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Chapter Twelve A Place to End Only five years retired, and it seems a perfectly natural way to live. My days have fallen into a comfortable rhythm. Yet I know it is not a rhythm that will continue. The time will come—unless something unforeseen whisks me away first—when I will move into yet another phase of life, technically a continuation of the retirement phase but actually a different phase with a different rhythm marked by the presence of caregivers. Should we call that the post-retirement phase or the pre-death phase? As if I weren’t in that phase, the pre-death phase, already! Of course, we are all in it from the moment we are born. Media vita in morte sumus. But it will be undeniable when I reach the post-retirement phase. I wonder what I will look like as a very old woman. And will I still have an inner life? Will I still be attentive to the different shade of blue the sky takes on in October or the way a wren cocks its tail? Will I want to choose the dinner-time music to accord with the menu? Or will I not care? No one has told me what to expect. I saw my parents’ aging and Loren’s parents’ aging, but that told me very little about my own. Least of all do I know whether that final phase is still a long way off or fairly close. In just the five years since I retired I can see changes; the medical problems have become more frequent, the overall sense of well-being more fragile. So far, I don’t fret about it. But I do see the world differently now that I am, as my brother recently pointed out, pushing seventy. I see things in people I never noticed when I was younger, never even imagined noticing. I see someone like Zbigniew Brzezinski, say, on television, someone I know 233 is significantly older than I am (according to the Internet, born in 1928; I was born in 1939) and I think, “Look at him—old as he is, and he still has the energy to do all that! What an achievement! And what a mind! What a loss to the world it will be when he goes!” Such things never seemed so remarkable when I was young. Human beings are said to be the only animals who know they will die. At what age I became aware that people die I can’t remember precisely, but once I did, I don’t recall ever having any illusions that I was going to be exempt from the general rule. It was when Loren and I began talking about retirement and giving so much thought to the building of our house that I began to think more about this and realized that in moving to what we expected to be our last house, we were moving to the house in which I hoped to die. My point is, I’m content with that—with all of it. The reality is that I will probably die within the next decade or at most two. And that seems OK to me. Not that I would be comfortable with the specifics I would have to face if I were, say, diagnosed with some dreadful disease tomorrow and given six months to live. But in the absence of that kind of immediacy, I’m comfortable with the general idea. I’m comfortable with knowing that we at least tried to prepare the place where we would die. But I have even less confidence, this second time around, that it will work out that way. And the truth is, I’m not caring as much this time. I just hope to stay closely in touch with the realities of wherever I am, in whatever phase of life. New Mexico was a particularly good place for becoming comfortable with the “real,” especially those aspects of the real that might be thought harsh. It was a dry, hard land, all rocky and thorny, a land close to the geological skeleton, and for whatever time I had left I wanted to live very close to it indeed. When we left that beautiful , harsh place we may have been in some sense retreating from it, but if so it was because we were choosing to be more fully engaged with another kind of harsh reality that we knew we mustn’t...

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