Don’t let the Sun go down on me

Many a man has found himself feeling the full dread of a setting sun. Not so much the setting of that physical behemoth, but rather, the setting of the sun of a man’s years, that sad, inevitable moment in his life when he finds himself irreversibly in the twilight of his years. He’s left behind the best of everything, his most raucous laughter has long bid his erstwhile company adieu, his deportment has long since gained that state that betrays a nimiety of fine dining and fine libation that indeed borders on crapulence, his desire has all but crept away from him, his physical strength is a shadow of its former glory (he winces when he thinks of whence he’s fallen from). He is but a pale shadow of his former self. That propellent quality, curiosity, has long since refrained from visiting our sorry subject, except in cursory and perfunctory stints, and even then it’s relegated to the most bilious and mundane of topics, the obituaries, the price of desert roses, or other such matters to which no ordinary younker would ever dream of being drawn to the contemplation of.

Such a man, in such a state, is  not necessarily a bad thing, for when man has, in the course of his life prior to this crepuscule, lived his life in full measure, then said crepuscule will elicit only a minor sense of resentment in the visited. It offers him a chance to rest  before that final rest that must visit all men is visited him, aye, ‘fore the Grim Reaper draws nigh for the harvest he will not be denied. Fortunate is the man who upon reaching the twilight of his years finds himself with little or no regret (indeed barring the one regret of being subject to senescence).

“And so to conclude and to finish this skit,” I will state my utmost terror, here in the very prime of my youth, an overwhelming dread really, that on the day that I will confess myself to have taken that last turn on the highway of life, the turn that leads in only one direction, and to a final destination six feet ‘neath the ground, having passed through geriatric station, I will find myself with regret the regret of not having lived as I set out to, not having travelled extensively as possessed my young mind to imagine, not having dined with kings and with beggars, amongst a bevy of other goals objectives formulated in the formative years of my life. Please don’t let the Sun go down on me, (but when it does, let me have done all I set out to).