Jane and I are the grayheads in our blended clan. Our ascension has been natural, age-appropriate, nothing surprising, yet surprising even so. At the implausibly long holiday table we occupy either end. The youngest, boisterous in their funny hats, are more than seven decades our junior. As autumn’s leaves are watched, so are we for our instant of detachment. It can’t be helped and is not to be regretted. That time has permitted this ripeness suffuses us with gratitude. Others were less fortunate. We think of them too.

            I observe the festivities with bemused detachment, here but not wholly. I recall comparable occasions through childish eyes, a young man’s, a dad’s, then in midlife feeling for my way. The faces around the table have gradually changed, individual stories have progressed remarkably, but the ritual varies only slightly from those prior years. Less formality now, the occasional intrusion of electronics, but the same intergenerational astonishment. To our grandchildren we are visitors from a far-off kingdom; to their more practical parents, problems waiting to happen – “It won’t be long now.” I am playing in this rite a set role, like it or not. How should I be?

            Seldom have I felt more an actor, like a priest before the congregation, reading my statutory lines. Whether I play my role grandly or modestly, graciously or meanly, it must be the same role – priest, paterfamilias, patriarch, label it as you like. I lead the solemn parade to non-existence. Barring premature exits (God forbid!), we will be the next discoverers of that mysterious condition none confidently foresees.

            I aim for grace. I’m less sure what this means than what it doesn’t. It does not mean raging, grumping, grousing, garrulously reminiscing. It does not mean swaggering, as if survival were an achievement. It does not mean a presumption of sagacity. It does not – please! – mean dotage or indifference to appearance.

            It does mean calm. Followers’ eyes ask, What is it like, one’s final station? I hope my demeanor will reassure. Sure, it’s unnerving, melancholy, this proximity to parting, but soothing too, with the sense of being done. The starting line thrills, the race taxes, and the finish line relaxes, win or lose.

Young Dylan Thomas exhorted his dad,

But that was a youthful vantage, imaginatively infusing an old man’s decrepitude with a young man’s zest. Tennyson’s great poem, Ulysses, also written when the poet was young, effects a similar transposition. (I sometimes think Ulysses is my favorite poem.) I have no intention of burning or raving if I can help it. At a certain point, it is “too late to seek a newer world.”

            I mean to embrace my condition, not disown it. Few sights more ghastly than old folks passing for a younger version. Who are they kidding? Their denial is a panic attack, no laudable deception.

            Will I venture words of wisdom from my newfound altitude? A few perhaps, but only if asked. We can hear only what we’re ready to. The reason to speak is to be heard, not to have spoken. Will I carry libraries of learning into the vail of years? So what! With luck we run out of time before running out of things to say.

            Am I serene? Hardly. Pissed off rather, not to have made more of this gift of time – and to have so little time left! Then puppy Henry licks me back to sense. “Be glad,” he nuzzles, “be glad.”