On the timing of a life

I wonder sometimes whether to think of a life as a series of moments or a narrative and whether it makes a difference to how you think of a life when it ends.  The Romans had the dispiriting idea that you might live beyond what should have been the end of your life, but I wonder also whether the timing matters not just in terms of your personal narrative, the biographical elegance of dying at a certain point in the story of your life, but in terms of the moment of history - or stretch of history - you have lived in (or will have lived in).  Would you have been lucky to have died before the Trump presidency, or before the Covid epidemic?  Would you have been unlucky (or lucky, perhaps, depending on your nationality and politics) to have died halfway through the second world war not knowing who would win it?  Would you be luckier to live through it and find out the ending, and would you be unlucky to live through it and find out the ending supposing, for instance, it had ended differently, with a Nazi regime in power?   We live in moments but also within narratives that are not just the narratives of our own lives, but we live only in one moment of them at a time.  Does it matter at what point in the story we no longer follow it, in terms of how we measure the happiness of a life?  Is all there is to measure just the sum total of the moments in which we have lived, or can we only make sense of a life in terms of some larger meaning, and is the meaning necessarily formal, structured in terms of a narrative in which the ending plays a definitive part?   (Answers in the comments please! (Would it make a difference to the meaning of my life should I die before or after reading the answer to my question?))