David Price,

I just looked in my YDS folder to see what I last wrote about my progress through my “golden years.” I told you then (2017) about my part-time job teaching ethics to mid-career health professionals in a course called PROBE, about living right on the ocean in NJ with my brilliant wife Pat Murphy, and about some of my favorite memories from our YDS days.

So, an update is in order. New in this past two years is increased engagement in local Democratic politics. I became a sustaining member of the county Dems’ Chairman’s Club. I contributed, canvassed and phoned on behalf of a young, first-time candidate for congress in my district. This Annapolis grad and Afghanistan vet was challenging a 17-termer whose career, in my view, is distinguished only by careerism and  leadership of the house “pro-life” caucus. While my guy was an attractive candidate who worked hard, the hill was too high. 2020 will be a different story, I tell myself.

I am doing even more in the PROBE course (some significant involvement in about 20 weeks/year).  I continue to love it and to be enormously proud of it.

Living on the ocean in a forth-floor apartment with huge windows puts one in immediate touch with the constantly changing natural world in a way that continues to be thrillingly interesting. It is also a way to be engaged with nature that one can maintain throughout all of one’s life. If I am lucky, my hospice bed will be right in front of the 12-foot wide sliders.

Meantime, I can report that I have no life-limiting diagnoses. I still take my increasingly creaky body to the local (24-hour, 365-day!) gym where I do clearly geriatric-level strength exercises and stretches next to the cops, off-season college athletes and bulging bodybuilders.

See, I do acknowledge that I’m old. As a teacher, as a grandparent of young adults, as a friend to younger people, I feel a responsibility to share the view from the perch of age. (I think that’s fairly common and hope I can manage to do it more helpfully and less clumsily than some other old farts.) My latest published writing is a chapter on “Ethical Issues Facing Older Adults” in a 2019 Hospice Foundation of America book.  For the first time in my contributions to professional literature, I wrote mostly in my own voice, drawing anecdotes from my personal (non-professional) experience. The chapter begins this way:

We old folks go to a lot of funerals. Our class reunions thin out. Our address books have many names crossed out. We grieve for friends whose faces we will see again only in photographs. We know not when it will be our turn, but we know that we are old and soon will be very old and then we will be dead.