My friend Ralph is dying. It’s true that we are all dying, maybe a little bit at a time, but Ralph is really in his last days. Those days, he said today, are long. He did not say much else. He did have some banana pudding and chocolate cake. He did not indicate whether or not the pudding was to die for. I’d be willing to be that he thought about it. Ralph appreciates a good joke, especially one he can tell at his own expense.
Like the one about the doctor who told him 35 years ago that if he did not take better care of himself, he was probably going to die. “Now,” Ralph said recently, “they tell me there is still a pretty good chance.” Not that, in the 20 years that I have known him, Ralph has been particularly fixated on dying. He has been much more taken with living, especially with Judy. They have been married as long as I have known them, but they got married a little later in life.
Much later for Ralph, not as much for Judy. She’s a lot younger and knew from the beginning that Ralph was likely to be the first of them to pass. That’s a pretty brave choice, if you ask me, but a heck of a lot better than choosing a lifetime of regret. We don’t always get to choose who we fall in love with, but we do get to choose how well we live out that love. Living like Ralph and Judy, all the way to the end, looks like about as much as a person can hope for.