A post I just read over at The Art of Manliness just helped me think through something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while now – my mortality. The post is on how one grieves a friend. I got pretty choked up reading it, which is pretty rare for me. Normally it takes ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or ‘A Snoodles Tale’ to make me get misty. But this got to me. Though the writing was very good, I wasn’t sure why it affected me so. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was because I could so easily identify with the writer. While I haven’t had any close personal friends die, I do know of several men my own age – with families and young children like mine – who have died recently. I’ve been in that life stage for a while where many of the older generation of relatives and friends have started to pass. But seeing people who have always seemed ‘old’ pass away hasn’t effected the image of my own mortality the way seeing someone very much like me suddenly struck with cancer and die. Combined with annual insurance enrollments that this year included increased life insurance coverage on both my wife and myself, and I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot.

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