Grow old gracefully

Our family is due to arrive in just under a week for the typical American feast of turkey and trimmings. This gives me yet another opportunity to watch my husband’s two 90ish year old grandmothers side by side. One of whom I think is just having a fantastic old age and the other is living the life that I fear.

It is a striking difference as to how they are getting along through life and one of the things I love to do is to ask them both the same questions and take inventory of thier answers.

• Grandma 1: Oh, I am having lunch with Millie this weekend and Harriet and I are planning to go to a show next week. I also met this new woman who moved into my complex who is going to join our weekly canasta game.
• Grandma 2: They are all dead.

I think a lot about growing old and the potential of dying. I believe that not believing in God is much harder than being a believer. As a non-believer, you truly have to face the concept to death. And in our society, you have to do so in a type of isolation. Death tends to be an unpopular topic to discuss anyway but to discuss the finality of it is even less so.