I am growing older.

It occurs to me that mortality is like a sickness. At first, you are unaware. Then you feel something—a difference. The difference becomes a discomfort, and you think, “I’ll wait. In a moment, it will go away.” But it doesn’t. And after a change of position, and a palm on the forehead, and maybe even a scientific measurement with a thermometer, you name it. It’s a fever. You have a fever and you are sick. You can’t find the edges of it at first. It seems everywhere. It is what you are. And then you realize that you will have to suffer. You are immersed in suffering and there’s no way out but to feel it, to feel it through to the end.

That’s what growing old is like. It is inescapable. We try to laugh it away. We try to jeer at it. But there it is, and we’re as surely inside it as a mouse in a milk bottle. We can’t climb out of it.

And it is what we are, like the rhythms of our breathing. We can’t not be growing older, because that would mean not being at all.

I try to comfort myself with thoughts of how difficult it was sometimes to be younger. I wrap all that I now know around myself to remember that it’s better to be as I am now. I remember the difficult times I’ve survived and soothe myself with comforting assurances. And there is time left. As I do when I wake up in the morning too early to rise, I say, “There is time left.” We don’t know how much time, but there is time there, in the bank. Not as much as there was ten years ago, or even yesterday, but there is time.