HOW WILL I DIE?

Not to be morbid, but I really believe it is normal to think about dying as we get older. And in thirty days, like many other Boomers, I hit the Big 60.

Now, I've always been in the "it's better than the alternative" camp about aging. Thirty and Forty went by without a twinge. I hinted at (and got) a surprise 50th birthday party because I felt I had earned every one of those years. But I'll have to admit that something about the '60' has me a little more wary. It's one thing to be starting down the closing slope at 50. The second half of my allotted century I forthrightly proclaimed. It is quite another to be already part way down a very slippery slope of uncertain length.

My husband Al hit sixty a few years ago - with long thoughts and a long face. I was cautious, but wasn't very charitable. It's just another ten years I reasoned. We all end up in the same place I reasoned. No one controls our time left I reasoned. Eventually, it did dawn on me that I had to go there too - and that reason had little to do with it..

So let's just say the thought of dying is no longer foreign to my meandering mind.

And then a TV ad about surviving breast cancer and dying while dancing with joy sent me careening down a whole new thought path about death and dying.

I want to die with someone I love; my husband Al, my daughter Stephanie, Jackson, Dylan and Karly my grandchildren, my sisters, my cats Samson and Lily.

I want to be hugging, snuggling, laughing, singing, dancing, bicycling, skiing, snowshoeing, reading, eating popcorn and drinking hot chocolate, playing catch, listening to the trees, watching deer, hearing birdsong, staring into a campfire, awestruck by lightening and thunder, making love by moonlight.

No, I don't believe I have control over how I die.

But I know that I will never die in any one of the many ways I wish if I am not doing those things in life.

So now, for me, thinking about how I will die begins with thinking about how I will live. Doing.