Growing Old Is Not For Sissies

This title is a quote from my wife ... possibly recycled ... but it is so, so true. My wife just had a new knee installed and I am scheduled to have the same operation in mid-June. Unlike my wife, I am not looking forward to this bit of bodily reconstruction. (I keep imagining an archaeologist finding my bones in a thousand years and marveling at my metalic knee.) Watching my wife in her current struggles to get through the day have upped my trepidation levels to near sissy-dom ... particularly on top of the stress of my stenosis.

Being of an age, I have watched many of my friends and family go through the geriatric gauntlet ... and so I am we'll aware of the travails that still await. Unfortunately there is no option to forgo this penalty for living ... since Ponce de Leon never found that Nirvana in Florida ... although hordes of oldies are still drawn there in similar pursuits. So I must live out my existence on this big blue marble awaiting that old man sharpening up his scythe.

But as Shakespeare once said "a coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once." And, realistically, I know to which crowd I belong. Moreover, as a young man, I used to read that avant garde publication, The Evergreen Review ... and I still recall a Turkish poet's entry that went something like this:

You lie
When you tell me about this thing called death.
Heaven and earth shall pass away
Before I'll cease to be.

He lied.