Death scares me.  I know, it scares everyone, if we really stop to consider it, which we don't much in our youth, unless we have been surrounded by quite a lot of it.  I have certainly lost my fair share of people, but up until the last year or so, that always felt like something you could easily bounce back from.  They are gone, you are sad, but there is life to live and all sorts of brightness in the future still, so it's okay.

I don't feel like that anymore.  Somehow, at 37 years old, it seems like I have crested a hill where bouncing back isn't easy.  The deaths pile up.  They start to be people who are closer, or whose loss is less easily brushed aside.  My mentors Jack and John.  Dr. K, who saw me through my first Master's degree.  Mr. L's mother, with whom I had a tense relationship, but who nevertheless leaves a hole that looms large in my mind.     

Illness, too.  We currently have two aunts, one of mine and one of his, recovering from strokes.  Mine is in a rehab facility, and is doing well, considering she is 90.  His is in a coma at Emory, and each day we wait to see if it's the one where we have to go say goodbye.  She is much closer to our age--only 15 years older than my husband himself--and that is the sort of thing that brings me to terror in the middle of the night.  I'm sad for her, and I'm scared to lose the person in his family that is most dear to me, but really, the fear comes from the thought that this could be one of us.  He has diabetes now.  My mom does, too.  Mom's partner, who is missing his leg due to that disease, and has frequent seizures and hospitalizations, seems like a terrible sign post of what is to come.  We are rearranging our lives to try to stave off the worst of it, but at 37, death is becoming a much more threatening spectre than it was when I was 25.

Of course, I know that I am not the first to start worrying about this around this point in my life.  Isn't this what the mid-life crisis is all about?  It's positively cliche.  Knowing that, and rationalizing it, doesn't make my heart beat any less wildly when I consider the Reaper, standing just over that hill, but getting closer.  Closer all the time.