The worst thing about getting older

Besides approaching average life expectancy for the beginning of the twentieth century or finally being old enough to be the father to many of my students, the worst part of getting older is having multiple friends and colleagues with serious illness and seeing people I think of as being part of my cohort—and younger—die. I lost my father-in-law just shy of two years ago, two friends of mine—both younger—that I met when I used to bartend in the last year and a half, a friend from high school recently went into remission, a colleague is battling a mysterious case of wasting, a colleague of my partner's just had a lumpectomy with the removal of twenty-five lymph nodes, another colleague of his lost his wife, the women who takes our dog once a week has breast and ovarian cancer and the list continues.

I'm barely middle-aged and, yet, I realize every day more and more just how close death is to us all the time.

Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.