When it's you

The death of a grandparent, graduation from high school, first love, things you did that caused extreme embarrassment, guilt, anger, joy. 
From the time you're young—the age can vary widely from one person to another—there's a part of you that does more than just experience significant events. There's a part of you that considers how your future self will use what you're learning from them. It happens almost as the event is occurring, or immediately afterward.
We never really know how we'll be when we're older, but we do know that what we do now will have an effect on that person, even though he or she may not exist for ten, twenty, even fifty years from the present. We know that we're learning or have already learned something, and that it will change us and guide our behavior in the years stretching ahead.

My brothers, some time around 1960.

I've been thinking about this with my recent highly likely terminal diagnosis in mind. I'm learning new things daily, seeing things in different ways. But for what? I'm making mistakes, but the mistakes are about things that will never happen again. And even if you believe in an afterlife of some kind (I do not), the form that afterlife would take wouldn't be one that you can use anything you learn in your last months in a practical way. Passing along what I've learned to others? People have been doing that better than I ever could for millennia. As much as I would have loved to, I never married or had children.
Nearly sixty, what I'm learning now won't change me in any fundamental ways. Am I being nicer to friends, relatives, people I encounter in daily life? Perhaps, a little, but I've always been a pretty nice guy. The time to ask yourself who you will be when you die is when you're twenty.
The only thing I can think of doing is to go quietly, without disrupting the lives of those around me, which in my case is my two brothers and their wives. Histrionics won't do them any good. 
I want to draw my last breath in some physical comfort but in even more mental comfort. Dying alone in a hospital bed, during a night shift with doctors and nurses padding quietly up and down sterile halls, everyone I know asleep, will be fine.