as the years go by, but that still hit their coevals like early warning signals before an approaching tsunami.

This is a generation that’s dined out on its liminality, on being folded up between the bulldozing Boomers and those clever Generation Y/Millennials who are making their names and fortunes in a world increasingly of their own creation. They’ve got decades left before they really start melting away, but Smith’s set the stopwatch running. I wonder if there’s some collective mind that may yet be concentrated by these first few lightly tolling bells.

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Bert Archer writes about media and real estate for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter:@bertarcher.

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