I have discovered that when you’ve grown old your mind wanders down dark roads kicking up dusty recollections and strange memories. That happened to me this week after I heard about the six teenagers killed in two separate accidents.

Two of them—brothers—were on their way to a dentist appointment. Four were going somewhere else; the news didn’t say. In both cases, however, there were six young people who in one moment had futures and in the next didn’t.

And we’ll never know what possibilities were cut off in that instant between having a future and not having one.

For some reason that made me think of two people from my distant past.

One—J.R. Register—was a classmate. J.R. played trumpet in the band and was on the basketball team. For a while, his claim to fame was that he was the only boy in the ninth grade with a 5 o’clock shadow. I don’t remember what J.R. planned to do with his life; I’m sure he had the same kind of aspirations and plans the rest of us had.

At least until a driver ran a stop sign on a country road one night and killed both J.R. and his date.

The other one was Joanne Neighbors. Joanne was older than we were, the older sister of Keith who, among other things, was the trumpet player in our wanna-be Dixieland band. Joanne had graduated from Meredith with a degree in music and was blessed with perfect pitch. She patiently sat through Sunday afternoon practices in their living room, occasionally writing out a part to fill in a hole an arrangement.

It never occurred to me that those noisy and out-of-tune practices must have been agonizing to her ears. But she was nothing but encouraging.

The week before Christmas that year Joanne was in Four Oaks to conduct a church’s Christmas cantata. They found her in her car.

Unlike J.R., Joanne already had her path set. She had won awards for her compositions and was being recognized for unusual talent. She had a cousin who was a nationally known composer, and it looked as if Joanne was going to do just as well. Until that night.

My mental wanderings are not as morbid as they sound. This is not some sort of survivor’s guilt. What I was thinking about was unrealized possibilities and what that should mean for those of us who still have a future. Sometimes I think we are so busy with the here-and-now that we don’t invest in our futures; we don’t keep working toward those possibilities. And I don’t think old age is a good excuse for that. It’s true that we’ve arrived at a point where we obviously have more past than future, but that isn’t license to give up on the future we do have.

In short, I believe that just the act of waking up in the morning places a responsibility on us to lead meaningful lives, to accept the gift of another day gratefully and to use it purposefully.

There is, when you get older and discover that there are more obituaries in the paper for people younger than you than for people older, a tendency to mentally cut life off, to decide that something would be a good idea, but there’s probably not enough time for that. You decide not to try to learn another skill or another language, to begin a large project, or to dive into some activist group. Unconsciously, we are just picking a place to die.

But look at the other side: if you decide to launch into a major project and you don’t have an opportunity to finish it, what have you lost? Even unfinished, the project has added purpose to the days you did have.

Back in the forties, cowboys kept saying they wanted to die with their boots on. I didn’t really have any idea what that meant until I got older. It meant that, if they were going to be cut down, they wanted it to be when they were active rather than lingering in bed. Now I can understand that, but I still feel that it’s incomplete. To me, it’s not so much that we have our boots on, but that even our last and final steps are going somewhere. We still have purpose.

We’ll never know what J.R. and Joanne would have accomplished if they had lived to an old age; it’s not really helpful to speculate on it. But there’s always our own future, long or short, that we’re responsible for. And may we really make the most of it.