I live in terror of getting a potentially terminal disease that requires constant monitoring and different therapies, most of which fail with great disappointment. I imagine spending hours in hospital waiting rooms and doctors’ offices, dreading the results that will ultimately be delivered to me. 

I don’t know the best way to die. It is a very individual thing. Some people would like to die in their sleep. I don’t want that. I would like to say goodbye, but I don’t want it to be a long goodbye. Maybe a few weeks with just enough time to take my leave and tell those around me how much I love them. It would not be enough time to get my affairs in order, which is why I try to keep everything organized in advance. I don’t want to be dealing with those kinds of  logistics in the last weeks of my life.

I no longer feel the urgency of having to complete anything. I am ok with leaving something’s unfinished like the novel I dreamed of writing or the songs I want to compose.  Thankfully, I wrote my book, “The Flight of a Wild Duck,” in 2022. It does a good job of explaining my life up to about twenty years ago. So those memories will live on.  The people around me now will remember these last twenty years so that doesn’t require much documentation. A some point I may up date my book and make it current, assuming I am still around to do that.

How and when I die is not really much of a choice, unless I were to take some action on my own. I try to be as healthy as I can. I’m not anxious to die. I would like to live another ten to twenty years, and I do everything reasonable to make that possible. But every once in a while I feel ill, and the vulnerabilities come back to haunt me especially my childhood memories of constant trips to the hospital to deal with my chronic asthma.

That is where I am now.