At the concert many grayheads, totterers, out for a safe matinee. Walkers, attentive grandkids, sneakers, oddly-crook’d canes. One enfeebled gent, alone, having settled into the soft grass, now struggled to rise. Ought I offer him a hand? Unwelcome aid might inadvertently wound. I passed, eyes averted – coward or Samaritan, I’ll never know.

                  Old age, I shuddered. Then: are they much my seniors? Wasn’t my presence here age-appropriate?

                  I am lucky so far. Age seventy-five and still (I like to think) compos mentis, mobile enough to get around, self-reliant. Still invigorated by ambition to make better, more, my best yet. But I can do the math. Many my age are dead, others dying (“circling the drain,” they ruefully grin), others playing out “the back nine.” However long, it won’t be long now – a dozen, at most two dozen years, and if cursed with longevity, those final years hardly worth the bother. I visit my young doctors expecting a capital sentence. Doom incubates in one or another corner of my corpus, awaiting its chance. 

                  I’m not being morbid, just saying what all know. Surrounding senescence, a vast unconvincing conspiracy of silence. My time is almost up. So now what?

                  There is no wrong way to get old. Each must confront our mortality best we can. Going “gently into that goodnight” is no more a crime than fighting till the final breath. Whichever our course, our survivors will likely congratulate us. Oldsters and infants are lavished with nugatory praise: it amazes folks we can still balance on one foot (though not for long).

                  I observe myself in process. I’ve observed myself for fifty-five of my seventy-five years and today’s landscape’s no less vivid or complex. None can predict their death throes with confidence. A relative who insisted they’d be game at their final hour, and boasted of membership in the Hemlock Society, when the time came struggled ghoulishly for an extra breath long past hope. Others glide out of life as melodically as Lohengrin on his swan. I mean my exit to be grateful and ingratiating, to deserve Shakespeare’s handsome send-off: 

Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it

… but who knows?

                  All at the pleasant concert declared it splendid. Exaggerated exuberance is another characteristic of our final stage. With any luck, we’ve given up complaining. Old deathbed grumblers leave a sour aftertaste. "Nothing is more beautiful than cheerfulness in an old face,” observed the German aphorist Jean Paul. But that cheer may become jarringly disproportionate. No, this concert was not the best ever, just because we hadn’t many concerts left. The concert was OK, even disappointing, but such a verdict can feel heresy in the dusk. 

                  I think a lot about my end. More than a few have rebuked my curiosity, but what is more interesting than non-existence? How fascinating to envision the world without me, to feel memories of me fading into myth or mist, to vanish into the fairy-tale quaintness of a daguerreotype? As a schoolboy I used to gaze at the group pictures of classes decades, even a century distant, all now safely tucked in. So many lives – with their hopes, fears, self-importance! All those dreams!

                  My fantasy is to imitate Pheidippides – to race with my message as strenuously as I can, then drop down dead at the finish line.    But unless we take our own life, we seldom get the death we have in mind. These days dying is mostly a tedious and tawdry process, teeming with nostrums and strangers in unfamiliar rooms. Oh well, I’m ready for that too.