“The word nostalgia is learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of nóstos, meaning ‘homecoming,’ a Homeric word, and álgos, meaning ‘pain, ache'”
–Wikipedia
Nostalgia is the besetting fault of middle age, and I am not immune to infection by its sweet melancholy. I sometimes find myself driving by my old middle school in the Richmond hills, or by the high school here in town, and feeling an almost desperate desire to turn back time and walk the halls of those institutions with the sense of a limitless future I all but took for granted back when I was a younger man.
In a column a few years ago, I wrote about entering middle age:
“Death, as an actuarial matter, is very possibly closer to me in the future than high school is in my past, and the years seem to tick by in the span that six months used to occupy.
“I’ve decided to skip the Corvette-and-hairpiece, clinging-to-youth thing some guys do in their middle years, but I now understand what a powerful attractant nostalgia can be for guys my age.
“It’s all death-denial. The negotiations have begun, but I already know I will lose and death will win, as it must — as it needs to.
“I understand the temptation in men my age to vainly try to hold on to a mercilessly vanishing youth.”
The poet Dylan Thomas, watching his father on his deathbed, put it better and more succinctly than I ever could:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

“Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

“Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

“Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

“Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

“And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

When I was still firmly ensconced in my youth, I knew that death was a fact of life, but it was very much an abstraction. I knew about death in the same way that I knew that atoms have electrons orbiting a nucleus, or that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066. It was just something that I’d heard was true, but it had little to do with me. I had no relationship with it, as it were.
My first personal encounter with death was during my own father’s final illness. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer in July 1994, and (being the stubborn Irishman he was) it took him until April of 1996 before his body and soul parted ways. I saw him get weaker and sicker over a year and a half, and sometimes I sat at his bedside and held his hand, and we’d talk. A lot of our father-son divisions melted away over the months, and one day he said to me that I seemed the most Irish of his children, and I felt unexpectedly honored by that. I realized that I had always wanted to hear him say that.
In his final weeks he was in considerable pain, and on an April day I got a call at work that I needed to go home right now. I arrived at about 2pm, and I was holding his hand as his breathing slowed, and after an hour or so he took his last breath.
Among the many emotions I felt in that moment was an abiding sense of surprise – at how utterly natural it was. Usually in the movies when a character dies, there is a swell of ominous or sad music, and there is a sense that something has gone ultimately wrong. In real life, in turned out that death was sad, but not tragic; wrenching, but not in any sense wrong. Indeed, it was a relief to know that my father’s pain was finally at an end, and I said a quiet prayer that his soul would be seen safely to Heaven. I’m sure he’s putting in a word for me.
Lest you think I’m getting lost in morbid ruminations, let me assure you that I’m not planning on going anywhere for a while yet, and I do what I can to support the expectations of actuaries. I quit smoking almost 10 years ago, quit drinking a little over a year and a half ago, and I’m starting to take a serious look at my diet and other bad habits at present.
But that is only delaying the inevitable. One gift of middle age is the sense that life is not infinite, and that if you are going to make some kind of enduring mark on your world – if your life will have some meaning beyond the fact of its existence – then there is no time like the present to start on that project if you haven’t already.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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