I'm about to go off on another tangent. Until recently, this blog has been about Chico, but I'm running out of things to say about it. I could just end this blog, but it's hard for a writer to stop writing. So I think that over time, the title "But this is Chico, too" will mean Chico and other things.

My first major tangent was a series on the history of rock music from a personal perspective, which I've just finished. It had nothing to do with Chico. This time around I'm focusing on aging. This topic's only tie with Chico is my belief that I will become an old man here. In 12 years, I'll be 70, so we're not talking about a long time before the transformation is complete. I'm not going to do this as a series. I'll just bring it up occasionally.

By the time I'm 70, I hope to be retired. I'll have plenty of time to write, but by then I may be so overwhelmed by aging that I may not want to write about the subject. Now may be the best time to address it.

What do you do when you retire?

What you always did, but more of it. For me that would mean reading, spending time with my family (grandchildren maybe?), traveling, gardening, volunteering, flaneuring, perhaps running. Those things would be my first order of business.

My last order of business would be dying.

I think about that more than all the other things put together.

Twenty years from now we'll start hearing the media talk about how 10,000 baby boomers are dying every week. Thirty years from now, it will be up to 100,000 every week. Bye bye, boomers. We're a large demographic so it will hard to avoid hearing stories about us in our declining and vanishing years.

But even if the rise and fall of my celebrated generation was not automatically newsworthy, I would still be painfully aware of the reality of death. Every day, I feel its talons digging into me, its hot dragon breath searing me.

Fifty years ago today, shortly after I started the second grade, and just days after I went to school dressed as Superman for Halloween, my mother died.

There she was, sitting up in bed admiring my little brother and me in our costumes and praising the pumpkins we had carved with the help of my dad. And then three days later, she was gone.

The main person in my life was gone.

Since then, death and I have been on bad terms.

Until that point, death had been no big deal. A year earlier, my mother told me my great- grandmother had died. But that's OK, she said. My great-grandmother was sick and old. We all have to die someday, my mother said. I accepted that. My great-grandmother looked so ancient and infirm to me I could barely believe she was still alive. Death seemed like the next logical step for her.

But my mother's death changed everything. This was not OK. This was not only a desertion, but an ambush. Nobody told me it was coming. It wasn't just about protecting a child from bad news. The adults didn't talk to each other either. How do you wrap your head and heart around the idea that a beloved wife, daughter, sister and niece, just 30 years old and with two young children, is dying? My family couldn't. They chose to cling to false hope. You'll get better, they told my mother.

Even on the day my mother died, my dad was unwilling to tell my brother and me what had happened. He sat us down and told us a story about how God had taken her away, and how it would be a long time before we saw her again. How long, I asked? Oh, a long, long time, he said. Where is she, I asked? Heaven, he said. That's when I finally knew. I ran out of the room. I'd heard enough of the story.

My little brother still didn't understand. A few days later, I was the one who had to tell him, She's dead. She's dead.

My mother herself never told me how sick she was. Just a flu that isn't bad, she said. Later, I found out from a next-door neighborhood child that my mother had died of cancer. No she didn't, I protested. Yes, she did, the child's mother said.

Lately, I've been thinking about how my dad said it would be a long, long time before we saw my mother again. Well, isn't 50 years long enough? Where is she? I'm not a person who is blessed with the ability to see dead people, but just a little sign would help. I look for signs everywhere.

I assume my dad was trying to tell us we wouldn't see her until we died. He died last year, so maybe he's with her now. I'm not convinced any of this is true - God, heaven, life after death - but all of my religious impulses start with the hope that I will see my mother again.

In this self-actualizing age, we think of life as a journey. But if death is the end of all of us, and if we must suffer the loss of loved ones we will never see again, what's the point of such a painful journey?