I rent a small room from a modern-day Miss Havisham, and it will likely see me through the end of my time on this earth. My former, modest house and its annoying upkeep is someone else's problem now, and my hope is that the cash from the sale will last until I am naught. British literature was always my passion, starting all the way back with the Great Books program as an adolescent. But I was a lousy student, right up to my mediocre master's thesis. I remained, therefore, throughout all my working days, a mere adjunct professor at a community college. Now I am, somberly enough, a doddering octogenarian. Miss Havisham is twenty years my junior, but we seem cut from the same wrinkled cloth. She has earned her title on several counts, starting with the inability to recover from a jilting in her twenties; through her dusty, cobwebbed house; on the grounds of her money; by her cat Stella (not Estella, but close enough); and the four decades she has gone without the sniff of a man within her ambit. Recently I fell, for the second time this year, but she has no room in her life for my concern.

"When are you going to begin walking outside again?" she challenged me, slobbering up her morning granola and blueberries. "If you don't use it, you'll lose it." The fall had shaken all the sinews of my body. My big toe had found a half-buried brick that was camouflaged by dead leaves, and over I went. Like Sydney Carton awaiting La Guillotine, I feared for my head. My arms shot up, crossing to form a protective X. But the rest of my body suffered for it. I have ached for weeks.

"Sadly, I've too much pain at the moment. I'll get back to walking in due time."

"The sooner, the better." She fears being stuck with an invalid, I'm sure that's the extent of her concern. I have us on a word count each morning, and having reached it, I left her in the kitchen to finish snarfing up her breakfast.

Enough of minor mishaps and misanthropic madams. Here's my octogenarian's CV of health: I've a bum ticker, I'm on insulin, and I've beaten cancer twice. Twice. It will be interesting (at least to me) to see what malady takes me down for good. I feel as if, here at four score and upward, I have gambled at a great roulette wheel that keeps spinning, spinning, spinning. And I keep waiting, waiting, waiting for the ball to stop bouncing and fall into its lethal slot.

Vanity does not leave you in old age, but it is a lost battle. I'm a bag of bones, scrawny as a Victorian street urchin. My skin is distressed - a pattern that works well for a leather jacket, but hardly becomes a human being. And the galaxy of skin tags on my chest and back! In my condition, the world will have little to do with me. Don't be fooled by those fortunate, spry few. Most face nothing but solitude, kicked to the curb like curs.

These days, I find myself watching the 1982 BBC production of King Lear over and over. Michael Hordern is a brilliant actor, but there is a certain "affable doofus" quality to everything he does. Whether it's Juliet's father, Prospero the magician, or the bent and haggard Lear, Ed Wynn always comes to mind. Watching his Lear, I feel like it enables me to laugh in the face of looming death. I think this might be a good way to go out - if I get the benefit of a gradual exit, I will watch Hordern's Lear upon my death bed, and exeunt with a wicked smile on my face.

My son sometimes calls me from his apartment, having lost his house long ago to the fallout betweeen him and his ex-wife. It saddens me that both he and I have such small living quarters. We owe this to one shared fault: the inability to get along, matrimonially, with women. Don't get me wrong, we both respect women. I'm sure I can speak for him on that account. But the two of us are missing some quality that affords gentle cohabitation. He works, as I did, as an adjunct professor in British literature at the local community college. Like father, like son. Like women? Well, we both tried to.

On the day I finally decided to try walking again, I came downstairs into the kitchen and found Miss Havisham with her head in the granola, unresponsive. Her face, what I could see of it, was tinted blue, like the blueberry infused milk in her bowl. The paramedics came and told me what I already knew - she was dead. If she were to have gone according to Dickens, it would've been fire. But it was blueberries. The lucky stiff! She now had the peace I'd pontificated about and worked over fiercely in my scrambled mind like a dog or cat shreds a toy. But it didn't look like anything I wanted. I was looking at nothingness. It was a hard image to absorb. My son will take me in, I’m sure, but I hate bothering him. He still has hope for his own life and I don’t wish to be an impediment.

That picture of Havisham in her death bowl is something that will not go away. It's made me less contemplative about my own dying. You better believe I'm out there walking every day, fighting inertia, staying engaged. I'm at a detente with living, and that's the best it's going to get. Still, I've made a bold decision, should my body begin to yield again to some pernicious force. I'll refuse treatment - let it run its natural course. It happens more often than you think. Recently a friend of mine, who got leukemia at eighty-nine, said she was through with the whole damned mess, didn't want the extra six months that chemo would give her. She died within a month of the diagnosis.

I've seen enough of this world. I had great expectations for it, once upon a time. But it seems war and suffering and loneliness will continue, long after my simple sojourn. Have I not mentioned loneliness? Perhaps the worst thing of all. Human beings cannot stand much of it. They wither in its presence. It's a stage upon which disease expounds its final, fatal soliloquy. Sometimes I just have to rage, like Lear. Bring on your infirmities, world! Test me with your noxious afflictions! Drive me to the precipice, o foul contagion!

I'll die bravely; draw the curtains....