I’m 85. But you know that. For the past several years I’ve taken a moment in January to write a businessy letter to my executor children. I’ve been an executor several times, and I know how frustrating the job can be when essential basic information, for instance, about insurance or burial wishes, is lacking.

I always joke, though, that what I’m really doing with the letter is answering the burning question on their minds, “Where’s the money?” or, rather, “Is there any money?”

However, in the annual letter I have also ventured to suggest what music I would like to fill the reverent halls of Connell or Cantelmi-Long at the viewing. Such music says something about the personality of the dead one and the way he or she would like to be remembered. One time I suggested a rousing “When the Saints Come Marchin’ In.”

In this moment I suggested “My Peace” by Woody Guthrie by way of Arlo Guthrie, which I have heard Arlo close his performance with several times. I must admit, though, that the choice of the Guthrie words is aspirational rather than actual.

I have been successful over the years with local letters to the editor. However, my recent work bellowed at the opinion editor of the Morning Call has failed, the last rejected with a terse, “We’ll pass on this.” The lack of a concrete damning noun as rationale after the final adjective “this” left me with a pregnant speculative chill.

So, “my peace” at this senior moment is aspirational: “My peace my peace is all I’ve got that I can give to you / My peace is all I ever had that’s all I ever knew / I give my peace to green and black and red and white and blue / My peace my peace is all I’ve got that I can give to you.”

When I sing these words along with Arlo on YouTube now, it’s with a sense of nostalgia for an essential part of myself muffled by recent political discord, which is a kind of death already in life. I don’t quite have as much to leave as I once had. And I don’t mean dollars.

By Ed Gallagher