We Move Along

'Finally, there is nothing between you and God.' This is not original; I read it somewhere, sometime and it has never gone away. Always lurking. Moving closer. Not just an intellectual exercise any more.
In life, my mother-in-law had a close and true friend. My mother-in-law is already long gone; her friend is recently so. As well as sympathizing with the family's loss, this person's death bothers me more than I care to admit.
We are moving up; we are moving along. Remember 'needle day'? Every one lined up for the health nurse and we moved along. In my experience, there was no way of getting out of that line; even the fainters got their shots. So, we moved along, then it was my turn and sometimes it wasn't so bad, after all. Move along, move along.
In a properly ordered world, the young, the middle-aged live. The old who live provide us with a measure of youth. Finally, reluctantly they die.
The entire preceding generation has provided, for my generation, a bulwark against The End, as we do for the following generation. For our children, there is a pretty solid wall between them and it. For me, every death of someone I've known is a small dismantling of the wall; every death of someone close to my family makes that dismantling just a little bit quicker.
For those of us who have lost a parent, a whole section of wall has come down. For those of us who have lost both, there is now no longer anything between us and old age. The illusion of youth has been totally stripped away. There is nothing between us and the void? the abyss? the rapture? 
It is not as easy as I thought it would be: this getting comfortable with my aging. Actually, I have seen an abyss, and there is a river running through it. Rivers go somewhere. This will be my wishful End.