This is a story of my impending retirement brought about by three synchronistic events. As the story unfolds, I come to see retirement as a form of symbolic death. That insight teaches me three important lessons. First, that I can forestall this form of death by continuing to write and teach in retirement. Second, that I need to reach out more to others so as not to isolate myself from life. Third, that my habit-driven life style may be a futile hedge against death, symbolic and real, and linked in complex ways to the death of my spouse.
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