O, death!

Won't you hold me over for another year?

I’m a near-contemporary to Joe Biden, so, of course, my initial reaction was an anticipatory “such a young man.” But, of course, we are old men, and one of the ills that goes with the territory of overstaying actuarial shelf-life is a very high likelihood of prostate cancer. And, yeah, no one wants that, even post-sexuals like me.

But. But. We’re all going to die of something at some point. Sorry, but there it is. Besides the potentially long farewell of cancer, we have a variety of other ailments on offer.

Some of those are sharp and abrupt. My grandfathers and mother keeled over and died instantly of cardiac arrest. Geriatric drivers are, like the rest of us, subject to instant annihilation by impaired or inattentive drivers, including themselves.

Others are suspended sentences. Among those are the sequelae of cognitive impairment. A moment’s distraction is followed by a loss of balance and a fractured hip. About 6% of geriatric patients never leave hospital and another 14% are dead within the year. My dad was one of the later, although it would be fair to say that his cause of death was actually incident to being a life-long asshole (he fired his physical therapist for being late one day and never left his bed after hat, dying of sepsis from a blood blister on his heel).

There’s only one way to choose which door to exit, and it’s a hard one, hedged about with many taboos, delayed as long as possible even for those who choose this route. One of the pressures is a healthcare culture of prolonging life as long as possible under the guise of “quality of life.”

But, what is life? Life is a series of moments divided among anticipation of those to come, memories of those past and the evanescent experience of those as they pass. In advanced age, the anticipatory horizon shortens, the present accelerates and the shelf life of the new memories is necessarily short.

What should we hope for then?

It is this: a good end.

Count no man happy until he is dead. Solon

That is wisdom I didn’t understand when I was young. It makes more sense today. As long as I can say “life is good,” though, I’m in. no hurry.