Hello, Rakeitha and Melody: Thank you both immensely for your posts.

Melody, I do eat well, a full and balanced diet. Too much sugar and salt, no doubt. Sprouts? Your prior message was the first time I ever heard of them. No doubt I could improve things by eating better; the question is, how much better? Yes, I believe in alternative medicine, and did yoga (Hatha) for 6 months or so. I take homeopathic medicine now. It's just that, well, at the end of the day, the thought keeps reappearing: my time has come. I know that people here refer to suicide as the "beast." I would say that taking one's life when the time comes, is not suicide; hence, the beast is either absent altogether or of an entirely different nature.

Rakeitha, you mention Steven Hawking. He is a hero to me -- much as Johnny Weismuller was to all us kids in the polio ward (he had polio and went on to become a world champion swimmer). Such people move the goalposts for everybody else; indeed, they provoke changes OF, not just IN, the game. Yet there is a price to be paid, even in their case: go to http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=577 for another person's view, i.e., his ex-wife.

No, I don't feel bad because I am "old;" I feel old because I feel bad. I looked around for a quote from Hawking on suicide, and couldn't find one. I wonder if anybody has ever bothered to ask him about it: Dave, talk about the elephant in the room -- that one is no elephant, he's a mammoth!