8. My grandfather was lucky enough to have good health & a lucid mind till the very last week in life.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
9. Yet to live to be 95, even surrounded by a family that loves you, is to bear witness to innumerable deaths.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
10. My grandfather outlived his wife by many decades (she died before I was born). He outlived a daughter and a son.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
11. My grandfather outlived not just almost all his contemporaries but also almost everyone from the generation younger than him.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
12. In the last week of his life, when for the first time he lost his mind's grip, my grandfather started talking to people decade's dead.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
13. I know of know work of literature that quite captures the texture of extreme old age better than that Agnell essay.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
14. My grandfather -- born in a village in Punjab -- couldn't have been more different than Agnell. Yet their old ages have parallels.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
15. I was lucky enough to talk to Roger Agnell once, while working on an essay about New Yorker cartoonist Gluyas Williams.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
16. Williams also lived to an extreme old age but had stopped drawing in early 1950s.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
17. When I talked to him, Angell was quite possibly the only person in the world who remembered Williams from when he drew for New Yorker
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18. When I talked to Angell, every word was precious, because no one else had those memories. He's the last witness.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
19. I'm not too sentimental, but I was trembling when talking to Angell. I had to pay attention to every word. There was no one else.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
20. All of which is to say, Roger Angell's "This Old Man" is a tremendous essay:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/old-man-3?currentPage=all …
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