Why didn't I write that?

I just read Nora Ephron's I Remember Nothing. I am a great admirer of Nora Ephron's writing, which puts her on a very short list of women writers I admire and want to grow up to be. The problem is it's too late. I am grown up. I am beyond grown up. As Ms. Ephron so courageously says, "I'm old."

She was sixty-nine when she wrote that. Her picture on the back of the book looks sixty-nine like I look twenty-nine. She either has the greatest genes in the world or the greatest photographer. In either case, she looks great!

But that's not the point. The point is she wrote about being old with a clear-eyed honesty I cannot manage. She nailed it. Everything she said, I have thought. Everyone at our stage of life has thought it, even if we don't say it aloud. And if we do, our kids accuse us of being maudlin or morbid. It makes them uncomfortable; it makes us sad.

The realization that she may have only a few good years remaining hit her with real force, as it hits all of us. We know of course that we have only so much allotted time on this earth. We know, but we don't really believe it. I wonder how we manage to delude ourselves for so long.