Brooding

 I don't know how to write about this...I don't quite know what I am going to say. It's meant to be something about my current state of mind, which--if not actually anywhere close to depression--has me brooding on my age, my life expectancy, my worries about dementia, about putting poor Joan into a caregiver capacity, about how long my physical health will bear up, about how I will die...slowly with some awful malady like stomach cancer, or will I--like the poet who was 'half in love with easeful death' simply 'cease upon a midnight with no pain'? 

A good friend of ours has recently had a stroke and is badly incapacitated physically. He is in his early eighties and his wife has her 75th birthday next week. The burden of caregiving for a wheel-chair-bound husband will fall on her--and it looks like it will be a very difficult time for her, and it could--of course--go on for many years.

I know, I know--if I mention my worries, the responses are always--you're fine, you don't look your age, you walk four miles a day--yes, you have a pacemaker, but that's been ticking away merrily for more than ten years. What are you worried about? Your life expectancy is five years--but that's the average and it includes a lot of men who are already sick and at death's door: so your life expectancy is probably much longer than the average.

All very true, yes.

All very true...but it does not help...