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So many people, so worried about dying alone.   What am I, chopped liver?   No one dies alone.   Family members rushing in from far and wide, racing against time to reach the bedside before their loved one checks out.   But you're not doing it for them, are you? You're doing it for yourself. To alleviate your own free-floating guilt.   You should have known better.   You did know better.   But you were too busy to think about it then, too busy to do anything about it, and now you feel guilty, and here you are, on your personal pilgrimage, doing your penance, begging for forgiveness.   There's plenty of time, you thought.   There was plenty of time. You had years. Years.   Where were you?   No one dies alone, but a lot of people live their lives alone.   And now, who do you think you are, showing up at the last minute, as if you could atone for all that procrastination in a day, or an hour?   And then you have the audacity to yell at me. Like I'm the one who's being thoughtless, inconsiderate, unkind, unfair.   Of course. How dare I?   You dropped all your busy-ness the moment you heard, and came all this way, all this way to be here for them, to reassure them (to reassure yourself) that you didn't actually forget, no, never, they've always been a priority but you just had so much else going on.   But, sure, I'm the asshole here.   You're too late. Twist it any way you want, any way that will help you sleep at night, but the simple fact is that that you came too late for one more family dinner, too late for one more walk in their favorite park, too late to go fishing together one last time or one more late-night bullshit session on the back porch. Too late to apologize for that argument, too late to tell them that it was all so silly, too late to patch things up.   No more memory-making. This is it. You've reached the last page in that scrapbook. This is the last memory of them that you'll get.   Their last memory of you will only be that you came too late for any of that.   And, honestly, they probably don't even know you're here.   They know I'm here.   I'm the only companion they've got now.   I'm the one who comes in time.   Don't worry about dying alone; I've got that covered.   Worry about living too little, too late.   Worry about living too lonely.