This is #7 in a series of essays on aging.

Do you get sick more often as you age? Maybe not, but you feel it more. You are more fragile, and you know it. You know sickness can do you in.

Not everybody gets sick. I have a ninety-five-year-old friend who is as healthy as you could wish. You probably know somebody like that too. Lots of older people are healthy.

You can be quite healthy and yet deeply affected by illness, however. What changes is how many sick people you know. Everywhere you go, you hear the “organ recital.” Not only do many of your peers get sick, some get very sick. Young people catch cold (especially if they have kids in school), but old people get knocked flat. A cold may lead to pneumonia. Pneumonia lands you in the hospital.

Friends get cancer and die. They lose their memory and become a shell of their former selves. They fall in the bathroom and break bones. Younger people know of some such cases, but older people know scads. The longer we live, the more we know.

That explains why older people are more aware of, and more intimidated by, disease. It surrounds them. They have so many friends who are terribly sick. If they live into their nineties, half their friends are dead. They are like a battlefield battalion that has fought from D-day to the Battle of the Bulge, leaving countless friends fallen behind them.

Losing friends is a blow to the heart. I’m at the beginning of this. Most of my peers are still healthy. However, every time I pass by a certain neighborhood I think of a friend who died of cancer a few years ago. His face and his manner are still very vivid to me. He was so vital and alive, but I’ll never see him again in this life.

That doesn’t make me distraught. Death is part of life, and I believe in resurrection. However, I miss him. He’s a piece of my life, gone.

The worst is the death of a spouse. I look at my wife and know that she might die before me. Or she might become deeply sick and need extraordinary care, perhaps for years. Friends of mine are living with these realities, and I can see it’s a wound that doesn’t heal.

Like phantoms, these possibilities haunt life as we grow older. You can ignore them—most people do—but you can’t escape them. That creates distinctive challenges. How can you live a happy and fulfilled life when sick people surround you? Can you remain a hopeful person when the likelihood of severe illness grows greater every day?

The answer might come down to temperament. Some people are incurably upbeat. You can push them down but they bob upward like a cork. I’m not that type, however. I need something more. Most people do.

Faith becomes critical. If you can’t believe in anything but what you see, then sickness is truly an existential threat. You can—you will—be destroyed. If, on the other hand, you believe in Jesus, a man who died and was buried but raised up to eternal life by the Creator God, then illness and death are dreadful but they are not terrifying. They can be understood in context and accepted. Death is not the end of the story. It hurts us but it does not defeat us. Its presence can even help, by pointing us away from what is transient to treasure what is eternal.

I had a friend, Howard Claassen, who taught physics at Wheaton College in Illinois. We attended the same church and one week he told me he had been to his mother’s funeral in Kansas. After I expressed my condolences, he told me that all her life she had been a querulous and complaining person, who made it a chore for him to visit. Then she had a stroke and nearly died. While in that near-death moment, she saw Jesus. When she woke up, she was disappointed. She had wanted to stay with Jesus, and her bed-ridden life didn’t compare favorably. From that moment, her personality changed, Howard told me. She didn’t complain anymore; all she wanted to talk about was Jesus. She couldn’t wait to see him again, and happiness filled her because she knew she would. That was her state until she died.

Yes, that’s unusual. It’s the only case I’ve known. Would that we all could have such a vision.