I agree with everything you wrote, but I don’t think they carved up only Ukraine in that phone call. At least all of Europe, possibly the entire world.

• Your former school teachers die. At this point, I think the majority of mine is gone.
• Your gum recedes, and there’s nothing you can do about it except to stop smoking. On a larger scale, your circulation gets worse because your erythrocytes become less elastic, for reasons still unknown. Add to this the most damaging impact of UV light and our atmosphere’s oxygen - an objectively very aggressive chemical - and you start shriveling, just withering away from the outside. Molecular bonds are simply getting broken faster than they get repaired. Your insides last a bit longer, but their days are numbered, too.
• On the plus side, you’ll get to learn new words for body parts you didn’t even know you had.

Ain’t it brutal? They say if you haven’t started balding at age 40, you probably never will, but I’ve known several people with a full head of lush hair at 40, and in their early fifties, it’s all gone to hell.

That all adults are smokers.

This quote really struck a chord with me:

Over the years as we all worked our way into time as if it were a field of sawgrass, cutting our ankles, a slog into middle age for me and a slow sunken decline towards death for the generation before me and my siblings. There were break-ups, fuck-ups, children and my own struggles with misty sorrow that has seemed to follow me like a sick-feral cat. A walking disappointment was what I felt like much of the time, even though I had enough confidence in myself to live the kind of life I desired. […] In my mind I see the universe swirling like a giant whirlpool swallowing up everything all at once, and in this grand whirlpool people are smaller than a droplet of water rushing over Niagara Falls and then become mist. And when I die, my memories die with me and perhaps for one or two generations I will be remembered for a few things in my life but not for the mundane or what my daily interactions were like, not the cuddling of my dog nor the pride in my children or the laughter I was a part of, so much laughter that it caused people’s head’s to turn.