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Sorry Hanxter; in the last couple months, I've had a life-long friend die of heart failure while riding his bike, my mother was diagnosed with Lymphoma that has spread to her bones and another close friend is near death because his heart is so bad, he can't be operated on. Your dad was right; the older you get, he faster they go. I'm 56; lots of people who were important to me aren't around anymore. When my own father died (many years ago, and way too young), a friend told me about a book by a woman named Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. The books title is faily off-putting; "On Death and Dying" but it is a very uplifting book; the author is the motivating force behind the Hostel movement in this country; she also ran hostels in Europe for a nimber of years. In the book, she tells of interviewing terminally-ill patients, and their viewpoint of their situation; almost all of the people interviewed were accepting of the situation; their concern was for those that they would leave behind; none expressed any fear of death, the authors conclusion was that when death is imminent, people become accepting of the inevitibility, they understand that death isn't a punishment (as we seem to believe in the U.S.); it's the last act of life, a completely natural thing. To deny the fact that we will all die eventually is to diminish our own existence; acceptance is a validation of our mortality, not a fatalistic point of view.
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"If I had it to do all over,
I'd do it all over you."
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