One time I visited the hospital bed of a friend of my mother's. She had diabetes and had already lost the bottoms of her feet, and she'd been a smoker and alcoholic. So, she was in bad shape. She wasn't long for this earth.

I was in college at the time and she complimented me for going to college. She said she'd tried to skate through life and regretted it.

She'd been married to a rich businessman and traveled the world. They adopted a little boy from Mexico but then got into a car crash that caused the boy to have some developmental delays. The husband didn't want the problems, so he found a younger wife and took off. After awhile he died, and the woman he married got most of his estate, even though this friend of my mom's had spent so many years as his wife.

In the end, she had friends and a rented condo and that was it.
I don't know what became of the boy.

That's a sad story of what can happen when you try to live too easily. When we are dying, what do we want to be able to say?