Eight years ago, my wife and I moved into "Golden Acres," the subject of recent criticism in Annals [1]. Like most couples our age, independence had always been the name of the game. We were accustomed to giving support—not getting it. This move would be something very different—living in an apartment among strangers at first, but where others of like mind were trying, as we were, to secure a reasonable future against, as Shakespeare put it, "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." We found bright people, interesting people, private people, lonely people, ailing people, cheerful people, considerate people all around us.

In the community, set gracefully on the landscaped grounds, was the health center where one could be taken care of if illness struck or to which one could be moved when failing health rendered independence impossible. This place, in a very real sense, was often a way station en route to the hereafter, and its very existence became a quiet part of the universal consciousness that we were all, indeed, mortal. One soon found that gentle death was a sort of companion, seldom intrusive, but always present.

In time, it came our turn to experience for ourselves the acts of passage, the slow motion into eternity; my wife began a quiet departure while I became someone there to help make it as gentle as possible. The center staff proved to be patient, cheerful, and careful guardians; in their hands, the difficult became endlessly possible, as it had to be—and the sad, wonderfully reassuring.

Although the people who live in this community are accustomed to their finitude, the sense of a coming end does not hang over us like a threat. Rather, it is a final test of one's acceptance of an end to everything some day. There is a fundamental earnestness about this place that is one of its greatest attractions. It is not gloomy, not perpetually grief-stricken; instead, it is steadily triumphant. It has apparently come to an acceptance of both life and the loss of it, which seems to me quite wonderful. I'm glad we came; we both were.