Never Retire: Waiting for Your Turn to Die—or Finding Reasons to Keep Living

A lyric from Buffalo, my dad's old diner, a café in Rome, and what they reveal about aging well abroad.

In a song about a Buffalo neighborhood they knew well, the Goo Goo Dolls wrote one of the best lyrics ever about a place:

See the young man sittin’ in the old man’s bar
Waitin’ for his turn to die

I think about that line all the time.

I know people who say they don’t want to live a long life.

Not “I don’t want to live forever” in a philosophical sense. I mean people who’ve given up. They don’t always say it out loud—(though sometimes they do)—but you can see it: the routine stripped of joy, the bitterness calcified somewhere in midlife.

Some of them are from my family. They’re old friends back home. The people in that lyric—waiting for their turn to die.

When I think about dying—and I do often—the first thought that crosses my mind is being unable to do day-to-day life with my wife. We’ve gone over the routine I have in Spain enough so as to not require repeating, but I look forward to it each morning—quite intensely—as we wind down our nights together. Going to the market, hitting the coffee shop, exploring Valencia and other cities—(Rome, next week!)—going to dinner or watching “trash TV” with my wife never gets old. It makes me sad to think that one day all of this will have to come to an end.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that wanting to live forever sounds self-serving. But I don’t think it is.

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The Main Street Café

A few years ago, my wife and I sat in a diner with my father in my hometown. It was the theater of small-town social life—the same faces, the same stories, the same cups of coffee refilled a hundred times. It could have been a sitcom if it weren’t so real.

I remember thinking: Why can’t this place—the Main Street Café—be frozen in time?
What harm would it do if the same conversations, the same rituals, just played on repeat forever?

Because that’s what keeps people alive and helps make them want to keep living—the dailiness of it all.

Sounds dramatic—and it would be if it weren’t true—but my 90-year-old dad died a little when the Main Street Café closed shortly after our visit. He called me—for the first time in fifty years—to say he was bored. Then came the car keys, the hearing loss, the early dementia, or maybe just the collapse of purpose. It doesn’t really matter which. The result was the same.

A guy who used to wake up at six in the morning and be in and out of the house multiple times by noon, now wakes up just before nine, promptly watches TV and rarely leaves home. It’s not physical health—the doctor actually says he’s in great shape—it’s mental health triggered by the reality that he basically has no place to go.

That’s what happens when the world you built your days around disappears.

You don’t die right away—you just stop living.

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Rome, Spain, and the Opposite of Waiting

When I walk through Rome next week, I know I’ll think of him. Of Bar San Calisto— another institution, another stage where older men and women still have roles to play.

When that bar eventually changes or closes, it’ll hurt. But the neighborhood will survive, because the city itself is alive—dense, walkable, full of other third places that make you want to keep showing up.

That’s the difference between my dead hometown and cities like Rome—or Valencia, where I live now.

Here, you walk out your door and belong to something. You can’t be isolated even if you try. The city insists that you stay part of it—to keep your body and brain in motion, to keep noticing, to keep showing up for the smallest scenes.

And that, I’ve realized, is the only real antidote to the young man in the old man’s bar.

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Purpose, Not Forever

The goal isn’t to live forever. It’s to live in a way that makes you want to.

Every coffee, walk, bike ride, yoga class, and every time I get the subject to agree with the verb in Spanish is a vote for staying alive.

The place where you live goes a long way toward giving you the chance—the glory and privilege really—to feel like you want to live forever. Great places open the door to letting you remain a character on your own streets, which is really at the core of why my wife and I decided to move to Spain. When you can look 10, 20, even 40 years out and still see seemingly mundane days you can’t wait to wake up for.

If this resonated, don’t just read it—help sustain it.

Never Retire isn’t a fantasy about escaping to Spain. It’s real, on-the-ground field notes from someone actually living, working, and aging here—writing the long game in public.

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From our journey a couple hours outside of the city of Valencia on Sunday.