The Bane of Being Human

   We all know we're going to die some day.  We accept that, in a sense and to  a degree. In youth, the day of our demise we know to be real, but the instance of its happening we see either  somewhere in the hazy future or else, if sooner, as  a possible fluke akin to being drawn in a lottery.  In middle age, we resign ourselves to the inevitability of death, but it still projects as something that can happen to anybody at any time, no sense worrying about it.  We have stuff to do.   Then, with a jarring suddenness,  comes the awareness that no matter how we  think of death, whether we welcome it or fear it, whether we've been suffering ill health, or if we've made a remarkable recovery, even if we're blessed with good genes and outstanding physical health, the grim specter is not, can not, be far away.  We recall events that happened three years ago, or five years or seven, and those events are as yesterday. We know we can not count on the next three or five or seven years.  We calculate what age we were in the days of those memories, and then how old we'd be in the future three to seven years.  We're running short on time, out of time.
     So what do we do.  Mayor Bloomberg is giving much of his wealth away.  He knows he can't take it with him. But to make death a little less fearsome, he jokes about a man on his deathbed saying he can take the access code to his fortune, if not the wealth itself. So some want to exit doing good.  Others are embittered, or too sick to care, or determined to fend off death through utilizing all available life-sustaining medical interventions.
    When Bryant considered death in "Thanatopsis," he proclaimed we should not face that "last bitter hour" like a quarry slave, but to go forth in the glory of the expectation of peaceful sleep.  He sought acceptance of life's finality by viewing the world as a gigantic tomb, enclosing way more of the dead than the living at any given time.  I guess that's what worked for him, at least through the eyes of his younger self.