I struggled a little the last week, trying to put the concept of mortality into perspective, and I believe I have the balance between long time Carolina kicker John Kasay's being put out to pasture and the passing of my Uncle Howard.

It's not specious to say I am the mid-point.

Kasay had a fine 21 year career in the NFL, and after 16 years with the Panthers, mortality for him means "shelf life of a professional athlete." John had a fine final year in 2010--25/29 FGs (86.2%), 17/17 XPs--and that extra point total is as telling as anything about the state of the Panthers. When your season is 16 games and your kicker only attempts 17 tries after a touchdown, you probably aren't going to win many games, and the Panthers were 2-14.

Placing myself at the mid-point of mortality has to do with a creaky left knee, one with bone spurs and a constant snapping sound whenever I get up. Its impossible not to be aware of the possibility it might fail me at some point, especially when turning over in bed too quickly might cause things to flip out of joint, a very disconcerting situation at 3 a.m. At 54 I'm in pretty damn good shape overall thanks to lots of cycling the last 30 years and the benefit of a pool this past year. I eat right, get my rest, exercise regularly, but last year I started needing to take blood pressure meds because that is how the family history runs.

I didn't play basketball for over two months recently because 'mortality' raised its un-pretty head, my knee blowing up like a cantalope after four games with those (mostly) 45+ age guys I play with on Monday nights. When I came back and attempted a little 3-on-3 action, I had some trepidation about having to cover a Division I point guard, and splitting two games (only to 9) was accomplished because my jump shot is still sweet as an apple on Christmas Day, and she has more of a passer mentality than scorer, even though 3-3 is usually a shooters game. And yes, I said 'she'.

My Uncle Howard dying, THAT is life and death level mortality, and the fact he was a Marine on Guam and Iwo Jima is an aspect of mortality that unemployed kickers and less mobile basketball players can't approach. He was 'the cool uncle', and while he was ALWAYS telling stories, none of them were about the daily brutality of those Pacific battles. Oh, there was one about how when things were finally about over on Guam my Uncle Harold managed to get ashore from the aircraft support ship he was stationed on, find him and thump him in the head with a rolled up newspaper, but nothing about killing or being scared you were about to die any moment for weeks on end. He enjoyed talking about a shooting exhibition with Generalissimo Francisco Franco when he was training Spanish pilots on flight simulators in the mid-'50s, back when they pulled the feathers out of pigeons to create erratic flight vs. knocking out little orange clay targets, but shooting Japanese in caves or banzai charges, we never heard about it.

Statistically, our WWII veterans are dying at a rate of over 3,000 a day, and while John Kasay might just fade away with all the Panthers career scoring marks and I might find that my set shooting improves when I can't pull the trigger as accurately on that historically reliable J, thats how Life goes. Because mortality comes to all of us eventually, I accept that I'll carefully monitor how one particular part of my body feels all the time. Uncle Howard is free of that now, and I'm glad real mortality didn't catch up to him 66 years ago in the South Pacific. RIP Uncle H.

Glenn S.