A Lonely Old Man

By: Robert B. Thomas

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

When I used to ask my father how he was doing he would always say, “Getting old, but it beats the alternative.” But he never talked about what it is like to get old. Now that I’m doing it, I know, and it ain’t pretty. This is a fictional story about a seventy year old man who lost his wife to cancer, contact with his children due to misinformation, is feeling all the ills of being older, and is left alone in the world without a support system other than his dog. But mostly it is a story about what it’s like to be an old man. It’s about all the things my father didn’t talk about, but maybe should have. For the old man in this story, he wasn’t convinced that the alternative to getting old is worse, but then… there is the dog.