There are a few predictable milestones in life. They might include, especially if you are a boy, the first fight you won against a bully. Or the first boy-girl party. The day your parents dropped you off at college and the future seemed to be filled with enticing freedoms and infinite possibilities. Or the moment you were offered the job you had long desired. Or the birth of your first child. And the second. And the third.

But then, inevitably, there comes that moment when the future is suddenly foreshortened and you come face-to-face, so to speak, with the fact that the end is closer than the beginning. I am, of course, referring to the day a younger person sees you standing on a train or in a crowded room and offers you their seat. I confess that coming-of-age moment happened to me more than a few years ago. I was leaning, with a certain manly swagger, against the partition in the vestibule of a Metro-North train heading home from New York City to Connecticut. Naturally, I was startled and abashed to be preposterously taken for a much older man. “No, no, no,” I lamely protested as the young man rose from his seat and beckoned. “I’m fine, really.” But the young man would not take no for an answer. As I was graciously ushered to his seat, I realized that my appearance was no longer that of the vigorous middle-aged man I had long imagined myself to be. I thanked the young man as I sat down, but I was not entirely grateful.

I experienced a similar revelation recently when I received in the mail a “Dear Paul” solicitation, indeed an invitation, from a nearby cremation service (“Today’s Sensible Choice”). Surely, I said to myself, I don’t look to be in need of, well, a final seat on that train to oblivion. It is not as though my wife and I haven’t discussed the last things. We have, sort of. Still, we haven’t finalized our plans for that inevitability. For someone who earned a living making journalistic deadlines at the last minute, a little procrastination is in the bones. For several years now, we have been routinely bombarded with handsome brochures from various retirement and assisted-living residences. Our current physical and medical conditions, though not quite optimum, do not yet call for that posh incarceration. But since there is a time for everything under heaven, I suppose that if we are lucky, we will eventually have to shuffle off to one of those dorm-like settings where the elderly now gather. The future prospects on that campus, unlike those on the campuses of our youth, will be finite. Like most people, my wife and I tend to avoid thinking about such things, naïvely assuming that decrepitude and disability will somehow pass us by.

Several years ago, the essayist Roger Rosenblatt had a very funny self-deprecating piece in the New York Times titled “What They Don’t Tell You About Getting Old.” He confessed that when he was young, he never “expected that one’s social circle would consist of Marie, who does blood work, and an M.R.I. technician named Lou.” Along those lines, I have recently begun a serious relationship with a cardiologist while continuing to be faithful to my longtime orthopedist. Rosenblatt’s description of why it takes him forever to get in and out of a taxi is hilarious, especially if your own joints are a bit creaky. “If some other old person is with you—a friend, a spouse—there’s a real possibility of never getting out of the vehicle,” he writes. “You might live out the rest of your days in the back seat, watching Dick Cavett do real estate adds on a loop.” Restaurants are equally challenging. “Merely to rise to my feet in a restaurant takes so much angling and fulcrum searching, the waitstaff takes bets on whether I will do it at all.” I hasten to add that Rosenblatt, now in his eighties, is even older than I am—but not, I hope, older than I will be one day. Then again, one worries whether getting older is really all that desirable, given how humorless the world is becoming. My will to live forever was somewhat weakened when the Times ran a number of letters reacting to Rosenblatt’s column. One letter writer scolded him for complaining about his problem with taxis. Many people, the writer fulminated, can’t afford a taxi. If the Times saw fit to publish such an obtuse remark, perhaps the future is even darker than I fear. Perhaps a call to the crematorium was prudent after all.

Enclosed in my solicitation from the cremation service was a stamped-addressed envelope encouraging me to request a copy of the “latest version of our cremation answer book.”  It assured me that the service provided was “simple cremation at an affordable price without any of the unnecessary services many people don’t want.” What could those unnecessary services be? Is there such a thing as a complicated or deluxe cremation? “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust” should just about cover the options, I would think. But that was not a slogan that appeared on my cremation invitation. Perhaps the answer book will have the answer. Evidently, it is just another of the many things they don’t tell you about getting old.