I started feeling a sore throat, and having a rasping cough the second day of my train ride back home, and hoped it was just the dryness of the heated air in the train. But no. By the time I got home I was ready to admit I’d caught a flu, despite having had the shot. Not the first time that’s happened to me. Back home I was weak as a kitten, barely able to climb the stairs to get myself into bed. At the age I am now, 71, these things hit me really hard.

Hemingway wrote a passage in one of this stories where a guy was asked how he went broke. The answer was “gradually, and then suddenly.” I’m here to tell you that’s how you get old too. Gradually, and then suddenly. Two therapists I have visited, one when I was feeling lonely and suicidal and the other much later after mom passed away, both told me that I “present young.” I’m pretty sure that wasn’t about my fashion choices, but something about me that, to the therapist, suggested my mindset. And it’s true that, unless I’m looking in a mirror, or more painfully at the skin on the back of my hands and arms, I still see myself as a young man. Catching a flu now, at this age, yanks me out of that mindset pretty forcefully. But not entirely.

I’m not afraid of dying…death isn’t a thing we ever know because by definition if you’re dead you stop knowing anything. So you won’t know you’re dead, or even that moment it happens. But seeing it coming can be unpleasant. It isn’t death I worry about, it’s decaying. I don’t want to go slowly. Especially now that I’m at that senior stage in life where the internal young man mindset gets scary revoked whenever I get sick.

Like now. I’m not even sure it was a flu I had that I’m just now getting over. It only acted like a two-thirds flu. Pretty sure it wasn’t COVID since my blood oxygen levels have been good throughout. Looking over the online information it might have been that Respiratory Syncytial Virus going around. The symptoms I had match except for the physical weakness I was experiencing. But that could just be a function of…well…my age.

Doesn’t look like I’m dying this time. Hopefully I hold onto that present young mindset right up to that last moment…when it comes.