They are things we’ve been doing for years.

Not being able to come up with the name of the guy who starred in the movie. Standing in front of the open refrigerator wondering why we opened it. Suddenly discovering we’re further along on our trip and not remembering exactly how we got there. Putting our car keys down somewhere, but nobody knows where.

We’ve been doing them for years, but there’s a difference.

When we were younger, we just chalked it up to being distracted, inattentive, or careless. Now that we are older we wonder if this is the beginning of something awful.

Age does that to you. What used to be disconnected events become symptoms.

We all know someone or know a family member of someone who has Alzheimer’s or some other dementia. We see that toll it takes on the family as they watch somebody they love drift further and further away. We wonder if the lost car keys might be the beginning of that.

We know that nearly 14% of people our age are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia, people who are alive, but not living. And that becomes our greatest fear: outliving our lives and simply being a dead weight on those who love us.

When you get old and have assorted aches and pains, it’s hard to be consistently optimistic. It’s hard to take a rational view. A rational view would be if nearly 14% have some sort of dementia, more than 86% of us don’t. We are not destined to go out like a flickering light bulb.

I have good role models to fall back on. My mother’s father and my father’s mother each died at 75. Granddaddy did it just like he wanted to. He had been a driver all of this life, and he frequently said that he wanted to die at the wheel of a new car. After he closed his service station, he went to work for the Pontiac dealer and got a brand new demonstrator. One morning he got in the car to go to work. Backed out of the driveway, pulled to the curb across the street and died. Just as he had wanted to: at the wheel of a new car.

Grandmother wasn’t quite so fortunate. She had a stroke and didn’t recover consciousness for six months. But until the day of the stroke, she was active, outspoken, and—without question—the matriarch of the clan. Her last six months, comatose in the nursing home, was hard on the family, but it wasn’t on grandmother. She didn’t know she was there.

I only visited her a couple of times while she was in the nursing home, and it didn’t matter either time. But, sitting there, I discovered it was a lot more fruitful to think about the many years that she was active and very much alive than to concentrate on the shrinking husk in the bed.

That’s a lesson that kept coming back to me this week. I console myself that I haven’t lost a step because I never had a step. My mind is still reasonably active. And I don’t yet drool in public. Getting old is not fun, but it’s not nearly as dreadful as we sometimes make it.

I’m writing this as a pep talk to myself. I’ve lost a pen that Linda gave me. We’ve looked everywhere, and it’s nowhere. Some of my moving parts don’t really want to move. And I find myself thinking that in front of every silver lining there’s a cloud.

But, those are just incidents and attitudes. They are not symptoms.

At our age, we do spend time staring into the abyss. But nothing says we have to jump in.