David Crosby has lived a hard life, and he would be the first to tell you that it's caught up with him in a profound way.

So when he got a question from a fellow septuagenarian for his Rolling Stone advice column about fearing death in the COVID age, he was ready with a thoughtful answer.

The reader explained that they are roughly Crosby's age and have been thinking about death constantly of late. "How can us old people enjoy the time we have left, especially in the era of COVID when it's near-impossible to leave our homes," they asked.

In addition to surviving three heart attacks, Crosby, 79, is a recovering drug addict, a liver transplant recipient and a diabetic.

The two-time Rock and Roll Hal of Famer enumerated on his various health challenges in his 2019 documentary, Remember My Name. The trailer for the film opens with him being asked "Do you ever wonder why you are still alive?" Croz responds by saying he has "no idea."

As someone who thinks a lot about death himself, Crosby said the answer to the Rolling Stone reader's query is "fairly simple."

"The question is not how much time you have, the question is what are you gonna do with that time," he replied. "It seems to me that if you spend that time agonizing over the fact that you're gonna die, you're wasting that time.

"If you spend that time doing everything you can to be happy, to help other people, to create, to make new things, to make anything better for anybody, if you spend your time doing positive stuff like that, then the time that you have left — whatever amount it is — will be well-spent. And that I think is the key.

"If you try that really hard — try to stay positive and try to think about today and the fact that you may die tomorrow, but you've got today! So why don't you use the heck out of today? That's a good idea. That's how I see it."

Last spring, Crosby told Rolling Stone that he was in a bad way, mourning the death of his biological son Beckett Cypher and unable to work much due to COVID-related shutdowns and a hand surgery that didn't work and left him in "a tremendous amount of pain."

Crosby noted at the time that his health was headed in the wrong direction before the pandemic. Even if he remained safe from the virus, he wondered whether he'll be well enough to perform again once the world reopens.

Photo: Getty Images

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