I once imagined, on the point of retirement from a teaching career of 42 years, that I would give a version of Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech to colleagues and friends, starting with “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.” Why feel so lucky? Because I managed to do exactly what I loved doing as a college professor—reading, writing, research, teaching, creating new courses, traveling around the world to speak at conferences while having 3-4 months every year to organize my workdays and free days as and where I liked with family and friends, abiding by no one’s schedule but our own. Gehrig was only 36 when he gave his astonishingly gracious speech. I would be 70 when I imagined giving mine.

But the recent discovery and diagnosis of a disease that will likely kill me has rocked my foundations, which first to last have been forged on good luck and the entitlements of an upper-middle class North American life. These privileges (I thought) even extended to the long life I imagined I would lead, based on the life-long immunity from heart disease and cancer my parents enjoyed before expiring at 88 and 90, respectively. So here I am, less than two years into retirement, faced with the good chance I may be swept away within 12 months, with a decent chance of lasting two more years, and with the miracle of more time than that being just that: a miracle. How to cope?

I can say now, with experience, that the prospect of imminent death does, indeed, concentrate the mind. It has already made my day-to-day existence more vivid, brought me closer than ever to friends and family alike, made my frequent walks along the Delaware towpath in Bucks County more profoundly immersive than before–the stark outlines of bare branches flaring out against clouds and sky are every bit as compelling to me as were the lovelier (pre-diagnosis) leaves of Fall. And I have begun, as they say, “to put my affairs in order,” starting with the viewing notes, publications, and personal images I’ve archived on this website and moving on to the prosaic details of redrafting wills and estate planning.

Like many of us in the last few years, this isn’t the first time that my movement forward has been blocked. I’ve learned in that time—exacerbated by extended convalescences enforced by multiple ankle surgeries—to use time as well as I can: reading, writing, studying Italian, recovering old friendships, indulging in the warmth and love of wife and sons, bicycling, swimming and taking long walks when I can, or simply sitting outside to take in the sounds and sights of birds or the scudding of clouds across the sky. But this is the first time that the future itself has been blocked for me, the certainty of what will happen sooner than later mixed with the indeterminacy of how exactly and when.

At this turn, I hear old friend Hamlet whispering in my ear, “if it be not now, yet it will come, the readiness is all.” But am I ready, can I be made ready, is this a challenge I can meet? My wife and friends think I am being terribly brave but it’s more my inclining to Hamlet’s resigned view that “Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.” That’s as much to say, in my own translation, how impossible it is for someone in the stream of ongoing life to appreciate the difference between a death that comes sooner than later. And lacking that first-hand knowledge, there’s really no choice but to “Let be,” to carry on: read and write, eat and drink, and yes, even make merry.

But to put more pressure on “of aught he leaves,” I know very well who and what it is I will leave behind and can’t imagine their loss, much less my own absence from the scene of thousands of days to come, even if they remain riddled—as these days are—with the obscene machinations of the Trumps and Putins of this world. And that, my friends, is the crux, the thing that defeats me even when others see me—like Dante saw Ser Brunetto—as “quegli che vince e non colui che perde” (Inf. XV:123-4).