Boy has this been a bang-up year for death. Personal stories are this and this.

Anyway, sorry for another morose post - if this bringdown is not your cup of tea please scroll down to the next irreverant or irrelevant post which may be more your style.

Before getting my own personal stuff, I want to point out Kate's poignant statement on a personal case that strikes me as constructive:

So, while I appreciate any sentiments you may wish to share, I'd really prefer you take those few moments to sit down and tell a young person that a very good woman left the world tonight, years before she should have, because she made the choice as a teenager to pick up a cigarette.

Some of the funerals I've attended recently could spur an observation like that one. Watch what you do, and don't shirk the doctor visits, because once you hit 40 there are all kinds of reminders of mortality ready to bite you.

It's odd, but I got to the age of 33 without having experienced the death of anyone close to me. Then, in short order, I lost my grandmother, father, and numerous friends and relatives. It all reached a crescendo in the past year with a slew of funerals.

The most recent was this weekend with my brother in law. He was in his early 40s. As a child he had a cleft palate and went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for treatment which entailed a large dose of radiation. It turns out the Johns Hopkins method from the early 1960s was flawed. A bunch of these people came down with cancer 40 years later.

My brother in law got a nasty squamous cell skin cancer in the sinuses. In the spring of 2003 he had breathing problems for weeks and when he went to the doctor they gave him decongestants. By June the problem had not been fixed and an MRI revealed tumors and the extremely bad form of cancer. They operated to devastating effect to try and remove it, but couldn't. It was untreatable with chemo or, apparently, radiation. He held on until last Monday.

In the interim, he was overtaken by a tumor which was disfiguring and especially tragic because he and my sister had seven boys between ages 11 and 20 who had to watch their father decrease for over a year.

The funeral was brutal. Mainly, it was difficult because there was no lesson from the tragedy, except that Johns Hopkins in the early 1960s could have done things differently. But what does that give you to explain to a kid?

It sends you to the Book of Job, is what it does.

That feeling of immortality we have, we late-baby-boomers, is an illusion. We are in the crosshairs of the Grim Reaper, despite how we'd like to think we have a good long run guaranteed to us.

Although my thinking about personal financial decisions - how much to spend on a house or recreation - has been largely conditioned by concerns about setting us up for retirement, I'm thinking I don't want to wait for some of the rewards of life.

Maybe it's time to buy a bigger house. Even if I don't suffer an untimely death, I'll probably appreciate the extra space a hell of a lot more at 43 than I will at 63.