As I child I had a recurring dream that as my mother, father, and brother stood at the edge of some woods across a flat green field of grass to take my picture that I would back closer and closer to the edge of a cliff. At the last minute I would turn and jump then wake bouncing in my bed. It was a rush! I interpreted this as a premonitory warning that I would die by falling from a great height possibly in the mountains.
In college I pushed my limits with everything. There was no limit I was unwilling to try exceeding. We all knew you were supposed to live hard, die young, and leave a pretty corpse.
Now I would like to live forever. I want to always be there for my children and their children. I want to see how the world evolves over the next few hundred years. But stress is going to take me. Sometimes it feels like Death is reaching into my chest and tugging on my heart as a tease. My grandfather passed at 64 years of age. His nemesis was cigarettes; mine is stress and tension.
