Helpful Hints For Future Plans

A relative called to tell me that another, a distant cousin or something, a woman just my age, had contracted pneumonia and had decided to forego treatment and instead accepted the more than likely result of her death within a short time.  "Pneumonia is the old man's friend," I replied.  My only thought was how lucky this lady was to be taking a soft landing as it were into the realms of the dead, the inevitable destination for all of us terrestrials and for those of us about to end our ninth decade sooner than later.  Yesterday my husband and I were watching an English video in which an elderly man, but actually not all that old, who was suffering from leukemia which was turning out to be fatal, was interrogated into the death of a much younger male companion, who as it turns out the older gay guy had paid to be his companion, not for sex as the detectives suspected, but so that there would be someone at home with him when he died.   So deprived of the younger fellow, the leukemia victim made a date with another friend, a woman, and met her on a lovely sunny day, on a park bench, where they sat together, and the man grew feebler and feebler and eventually put his head on her shoulder and died.  Turns out he overdosed on morphine just before he came down to the bench.  Whether that was medically possible, I don't know, but I have been obsessed with his peaceful, friendly happy ending ever since.  Morphine?  Bring it on!  Dylan Thomas wrote "Do not go gentle into that dark night.  Rage, rage against the fading of the light."  or something to that effect, and I say nonsense, especially considering what a prickly and difficult person he was.  Imagine working in a nursing home where he was a patient, trying to get him up for a bath or putting him on the toilet.  No thanks!  Give me the sunshine, the park bench, the lady friend, and, oh, yes, the morphine, lots of morphine!