[Cross-posted at Time Goes By.]

[UPDATE: Amazingly, there is one more column from Donald Murray which he turned into the newspaper last Friday. A beautiful finale.]

Sad, sad news this past week. Boston Globe columnist Donald M. Murray died on 30 December at age 82.

His “Now and Then” weekly column was the best writing on aging anywhere in the mainstream media drawing on his life experience as a reporter, his love of writing and the ins and outs, ups and downs of getting older. The subtitle of my blog may be “what it’s really like to get older,” but compared to Donald Murray, I have not yet got anywhere near the heart of it. I looked to him every week for inspiration both on my own aging and in his exquisite writing.

I understood completely when Donald Murray wrote, in his final column published on 26 December:

"Each time I sit down to write I don't know if I can do it. The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can."

Then he quoted from that other exquisite essayist, E.B. White:

"I'm glad to report that even now, at this late day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me - more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears."

And Donald Murray finished his last essay with a message that should we can all take to heart, it seems to me, for the new year and every year granted us hereafter:

"Friends wonder why I do not take it easy. Why I don't play golf or walk through cathedrals in Italy. Because I have an obsession. I write. I draw. I try to capture a fragment of life and reveal its wonder to you. I never get it quite right, but there is a joy in the trying that makes me young at 83.

"My New Year's wish for you, old and young, is that you find in the year ahead something you can't do."

There is more about Mr. Murray in the Globe obituary, with links to some of his most recent writing. If the newspaper or his heirs do not publish a new collection of his weekly essays, I will be as disappointed as I am at his death. They are all of the sort than can be read again and again with deep, abiding pleasure.

* Contributing Editor Ronni Bennett also blogs at Time Goes By - What it’s really like to get older.,