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At sixty-eight, I just turned forty.

Our local newspaper has a side item it calls "On This Date". It contains the newspaper equivalent of two small soundbites; one from 20 years ago and one from 40 years ago. They often serve as a reminder both of what was happening back then and of how similar the past is to the present. While they are best when they contain local names you recognize, they are often both nostalgic and instructive.

For me, the light bulb of recognition started long ago for the twenty year details. Today, the forty year becomes personally relevant. A way of marking a life milestone for someone who did not remain in their hometown; or even home state.

Because I moved to Lewiston, Idaho when I was twenty-eight, I passed the 'more than half of my life here' marker some time ago. This was the place my daughter went through school. The place my second, longest and most cherish career began and ended. The place where my husband appeared and won my heart. The place to which my parents eventually followed me and which became their final resting spot. The community I gave my time and talents to in endless ways.

Lewiston, the mountain state of Idaho's lowest elevation, the furthest inland seaport in the US, the entrance to Hell's Canyon (deeper than the Grand Canyon) resting at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers and at the pivot spot of Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

Home.

Not my hometown. That remains forever Rockford, Illinois; a town that shaped my youth and my family. A town to which I will always owe a debt of gratitude. But no longer my home, just my hometown.

In 1976, forty years was unfathomable to a young, adventuresome city girl coming into rural Idaho for a brand new job. I'd never been close to a pickup, let alone ridden in them. (Although, back then city folk were not so taken with pickups as they are now.) I'd known the wide open flat of cornfields, but not the forests and streams of mountains or the rolling hills of wheat, peas and lentils. I'd known oaks, not pines. I'd never seen a deer in the wild, let alone an elk, cougar, moose or bear. But I'd known people, and that was enough anywhere.

I'm still here. Home for forty years. Thanks to the Lewiston Tribune, I get to remember that every day.

Losing a Child

In the textbook of life, if one can learn grief, empathizing without (thankfully) truly understanding, then today was one more heartbreaking and terrifying lesson.

Jamie was 34 and his mother is my friend. Not that it matters, but death came in a car accident.

The news stunned me into silence. The funeral leaves me staring at the pictures of my own child and grandchildren with both gratitude and fear; fear which is always, has always been present, but fear usually buried beneath daily life.

My helpless words never breach the shell and while my shoulder absorbs the tears it cannot restore. Mother, Father, wife, two very small children whose lives are forever altered. My imagining encompasses a mere speck of the reality. To me, a child lost seems the most hideous of bereavements.

Even the strongest life is fragile.

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.