Watching friends who made bad decisions now dying

This I find is one of the most awful things about being my age (68) now. People that didn't make choices that allowed them to survive at certain points in their lives for whatever the reason.

A friend of mine was in Berryvale (like a mini-whole foods store in Mt. Shasta) and found an old friend of ours that we used to pick pine, fir, cedar cones with around 1980 under contract to the California Department of Forestry. He was in a terrible fix because he had punched someone in his living facility because he now was having senile dementia. However, because he had girlfriends only but was now single at this point in his life he had no family who he had given Medical durable power of attorney. He didn't need durable financial power of attorney because he didn't have anything really. But, Medical Durable power of attorney can keep you alive even when you have senile dementia or Alzheimers or are in a coma or whatever causes you not to have your full mental faculties.

So, this friend of ours was crying and likely around 70 now because he didn't want to have to go out alone in the snow and didn't have anywhere to live and didn't recognize my friend when he talked to him. He said, "Do I know you?" My friend said "yes" and sat down at the table and talked to him for awhile.

However, as friends we have no legal rights to help someone in this kind of state, only the state of California would have this kind of authority to help someone like this who didn't grant medical durable power of attorney for someone to help someone like this in their later times.

So, often someone like this is not going to have an easy time as they fade out of existence.

So, if you can make arrangements for giving someone you trust a medical durable power of attorney so they can help you if you ever get to this state it might be a good idea and save you a whole lot of needless suffering before you die.

As my other friend says, "Dying isn't easy, Fred. Dying is really really hard because of the way we are designed as human beings. Most people think death comes quickly, but that doesn't happen for most of us."

So, as you get to be 50 or 60 it might be a good idea to sort of plan ahead to prevent unnecessary suffering for yourselves.

My thought all along is that even Trump is in some kind of senile dementia even though he is very intelligent too obviously. But, because of this the likelihood (and also his age) likely means we will see him die in office like FDR. So, at some point I expect to see Pence as U.S. President sort of like how Truman was too.

The world appears to be preparing for some kind of war even if it is against groups like ISIS or Iran. It is also hard to predict what spark will set all that alight too.

The world is both chaotic and restless and partisan and this usually causes millions of deaths like when I was growing up and before during World war II which I was born 3 years after it ended.