Mortality

When we were children few of us took any notice of our ultimate fate.  Mortality had no real meaning to those of us who had a happy existence.  Dying was something that great grandparents did, or at a minimum, grandparents.  When we only saw them a time or two a year their disappearance meant little.

As young adults our ideas began to change a bit.  Here and there some friend’s parent died and we mused they had passed on much too soon, but yet it never registered that it could also happen to ourselves.  Death was something that happened to others, usually much older folks, and we were living proof that we were not vulnerable.  Only on rare occasions did death touch our safe little environment.

When we approached a more middle age, we began to note that a former schoolmate had died, or possibly our own parent had succumbed to the rigors of life.  It seemed that death while not staring us in the face, was at least something that could happen to someone we knew, if not to ourselves.  The grim reaper was beginning to hang out in our circle, if not at our own doorstep.

Then someday we find we are older than the average person we read about in the daily obituaries, and we wonder how did that happen?  What did we do that was different that allowed us the dubious distinction of living longer than our friends, acquaintances, or siblings?  After much soul searching we discover the answer to be, nothing!  We led no exemplary life.  We didn’t refrain from all of the frailties of mankind.  We merely existed on this planet in mostly the same manner as all others that we knew.  Yet we are here, knowing that we will die in the future.  All living things die sooner or later, but we now realize, finally, that our mortality is an event that absolutely will happen.  We stare it in the face on a daily basis, we look it in the eye, not with defiance, but with the knowledge it can’t be that far ahead in what little future we have remaining.