Tiny few

"It’s not that a twenty year old doesn’t know he’s going to die, but it’s the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person— and you can’t know what that accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself. Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in the course of a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy."

Paul Auster, in http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/121/the-art-of-fiction-no-178-paul-auster