Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.

According to any decent actuarial table, I’m a good bit closer to the end of my life than I am to the beginning. News flash: I will not live to be 134 years old. Moreover, my parents and my parents-in-law have all passed on, which puts me in the oldest living generation of both the family I was born into and the family I married into.

Consequently, as I walk around Contoocook every morning with my canine friends, I sometimes find myself thinking about the end of my days. My thoughts seem to run in two different directions, one more practical, the other more philosophical or, dare I say, more profound.

On the practical side, the deaths of my parents and my parents-in-law provide different models for what the end of my days could look like. My parents both died suddenly and unexpectedly, both in their homes. In contrast, my parents-in-law experienced — or endured — a considerable amount of medical intervention during their final years. I pray for the ending my parents got.

I appreciate that I have only a modicum of control over how exactly my life will end, but it brings me some comfort to know that I have done as much as I can, from a legal perspective, to select the people who will make decisions about my health care if I cannot and to inform those people of my wishes. So much for the practical side of my demise and today’s public service announcement.

On the philosophical side, I cannot help but reflect on the fact that there are at least two points in my life when, if nature had taken its course, it also would have taken my life.

When I was in the seventh grade, I had appendicitis. I’m no medical historian, but I would have to think that as recently as 200 years ago appendicitis was often fatal. For me, it was not. Twelve hours after I woke up with a bellyache, my infected appendix was out of my belly and in a bucket on its way to a pathology lab. I didn’t die, but as my mother told the story, she nearly died of embarrassment when she watched an orderly wheel me into the operating room and saw how dirty the soles of my feet were. At least my underwear was in good shape.

About ten years ago, crazy high blood pressure burst a blood vessel in my nose. Without a midnight trip to the emergency room and a snootful of cotton gauze, I could have bled out. If my highly pressurized blood had found a weaker vessel in my noggin than the one it found in my schnoz, it, again, could have been lights out for me.

As I see it, that makes two times that I have cheated death, which puts me on life number three. If a cat has nine lives, then I must be one third of a cat. But beyond my interspecies mathematics lie several philosophical questions.

I have never thought of this until now, but if I am truly living my third life on borrowed time, does that not obligate me to make extra good use of the triple gift I have been given? I see more than a little merit in that idea.

If indeed my appendicitis and my blood pressure episode were potentially fatal and my life was saved by my 1969 appendectomy and my 2014 emergency room nose job, that raises another question, albeit one far above my pay grade: Just how long am I supposed to live?

It seems that something, perhaps in my genes, wanted to snuff me out at least twice while modern medicine rode to my rescue. Like many of my vintage, I am very likely full of other ticking time bombs just waiting to detonate.

As someone who probably watches more television than I should, I find myself bombarded with commercials for prescription drugs that urge me to ask my doctor to prescribe them to me. My dislike for those commercials could fill an entire My Turn, but that’s not my concern here.

Rather, my concern is with the idea that every single adverse medical condition is an enemy to be battled, notwithstanding the cost of the battle or the long list of side effects that accompany the “cure.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad my parents had my appendix removed. Had my daughter not been over eighteen when her appendix burst, we would have made the same decision for her. But, at the same time, I’ve heard that for many people, half of all the money they spend on health care is spent during their last six months.

I just have to wonder whether withstanding six months of intensive, invasive, expensive, and often unpleasant medical care is merely a Pyrrhic victory, at least for the patient. I’m pretty sure that’s not how I want to spend the end of my days.

Between becoming the ancient auntie in a back bedroom and being a science experiment in a big shiny research hospital, I’ll happily be the ancient auntie waiting for a gentle case of pneumonia to carry me away.