I used to be afraid of dying, but now, this whole dying thing has me pretty nonplussed.

My older patients are a lot wiser about a lot of things, and since so many of them who are staring death in the face don’t seem the least bit afraid of it, I have come to feel that the Grim Reaper is not so grim.

I used to be appalled when my 90-plus-year-old patients would tell me that they were ready to die. I was sure that they were all suffering from some horrible depression. And while some of them had been depressed, a large number were perfectly happy, but just realistic, resigned and tired. As I become an older (hopefully wiser) doctor, I am a bit more sympathetic. After all, when most of your friends are gone and you’re all alone, even if you are perfectly content with your living friends and children, joining most of the people you have come to love who have died before you is not such a bad thing — whatever spiritual or aspiritual state of being/consciousness it is that you believe in.

Long before I was a cardiologist, I worked with a middle-aged guy who was sort of a Casanova. He said he was happily married, and yet he acted like a bull elk in the rut season when it came to other females. I hated walking by his office, because he’d be in various stages of some new sleazey conquest, giving a back-rub or intently “counseling” one of the junior staff, a secretary or the housekeeping staff. His door was always open just enough to hear or see something you wish you hasn’t seen or heard.

I was friendly with a psychologist who believed this middle-aged Don Juan acted this way because he was afraid of dying.

“I’m not sure I understand how that psychology stuff works,” I said to him. “What’s dying got to do with it? He’s just a dirty dog.”

The theory, if I remember, was that this dude was desperate to prove that he wasn’t old and near death by proving he was strong, young and virile enough to go after all sorts of women. Prove to whom? To himself, apparently.

All of the psychobabble was cool, but maybe I understand statistics and probabilities better. As in, the probability of dying of old age is lower than the probabiity that Carla will kill me if I ever cheated on her, regardless of any psychiatric indulgence.

Now I don’t think it means I fear death if a really pretty woman happens to catch my eye. In my younger, stupid days, I believed I knew how to inconspicuously gander at a pulchritudinous babe. But Carla always busted me: “Oh, like what you see, do you?”

It may not be death I’m afraid of, but an Italian woman when she’s mad is terrifying.