You're most welcome - thank YOU for the affirmation!!
More and more, I see what a blessing it is to grow old and gray and wrinkled. All I can think of, revisiting this poem today, is how very lucky are those who wear the hallmarks of aging. Bring on the snow white beards, the shiny heads, the stooped shoulders, the gnarled, liver-spotted hands. When tufts of gray hair and knuckles at the steering wheel are all we can see of them as they crawl past in their old cars... we should salute those who've somehow managed to stay alive so long. Ernest Hemingway as a boy would laugh at old men and their comb-overs. Then he started combing over his bald spot. Then he got the cancer diagnosis and blew his own head off. Of all the things to remember about Hemingway, that one thing loomed largest for me, and I was only in my early 20s when I read that.
The lottery of life is such a mystery. The odds. Who draws the short straw.

Sister #1 killed at 18; Sister #2 died at age 63; this week, we learned Sister #3 of the 5 has stage 4 cancer, at age 61, with lymphoma, which means she will be lucky to have one year left. Five, ten years - making it to just age 71 - is something she will have to fight extraordinarily hard for, with stupendous Mind Over Matter, to beat the odds. She has always been the healthiest, most fit, most energetic of the five; she could do pull-ups and push-ups and run marathons. I was always the lump in the corner reading a book, unable to catch a ball or do even ONE pull-up.

Certainly, you're not ready to call it a day—

That line haunts me now. A day, or a life. My sister is nowhere near ready for her "day" to end. So much left to do. So much living for a busy, energetic 61-year-old.

The mystery of it all staggers the mind and challenges medical science. Miracles do happen. People do defy the odds. If anyone can, she can. I am hoping and wishing and praying in the most active and transitive sense those verbs can take.

Sorry. I didn't mean to uncork that bottle. It's just that I didn't find your reply - "Indeed, there is much more living to be done!" - until the shock and awe of learning my sister's sudden news. So, reading those words tonight, I treasure them all the more.

Thank you for your kind thoughts and prayers, my friend. :)