I’ve recently noticed that as each year has passed, I’ve become more in touch with my own mortality, more concerned about a minor ache or pain that 20 years ago was nothing more than that, and increasingly worried about how I will be remembered someday. What kind of legacy, if any, I wonder, will I leave behind and whether a handful of good deeds and good intentions will be enough to overcome a lifetime of human imperfection, flawed judgment and debatable decisions.

I received dozens of birthday wishes on Facebook last Friday, which made me feel blessed about the number of friends and more-than-casual acquaintances I have made. They were a combination of high school friends with whom I have become reacquainted through Facebook, and folks from my adopted hometowns of Lake Norman.

As I was looking over those Facebook entries on Sunday, I realized there was one I hadn’t received from a high school friend who was an avid Facebook user. Then, I thought, I hadn’t seen any of her postings appear on my wall in weeks.

I went to her home page to check up on her. She had previously posted status updates almost daily, usually about one of two subjects: her granddaughter and mysterious health issues that seemed to never be resolved. But Dawn hadn’t posted anything since I could remember. Something had to be wrong.

It was. And I missed it by a day. On Saturday, my high school classmate and pal, Dawn Miller Buchanan, had passed away. As it turned out, she needed a liver transplant. She ran out of time.

As often happens when we move away from our hometown, I lost track of Dawn and other classmates during the technologically unsophisticated ’80s and ’90s. It was through a Facebook group called “You know you grew up in Auburndale, Florida, if ...” that I reconnected after decades with folks from my hometown. There are always surprises — some pleasant, some not so much — when you are able to see how “kids” you grew up with turned out. Often, it’s better to just remember them the way they were.

In high school, Dawn was a good friend and confidant, and probably could have been more had I been smart enough to recognize the signs back then. I remember long phone conversations, many about what we planned to do after high school. She married and seems to have never left Polk Count. I followed dreams of a career in journalism, which would lead me to the Carolinas, eventually to Charlotte and then to Lake Norman.

I don’t recall, since graduating in 1977, if I ever talked to Dawn again prior to “friending” her on Facebook in 2008.

Just as I read that Dawn had passed, I was watching a story on ESPN about a Boston College lacrosse player-turned stockbroker who saved 12 lives on Sept. 11, 2001. He had turned to climb back up the South Tower of the World Trade Center to save more after escorting others to safety. He didn’t get out before it collapsed.

He was a hero. And in her own way, from what I could see of the messages left on her Facebook page, so was Dawn.

Now, at 52, I can’t help but wonder how I will be remembered. Hero, bum or somewhere in between. What I do today, and every day I have left, will write my epitaph.

Yours, too.