Somebody said that we don’t know what we’re thinking until we write it down. Like most aphorisms, it’s probably only true in limited cases. But I want to think this thing through, and you’re my designated victims audience.

What I’ve had on my mind of late is death.

This is not, I hasten to add, my way of easing into grave news. There is no grave news. I’m doing okay, health-wise, for an old fat man, as my doctor told me a few weeks ago (I think those were his exact words).

But there’s been a lot of death in my life of late. I lost a friend in December, and another in January. Now one of the men in my Bible study group at church is in hospice; we went to see him Monday night. We’ll likely never see him again.

Also I lost an uncle last month. And another friend died earlier last year. (That one was complicated. We’d been very close at one time, but over the years he changed his opinions, and I felt he was using me more and more as an ideological punching bag. So I broke it off. Then word came that he was dying, and I agreed to one last phone call. It was civil, I left him with God’s blessing, and a couple days later he was gone. I’m sure I could have handled it better, but handling things badly is sort of my personal style.)

So it’s probably not surprising that I’ve had death on my mind. I’m disappointed to find that I’m not properly resigned yet to my mortality. I honestly thought I was. I assumed (perhaps judgmentally) that those intense people who live their lives with gusto were probably in denial. But I’ve always lived carefully. Measured out my life in coffee spoons. I have looked on the dark side. Gazed into the abyss. The Roman emperors, I seem to recall, had a slave who followed them about, muttering, “Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.” I fulfilled that function for myself. “Remember, it can always get worse, and probably will,” has been my slogan.

And yet I find myself resistant to assimilating the fact that I’m in my 70s, approaching the actuarial horizon for most of my family. I had a vague idea, I think, that I’d probably drop dead after I finished the Erling books, like Pres. Grant, who finished his autobiography (which paid off his debts) just days before dying of cancer. (It’s a good book, too. Very succinct and efficient in style. He wrote like he fought. You’d almost think it was written post-Hemingway.)

But here I am, my great project completed, trying to find a way forward with an even more ambitious (but hopefully shorter) work. I’m planning as if I’ll live forever. Caesar’s slave whispers to me, and I give him an elbow in the gut.

I am, in short, in denial. That offends my sense of myself.

On the one hand, the Bible tells us to number our days. On the other, we’re told to cast no thought on the morrow. Am I living my best life, looking on the bright side? Or am I deluding myself?

I have no internal instrument for judging this.

I suppose I could pray about it, but that sounds kind of extreme.