I'm in very good health

I really am.

No symptoms of anything.

I'm also 66 years old, which, the Social Security Administration tells me, means I can expect to live another 16.28 years. I'll settle for that:

• Joey will be graduating from high school,
• Abby will be a mature young woman,
• their parents will be solidly settled into middle age, and
• Mary Ellen will still be beautiful enough to snag a successful young doctor or lawyer.

But all of that means also that I can expect to die in 16.28 years, and that really ain't an awful long way off. So my mind has been turning now and then to thoughts thanatological (a new word I learned today).

Thus, my recommending Gawande's essay a few days ago.

And thus,

For about eight years, I was a hospice volunteer, and had the honor to attend many people throughout their dying process. One of the most reliable rules was that people died as they had lived. Happy people were happy at the end, crabby people were crabby, anxious people were anxious. The story of human personality development is largely one of continuity. Temperamental differences measured within an hour of birth predict temperament 20 years later, and people who win million dollar lotto prizes tend, within a year, to return to being precisely as happy or unhappy as they were before their big win.

Keith Humphreys

Update: Great minds, and all that. I see now that Kevin Drum blockquotes the same paragraph