Dear Death,

This has to stop – people about my age, famous or not, dying. That means people who I went to high school with, or could have.

Regards,

Dees

I doubt that Death is listening. The trickle of deaths of people roughly my age – there’s always been a trickle – is only going to expand into a torrent in the coming decades until my cohort is no more. C’est la vie, c’est la mort.

I don’t expect to be among the last. You know how very elderly people are sometimes described as isolated because, among other things, they’ve “outlived all their friends”? I expect to be one of the friends.

The odd thing (to only me) about James Gandolfini’s death was that he born on September 18, 1961, exactly the same day as my high school friend Kevin, whom I posted about the other day.

One of these days, if I live long enough, I’ll get around to watching The Sopranos. I hear it’s good.