I have been having this really odd sensation.  I've been really keenly feeling that one day I will be old, and possibly bed ridden.  I was riding the train today and saw some flowers growing off the top of a metal fence.  I was thinking that when I am old and in bed I won't see those flowers with my eyes, but feel this memory so very sharply.  I also thought that my legs would be frail, maybe from being hit by a car when I was young.  So I just reached down and held my legs to feel their strength and and remember them intentionally. 

But what this really made me think of is the fact that my view of the end of my life is that it is a sorrowful thing.  Then I thought back to this piece from st. John of Damascus that a friend sent me.  It is from the burial service for Orthodox priest and ends like this: "Youth and the beauty of the body fade at the hour of death, and the tongue then burneth fiercely, and the parched throat is inflamed. The beauty of the eyes is quenched then, the comeliness of the face all altered, the shapeliness of the neck destroyed; and the other parts have become numb, nor often say: Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

With ecstasy are we inflamed if we but hear that there is light eternal yonder; that there is Paradise, wherein every soul of Righteous Ones rejoiceth. Let us all, also, enter into Christ, that all we may cry aloud thus unto God: Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia."

indeed.