Reflections on Reaching My 80th Birthday

I can't help feeling very grateful to God  for allowing me to live to see my 80th birthday.
When I was young I wondered if I would live to see age 70--the beginning of this new century--in 2000.
When I was a child in the 1930s, children got polio and were crippled; some died.
The Salk polio vaccine had not been discovered yet.
In those years, I think  the average life expectancy was around 40 to 50 years.
Many people died from pneumonia and various infections.  Antibiotics had not been discovered yet.
I remember in the 1940s,  penicillin was discovered, and began saving lives from pneumonia and other things.
What a blessing it was to have seen these advancements.  Today we take them for granted.


Yes, I am grateful.  I thank Almighty God for the gift of each new day.
In fact,I know that  my next breath comes for God,and the next beat of my heart comes from Him, too.
There are a couple of passages from Sacred Scripture that come to mind:  What is man, mortal man.  that You should care for him?  and,  You even add years to our life to teach us wisdom..


Life is precious.  My brother in Christ Rene Gonzalez died Sunday night. He was married 55 years.
We visited him, prayed and talked with him and his wife Sunday morning.  We all felt  the end of life was near.
He lost a three-year battle with cancer.  We plan to attend his funeral Saturday.

We learned of the  sudden death yesterday of a relatively young man  (probably in his 50s) whose widowed mother we know.   Frank was involved in a deadly vehicle accident.
No one knows the year or the day, as Sacred Scripture tells us.


When I was young, like most young people, I felt invincible.  Death happened to other people.
Today I have a very different outlook on life and death, as you would expect, at age 80.
I always believed that death was not an end of life, but a beginning of a new, eternal life beyond all imagination.
In ancient Catholic tradition, the saints are honored on the day they died, not the day they were born.
In effect, we are  observing   a new birthday, the day of entry into eternal , everlasting life.

It is good that we can talk about these things in an honest and direct way, on my birthday.
Our burial plots have been chosen in in St. Mary's Cemetery in the town where we live.
The funeral director has our instructions.  We want to be considerate of those we leave behind.
In a sense, this is like making plans for a new birthday for us, and a very important one, indeed.

Please pray for us that we will remain faithful until the end, so that on our "final birthday" we will begin a new journey into eternal life, light and peace. By example, we hope we are providing a road map for all our family through this life, so that we all may arrive safely at the beginning of the next one.

God bless you all.