Pretty much everyone has some experience of the old and dying. Some of you may be dealing with parents, grandparents, spouses, or other elderly loved ones who are making that final passage. Some of you may be making that passage yourself, perhaps without even knowing it.

Every fading life is unique but if you’ve seen more than a few of them you know there are also similarities among types. There are the old men, for example, who were accustomed to have things their own way all their lives, and worked hard to make it so, and who come into this grey zone expecting that, as when fortune and conditions went against them before, they will just work a little harder and thus keep their place in the world.

Unless they are more suddenly struck down, they are inevitably taught differently — by increasing infirmities, the fading of their senses, friends passing on or unable to communicate, and above all an uncanny imminence, if they are sensible to it, of a world beyond this one that they are moving toward whether their feet wish to take them there or not.

Sometimes you can see these old men having that reckoning: There may be fear at first, and unbelieving, but eventually many if not most of them make friends with that imminence and wait quietly for it for show them what it has to show. The calm these men obtain gives off a pale glow, and sometime even those of us who aren’t dying can see the imminence in it when we look at them.

Some old men who are accustomed to have things their own way, however, don’t experience the end like this.

They’re usually rich men, not prone to be sensitive or reflective or even aware of other people and things that have served them in the past. While other men may either curse their decline or accept it with humor or philosophical grace before passing on to their final acceptance, an old man of this sort will simply order and arrange whatever products or services make it seem as if it’s not happening: Machines, cutting-edge medtech, professionally invisible aides and servants, and, most important perhaps, the arrangement that everyone around him always acts as if there is nothing wrong — that he is still vital, still strong, still able to do great things with his mind and body that he is, to unbought observers, clearly unable to do

You and I, if we could afford this kind of simulacrum, might appreciate the comfort of it at first but never quite forget that it’s a pretense, even a fraud, and choose to do without it, except for the life-sustaining and painkilling parts, and even these we might relinquish at the very end.

This old man, however, does not see it that way. Because for him life has almost always been a simulacrum, a fantasy he has projected onto what you and I call the world — that vast landscape with its hills and valleys, floods and droughts and sorrows and beauties — which to him is just a sort of green screen for the projection that is his world. That world has nothing in it that would have discomfited the troubled child he was when he first gave himself over to it. It is full of comfort, luxury, crystal, gold, top-tier hookers, plush carpets, subservient retainers and slightly classier people with the skills and motivation necessary to play his friends.

Over time he forgets that there is anything else, even that there ever was anything else, and that he has just been incredibly lucky (if that’s the word) to be able to live completely in his own world. Whatever evidence of his decline can’t be masked, his mind easily ignores. When he looks in the mirror it’s always the light that’s at fault. If he can’t understand the question the questioner is stupid. He doesn’t see the doctors any more often than the suckers would if they had the money. Going to the doctors is great. He always feels swell when they finish with him, and they tell him how well he did on all the tests.

If he is indeed lucky, the flickering and guttering of his consciousness will dovetail with his fantasy and not disturb it or crack it so that reality can leak in. He forgets who these people smiling and praising him are because they were never so great in the first place. The world seems to fade because he is done with it. He sleeps more and more because he works around the clock, and if, as he slides into his nightly abyss, the thought intrudes that this time he might never wake up, there are all the monuments and proclamations and great achievements he has left behind to make even death seem like a beautiful thing, not a stranger or an adventure at all, just the greatest, the absolute greatest, the pinnacle of all his fantasies. If he never really lived, who’s to say he’ll ever really die?

No imminence, there; just a black hole, swallowed by the night.