Missing The Boat Into The Future

The above is a photo of a galaxy, just one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe. Hell of a thing to throw away.

This from the blog of Jane Gross, a single and childless woman:

As a single childless woman, I share the fear of my readers, above, and no amount of financial preparation for a prolonged old age calms me. For sure, my long-term care insurance policy will buy me a home health aide and pay to retrofit my house if I’m able to remain here, or contribute to care in another setting. I have the luxury of savings and a mortgage that will be paid off by the time I’m 70. If I need a geriatric case manager, I’ll probably be able to afford one. I count my blessings.

But, having witnessed the "new old age" from a front-row seat, I’m haunted by the knowledge that there is no one who will care about me in the deepest and most loving sense of the word at the end of my life. No one who will advocate for me, not simply for adequate care but for the small and arguably inessential things that can make life worth living even in compromised health.

How does one respond to something like that? It is always a personal choice - to stay single and childless - so she is now reaping the fruits, or lack thereof, generated by her decisions. She will die alone, with only the county coroner (maybe) to say goodbye. But sadly, like so many of her generation, she thinks only of herself, how she will feel at the end, and nothing of what she and her progeny may have contributed to the future, what may have been lost.

If you are an optimist and believe in the future of mankind, you also believe that -someday - humankind will spread throughout the stars in this endlessly vast universe. What a horrid thought it might be for those who chose to terminate their line, a line of ancestors that stretches back to the dawn of time, that the progeny of them all will never be a part of mankind's incredible future.

Their DNA, their uniqueness, their unknowable contributions to the future, will be lost forever.

Now that's real death.