Hope I die before I get old: Lynn and sweet, sweet Death.

An annoying trait Lynn and Elly both possess is a fixation on death and dying. Remember a sequence where John and Elly bought a thoughtful and loving gift for the whole family - a burial plot. They weren't this enthusiastic at Casa Foob until Michael won the lotteryhad his hard work pay off. All the right-thinking, normal people anyway. The silly, spoiled Martian creature with her bizarre and twisted values actually behaved as if talking about burial and death was morbid and weird. This also explains some of the hardship Jim is going through. It seems to me as if he's being punished for trying to live too long. We don't see an active, healthy senior in this mess. Aging is presented as horrific process wherein the body breaks down in embarrassing and grimly comic ways and old people live bleak existences in ruined husks of bodies. Attempting to change one's inescapable destiny of debilitation and squalor is seen as pointless and misguided. Why the boxcar does our artist present growing old as a horror only ending with the sweet rest of the grave? There are three reasons. The first is the reason she gives for quitting in a few months, namely the dystonia affecting her neck. Being in constant discomfort is bound to affect a person's disposition. The second reason, the fact that many of her friends have passed on relatively young, contains the third. That is of course the fact that her PARENTS didn't live too far past sixty. It doesn't matter to her that these people all had bad habits and took [boxcar]poor care of themselves. Even normal people can never quite picture themselves as being older than their Mom and Dad were when they passed on. She, of course, is [boxcar]ing NUTS and assumes her loving family will be at her memorial service by, oh, December 2008 at the latest. She doesn't REALLY look forward to all the things she plans to do in her retirement, NO. She assumes if she lives past her sell-by date, her body will be too ravaged by age to enjoy life because that's what she thinks the life of senior citizens is. Any noise about sixty being the new forty is so much horse[boxcar] to her, because she 'knows the truth'. Knowing why the only rest she pictures is of the eternal variety doesn't excuse her actions, though. It only makes her a uglier and stupider fool.