Ted Kennedy died today at age 77. Camelot is really over. Many people are writing about the kind of man he was and his legacy. I won’t do that. His death, as with all things, is about me.

Don’t shake your head at me! It’s true for every one of us. When someone we know dies, it makes us stop and reflect. I was 9 when Jack Kennedy campaigned on Church Avenue in Brooklyn and shook my little hand as his float rolled by. I was smitten and rooted for him with all my heart even though I knew nothing about him or his opponent. History would prove my schoolgirl instinct correct, but that’s another story. Jack’s assassination when I was in Junior High School became the first in a series of “where-were- you-when” events that we all have in our minds like still photos in a moving world. And then Bobby. And Jackie remarried and the romantic in me couldn’t understand how she could do that. I was a child.

But Ted Kennedy died at age 77 and I’m no spring chicken anymore. That’s less than 20 years away. I heard yesterday of a local man who died suddenly at age 61. That’s three years. I called the doctor the other day and was told the results of my needle-biopsy could take up to two weeks. Three years minus two weeks, that’s… you get the point. For the first time, life does not loom in front of me like an open question. It has an expiration date.