Uncertain future.

I have a bad heart. Eventually, it will fail me. When a person's heart fails, that's it. It's over. The heart is crucial. There's no mystery as to why people use the word symbolically in expressions like "the heart of the matter." It's at the core of things. It's at the core of your being. It's central, essential, an Organic Imperative. It's the crux of the biscuit.
I don't want this to sound dour and dismal. I'm going to wring whatever I can out of life. But I'm conscious of the proximity of death. It's always there, lurking. Like the Nazgul.
I can't sleep, anymore. I was awake at 3 am, considering the fragility of life. I thought about the time, when I was about 9 or 10, my parents and I made a condolence visit to a distant cousin's home. His kid's toy airplane (those balsa things - we all had them) had landed on top of an heating oil drum in the yard. The drum was perched on a stand. The stand must have been shaky, because when the kid climbed up to retrieve his plane, it toppled over and the drum crushed him. One bad decision and BOOM! He was no more.
I thought about a teenager, some friends of mine knew, who thought it would be fun to ride a skateboard while hanging onto the the bumper of a car. He lost his balance and hit his head on the pavement. He was gone. Just like that.
I remember another kid in my home town who was playing in his yard. He touched an ungrounded AC window unit. He was electrocuted.
An adult cousin of mine was also electrocuted. He was a smart guy. He'd spent 20 years in the Navy and retired in his late 30s. He only got to enjoy his retirement for a few months. While attempting to lay a long piece of metal pipe in a ditch he had dug in his yard (for some reason), the pipe made contact with an overhead electrical cable. That was the end of his life.
Death can be the result of childish behaviour or bad decisions, but, sometimes, the person is just doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wonder if any of them had time to be surprised. Boy, I didn't see that coming. I can't believe this is happening to me. When I was driving my car today I thought about how easy it would be for an oncoming truck to swerve into my lane and take me out. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's not always the other guy. If it can happen to them, it can happen to you (me).
Boy, I didn't see that coming.
It only takes one second to change everything. Good heart or no, we're all hanging by a thread.
Be good to people and enjoy the now.