An old friend who has survived the normal vicissitudes of life as well as cancer and its chemical and radiation opponents recently sent me the following:

On Being Almost Sixty-eight

Maybe it’s because you’d gotten in and out of bed more times during a single night than anyone since Wilt Chamberlain. Unlike Wilt, you did it to pee. It’s as if you’re hung over, only you’re not, haven’t been in forever. You’d like to fall back asleep. You would if you could.
Out the window you see two deer drink from the creek in the yard. Snow gleams on the peak rising from the far bank. Triple blue sky above. Your first cup of coffee is strong the way you like it. Real cream, three spoons of sugar, stuff you avoided when you thought you’d live forever and would want to.
Your favorite mug. A present from your son a hundred years ago. “Dear Dad, You are the gratest.” You sit alone at the kitchen table. On the stove is the teakettle you got for your wedding and got to keep in your divorce. You drink your coffee listening to music because you can’t read the papers anymore or watch the news. The pious certainties of politicians. The young, pretty actress reciting insincerities she memorized from her publicist.
Once she might have aroused an almost unbearable longing in you. Now she’s like a new baseball glove or a hundred million. What would you do with her?
On the wall is a picture of the dog dead now how many years? Nights you still feel for him at the foot of your bed. There’s the photo of the little guy with snow in his goggles and snow in his hair and his ski hat pulled funny and his cheeks red as‑‑‑red as the blood you just now noticed dripping from the back of your hand. You try to think how you might have cut yourself. A butter knife could have done it.
The pills, all those pills. A round pink one, two blues, a big white lozenge, a capsule, ibuprophen for your back, glucosamine for your joints, multi-vitamin, saw palmetto, gingko biloba, ginseng. This one with food, that one without, one in the morning, one before bed, may cause nausea, dizziness, headache. Don’t operate heavy equipment.
These are the pills that mother gives you. None will make you taller. None will make you small. You need others for that.
The coffee is so good you brew yourself a second. You know it won’t taste like that first and that your jaw won’t unclench until noon. You used to like that feeling, driving to work, jacked on caffeine. Ready for anything, ready for freddy. Bring it on! Back then your word for it was coffeedence.
A song catches your attention. West African percussion, fado melody. It touches you like music can. Something in her voice. She’s lived, you can tell she’s lived. She sings what she knows. What they call saudade. Honeyed recollection of the love you had, the love you lost, the love you wished you had and never did. Of times past, old friends, people and places you’ll never see again.
You make your bed, plump the pillows. Your wife taught you that. Your mother tried. Satisfaction in small acts completed as if they mattered.
In the bathroom where once you preened, you now avoid the mirror. You haven’t owned a comb in decades. Every shiny surface‑‑‑store windows, sunglasses, the pupil of another’s eye‑‑‑once whispered to you: Look! Your face is no longer your face. It is not the face you remember nor want to.
Tough being you.
You shave by feel, not caring about the places you probably missed, under your nose, the cleft of your chin. In the shower you still wash with Dr. Bronner’s. The pepperminty smell is the smell of your hippie days. Your hand still drips watery blood.
Your skin, paper thin, stained like old plaster, nearly translucent. All those years you spent in the sun. Hawaiian Tropic, Bain de Soleil. The lotion smelled like summer to you, the beach, like good times. Now you have sun block, the odorless kind, SPF 2000. You don’t go out without a hat.
You had abs before there were such things. Eight biscuits to a tin. You could have hidden a paperclip in the cuts of your thighs. You look at your body now. What’s happened? Dad was a boxer, a lifeguard, a diver from bridges, chiseled, a god. You watched it happen to him. Stomach distending, butt disappearing. How did you not see this coming?
You don’t even know what’s in style anymore. What’s comfortable is what you wear. T-shirt. Khakis. Running shoes. Faded ball cap. Your uniform. You remember shopping up on Forbes Street, taking the streetcar downtown. The big department stores. Tassle loafers. Monogrammed shirts. Back when your father bought your clothes. When your mother washed and ironed them.
Walking down the stairs your left knee reminds you of that fall afternoon fifty years ago. Moore Park, your father in the stands. Pryor, the great South Hills quarterback, number 9 in blue. You weren’t worthy of his notice. You were nothing to him, a weed in his path. He left you tweaked and crumpled in the dirt. You were seventeen years old. When courage was all that you aspired to.
The coffee shop. The cute barista who takes your order never lifts her eyes. You are invisible to her, a talking dollar tip. You talk baseball with the regulars. You talk colonoscopies, PET scans, CAT scans, knee replacements, hip replacements, procedures, operations, ones you had, ones you need. Had you wanted to know so much about aches, ailments, syndromes, chronic conditions, ACL’s, MCL’s, all manner of malady, you’d have gone to medical school.
The gym. The brown lunch bag your mother used to pack for you weighed more than these pink dumbbells in your hands.
On winter mornings, it’s the mountain. The sun is bright, the air frigid, the snow unwrinkled, rolled flat as a fitted sheet. Kids bomb down the hill. You can’t imagine. You only hope you don’t get hurt. At least you’re still up there. The air, the view, the sky. At least you’re still upright. You think of your old buddies who would like to be. After a couple of runs you call it good. You only need a taste.
Afternoons in the library. Authors you never read in your youth and wouldn’t have understood if you had. A nap by a sunny window, the open book on your chest.
A friend has had a stroke. You bring him magazines, spend an hour with him in his hospital room. Years ago you worked together on a framing crew. Back then he could stack a roof with 4×8 plywood sheets, 5/8ths inches thick. Heavy mothers. Awkward, too. Fifty sheets, fifty trips up the ladder. These days they use a hoist.
“You’ll be good as new,” you say to him. “Give it a month or two.” He needs a nurse to help him out of bed. He needs a nurse to help him shit.
You park your car at the trailhead, start out the path. Ten minutes out you double back, think that maybe you hadn’t locked your car.
The great stands of fir, their needles carpet the ground. Across the valley elk graze high on the sage covered hill. Twenty of them, thirty, heads down, rumps to the wind. You take it easy, jog within your breath. A mile or two is all. No more medals to be won or lost. There’s still the pain. There is no gain.
You’d been hypnotized by the myth of self-improvement. Constant striving. Always getting “better.” Never good enough. The ever present discontent. Now you see. It was there all along, hidden in plain sight. The striving is the discontent.
Here, in your sixty-seventh year, under the high, white clouds, among the fragrant trees, on this mild, sunny Idaho afternoon, you know that this as good as it will ever get. There is no hope. No hopelessness, either. Things are as they were meant to be.
What great selfless deed has earned you this?
Mexican food with an old old friend. Cold Pacificos. Salsa and chips. Salad for her. The usual for you. Burrito, black beans and rice, hold the sour cream, please, easy on the Poblanos.
Decades ago you were lovers. She was a different person then. So were you. She shows you pictures of her grandsons. You assure her that she’s not boring you. You’ve learned something over the years. One day, maybe you’ll have pictures of your own.
It’s your turn to pay the check. You walk her to her car. You hug, affectionate, deeply felt, prelude to nothing. A brief kiss. You remember when the taste of lipstick was an invitation. She goes her way, you go yours.
At home you flip through the channels. Fox News, Real Housewives. Conspiracies, cosmetic surgery, blowjobs for jewelry. You see the absurdity. People will do whatever they do. You can’t control them. Why annoy yourself? But you can’t help it. You do.
You undress, fold your clothes. You’ll wear the same outfit tomorrow, and the day after, and maybe the day after that. You pull down the comforter. Flannel sheets. Feather pillows. The mattress cost more than your first two cars combined: the white ‘56 Volvo, two hundred and fifty bucks, surf racks included; Five hundred for the red MG TD. You loved that car. You love the mattress more.
Not yet nine o’clock. You open a novel. Your reading glasses are not on your nightstand, nor in the drawer, though you are sure you left them there. You’re screwed and McGoo’d without them. You have twenty pairs stashed around. In the desk, two in the car, in the silverware drawer, your shaving kit, your backpack, your gym bag, your toolbox.
You climb out of bed, grab a pair, climb back in, locate the place where you’d left off. Hadn’t you already read this page? Not long until your eyes get heavy. Takes you months to finish a book.
Daylight leaking from the sky. The creep of night. You turn off the lamp. The welcome of the sheets. No thoughts of tomorrow, of emails, managers, or where you have to be at noon. There’s nowhere you have to be at noon. There’s only tranquil blackness, the trickle of the creek, the lonely bark of a dog down the road. Peace descends like anesthesia.
If someone had asked what you thought dying was like, if you had to guess, you’d say that you imagine it might be something like this.
And if you were right, if it is as you imagine, then what is there to fear?

I replied:
Nice. Even if you were wrong, what is there to fear? There is no fear to hold on to, no fear to let go of, just like the past and the future. Right now, at 75, I need to make dinner.