I remember bumping into a friend one day and the first thing he said to me was, “All our friends are dying.”

Sometimes I pause and think, “Am I blessed to be living this long?”

Indeed, as I have grown older, friends have left this earth for the afterlife. Then there are friends who still remain, but you want to avoid, for they have become grumpy and critical in their old age.

So the friends that you want to see and spend time with are those who will talk about most things under the sun without judgment but with laughter and good-naturedness. At the end of the day you feel relaxed and thankful for friends.

For one who lives alone, I often wonder if I’ll live too long that there will be no friends to mourn me when I go.

“Find a wife,” my friends would advice. As if that’s as easy as picking flowers from a garden.

“Don’t be romantic; just find someone who can take care of you,” they add. That’s even worse. I don’t think any woman would want to be proposed to with, “Will you marry me to take care of me?”

I have well-meaning friends, but they can be ridiculous at times. So I just smile and shake my head. As I am in my twilight years, looking for a wife becomes more difficult.

So I will just have to be content with seeing my close friends once in a while and hope that I will not one day find an empty table at the cafe where we always meet.