My goodness what a looker she was. Eighteen years old, sun red hair, big green eyes, a perfect figure that photos show she wasn’t ashamed of and a steely will built by hard times and a daily struggle to survive.

By now, it was 1944, and it looked like she, her family and all of London were going to survive the war. Annette can describe in detail the faces and the feelings and the sounds of spending endless nights in bomb shelters while air raid sirens wailed and German buzz bombs screamed overhead.

She’ll describe to you in detail just how her soon-to-be husband looked in his snappy U.S. Air Force uniform the first night they met at a dance in East London (she was dating the drummer in the band at the time, a Tony Cromby ...nice enough fellow, but he was no American).

She can paint a picture of 60 years back in time and fill in every stroke and then, this morning, she forgot that she’d moved to Buffalo City six weeks ago.

She called the other night for Sandra’s number, then didn’t understand why it was written on the paper she was prepared to write it on, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d suggested she write it down the three previous times she’d called for it earlier that evening.

She asked her daughter if she’d help her balance her checkbook — said something about needing a new reading prescription but when pressed, pretended to laugh and explained that, for whatever reason, she couldn’t quite remember how to add and subtract for the time being.

Her mental health is deteriorating while she seems almost cursed by excellent physical health. What if her body outlives her mind? Who or what will be the last thing she’ll remember and how long will she be left wondering who she is and … who are you?

My dear Aunt Evelyn had the opposite problem. She was diagnosed with Parkinson disease in her early 70s and very gradually became so weak that she could only communicate with the slightest of finger motions, and she could only speak in a very brief and light whisper. The last time I saw her, she gave the nurse one of those signs that indicated that she wanted to speak to me, and so I put my ear as close as I could to her mouth and with great effort she said, “It’s still me inside here.”

I never went back.

One lame reason I used was that my visit seemed distressing for her, but the real one was that I couldn’t bear to see one of the brightest, most vibrant personalities in my life reduced to a soul and a brain trapped inside a body that was already dead.

The aging process seems so cruel, so arbitrary — so not 60s. Guess who’s next in line? My generation was golden; we were stardust Ti-i-i-i-ime was on our side. Man, what a short song that was. One minute you’re barefoot, earth dancing in the mud at a rock concert, and then you blink your eyes and you’re scootching your rocker closer to the heat duct ‘cause you can’t get your feet warm.

I was hoping that one of the upsides of being on the tail end of the baby boomers would be such a concerted effort to make our lives as comfortable as we’ve always had them that we’d be done with the unpleasantries and inconveniences of aging. Course, I figured we’d have this whole “Democracy/Freedom/Peace/Love/Hope” thing running like a well-oiled machine by now as well. I think the mistake might have been the well-oiled part.

Certainly, there are amazing major medical advancements in myriad areas, and we’re living longer all the time, but to what end? What practical desperate advantage do we hope to gain by postponing the inevitable by a decade or two? We’re about to send the largest generation in history into senior citizenry and, it’s one thing to want to use those lifetimes of knowledge and experience to some meaningful communal end, it’s another to want to stick around long enough to get your golf game under 90 or see if Kevin Costner ever puts out another good movie.

Even the most physically obsessed eventually come to the realization that these vehicles of skin and bones are ultimately fragile and finite. My belief is that the soul has a shelf life of eternity and, maybe if visions of the end terrify us so much, it’s more than the body that needs shoring up.

Either way, when that time comes I think we all share a common hope of passing on with some modicum of dignity and a sense of real accomplishment, and I don’t think most of us want to crawl or be wheeled across the finish line. Then again, we don’t usually have much say in the matter. If we did, my ideal would be to be hit square on by a meteor, 10 minutes after making love with my wife on my 84th birthday — two weeks before property taxes are due.