Thoughts?

When my time comes I hope I handle it as well as that one good dog I had. When he realized he could no longer stand up, he just looked at me, and gave me a virtual shrug. He was apparently out of ideas.

He did not struggle as I cradled him up and loaded him into the truck for that last trip to the vet.

I still feel bad I ate that leftover hamburger myself that last day instead of giving it to him. I did cook him a few fresh ones in the days preceding, though, when it was all he was interested in eating. Obviously, I did not know when I ate the leftover it was his last day. That is the way to go. I don't like the idea of doing anything "for the last time".

I guess I am saying that planning for a comfy nursing home isn't much of a strategy.

Yeah being alone at the exact time that something debilitating happens can be a very bad situation. I knew an older guy around here who never really had any health problems, but he had no kids, his wife had died a long time ago and he had lived alone for a few decades. He was active in his church but, knowing him and his attitude, he was also probably mongering with the best of us PLs. Never spotted him at a local strip club but I wouldn't have been surprised. I would run into him when we both used to do live-model figure-drawing whenever someone in the arts scene organized a model. He used to regularly announce that he had never taken medication and he hoped never to have to. I hadn't seen him in a while, his church checked in on him because he was missing, turns out he choked to death in his own kitchen. Just having dinner probably, though there were some reports that he had also had a stroke. It seems like a damn stupid, very frustrating way to go.

So like the OP in this thread, I worry a bit about that sort of thing too. I don't really think that having a wife is an adequate trade-off, given all the other ancillary implications of that kind of relationship, but having a help-mate in the old-folks' house when you're ageing is certainly one of the advantages.

I've wondered if it would be possible to build up an Epicurean center of some sort. Eight or ten like-minded people who all own a small bungalow-house, and then nearby in the center there's a group-sized dining hall and communal living center. If you get to pick all your friends to be at this location, it sounds great. If you are stuck in this location by your family and you don't get to pick your cell-mates, it sounds like prison. Or like a typical senior citizens' rest home. In my Epicurean imagination, we'd gather to watch the Euros and the World Cup, we could go off on monger trips either together or on our own ("gone fucking" placard left on the front doorknob), and we'd cook interesting meals and sit around and shoot the shit in the pleasant moonlit evenings by the pool. I would like to be able to organize it but I don't have the money to build the whole damn thing, and the only people I know who would want to be part of it happen, damn my luck, to all be older women. Like, High School or College classmates, they're OK people, but the constant mongering that I intend to insert into my retirement would put them off I'm sure. Or even if it didn't, I don't think I would want to share the details with them anyway.

Live your life as you want. No one can sort it out for, really, only do what you want to do. If you like mongering and traveling, do it! If you'd rather hang home, do it!

Right now, I'm trying to do things I couldn't for the past 18 years. My wife passed away 6 months ago this coming 21-Jul. She had MS for 23+ years, and the last 18 years were a slow decline to dementia with deep white matter collapse to the point involuntary stuff your brain manages started to shutdown. She had lung and breast cancer, sepsis at least 6-7 times. Parathyroid surgery that went side-ways on the way home from outpatient. Two broken legs, couldn't stand the past 6 years.

I'm not complaining as this fell under the "In sickness and health, til death do us part" clause to make with God, and I took care of her. Now, I have the last third of my life to work with. I know what I'm doing, and a big part is adjusting to a new future,