That 70's Show

    Not the 1970's, but the age group.   Everyone who was a contemporary is in that bracket now, those of us who have survived, and I don't know of a single one whose health hasn't been significantly compromised in one way, another way, or multiple ways.    I was 27 years old when my father died at the age of 71, and I thought of him as old.  My sister died at the same age as he, and I thought that was far too young.  He died instantly and she did not, he having had very few health interventions and she way more than anyone should have had to undergo.  I was 45 years old when my mother died at the age of 78, and I had become frozen in terror at the awareness she had grown old.  She died suddenly also, with only a modicum of medical care.  When I was young, I lived with the illusion that old people had always been old; I remember visiting elderly relatives; they seemed to have been permanently old.  Even the board game that bequeathed you an inheritance from an eighty-year-old aunt left you with no thought of sorrow for anyone of that age.    Now we try to tell ourselves that 80 is still young, but the hard truth is that it is not.