Sublime

Recently he has been writing a lot about death. He’s reached an age now where that has become unavoidable, not like youth when you can deny it or middle-age when you suppress it.

My mother, the doctor thought, was waiting for my arrival and might not last the night. “Dying of what?” I asked him. “Nothing, everything.”

Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now must lose them. I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thought-burst, from a place where time

He said little, but as a neurosurgeon, he knew what lay ahead. Although Paul accepted his limited life expectancy, neurologic decline was a new devastation, the prospect of losing meaning and agency agonizing.

Most of us alive today will survive into old age, and although that is a welcome development, the price of experiencing more life is sometimes experiencing less of it, too. So many losses routinely precede the final one now: loss of memory, mobility, autonomy, physical strength, intellectual aptitude, a longtime home, the kind of identity derived

And because there was no dark, no real darkness to speak of, there was of course no light, no real incandescence to speak of, just a rapid dousing of a miserable thing, nothing glorious at all, merely a routine extinguishing, inevitable and unremarkable.

all such existential enlargements brought by living long are under threat from the lessening of strength and stamina. However well compensated for by intelligent coping mechanisms, small or large breakdowns in one bit of the body or another begin to restrict activity, while the memory is dealing with overload and slippage. Existence in old age is

Rachel Naomi Remen, who once observed,

despondency.