Sigmund Freud, I tell them, once said we are all immortals in our own minds. I then ask: How about you? Finally I confess to being a naïve immortal myself. But lately this has begun to change.

A few years ago I read a wonderful essay in "The Undertaking" by the funeral director and poet Thomas Lynch. The essay begins with the following premise: When we are young we look forward with anticipation to what we are going to be, whereas when we are old we look back with longing on what we might have been. He then hypothesizes that if you can find the precise moment when you shift from looking forward to looking back you have found the exact midpoint of your life. From that midpoint, you can then calculate when your end is going to come. It’s a wonderful conceit, and Lynch executes it brilliantly.

I first read this essay just as I was entering middle age and grappling with its attendant physical and spiritual portents. Since that time I have been creeping ever so cautiously toward reckoning with my own mortality. I’m glad whatever realizations I have attained on this score were of the creeping as opposed to the catastrophic sort. In the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh, which I read every year with my “Death and Immortality” students, the god-man Gilgamesh becomes mortal only after the death of his friend, the animal-man Enkidu (who himself becomes mortal through sex with a prostitute--but that's another story).

Every year I tell my students that those who know, truly know, that they are going to die also know how to live. I tell them that, like a good book (or a good student paper), a life is sweeter when it has a beginning, a middle, and an end—that there is nothing so tedious as a story that refuses to come to a conclusion, a person who never stops refusing to let go of what is mortal.

I suppose if I had followed Lynch and taken the beginning of the middle of my life as an opportunity to reckon with its end—if I had actually become the mortal I challenge my students (and myself) to be—I could say that I was satisfied with where I now find myself. But I have not, so I cannot. I still pretend far too often that my days are endless, even as I become frustrated with friends who pretend the same thing, who fail to realize (as I often do) that each day is as urgent as life itself.

For now, however, any proclamations of satisfaction are going to have wait until summer when, God and the elements willing, my daughters and I will row out for the first time this year to a small catboat we own, lower the centerboard and the rudder into the sea, hoist the sail, toss away the mooring, and let the wind take us to whatever wild place it pleases.