I retired from practicing law at 69. I had planned to work until 70, but the pandemic made work a pain in the ass. I had enough money to retire and began to wonder, more and more, as I sat in the office an hour before anyone else arrived, why I was still doing it.
I was at my desk when Henry Fallows died at his.
Henry Fallows practiced in the same niche of the law as I did. He was a regular presence in the courtrooms where I appeared and at the conferences I attended. In the last few years, he never looked good. He was stooped and walked with a cane. A decade before he died, I thought, Henry, why do you keep on doing this? When I learned he died at his desk, I wasn’t shocked. And I didn’t want his fate to be mine.