Themes in William Trevor's final stories

William Trevor was without doubt one of the greatest English-language writers of our time, in particular for his short stories, the closest any English-language writer has come to the tone and style of Chekhov. Trevor died two years ago, and his final 10 stories appear in the aptly titled Last Stories. Nobody would consider these the best among WR's works (based on first 6 + one more I read in the NYer), but they are still excellent and worth reading for a sense of WT's final thoughts as - as he clearly knew or sensed - his writing (and therefore his life) was ending. Among the first six, most set in contemporary London, almost all are about the loneliness and vulnerability of the elderly, several about various scams perpetrated on the elderly and infirm, and several involve recently widowed people seeking a new life, a new partner, a way out of their loneliness. The stories are more trim and exacting than most of WT's earlier pieces, sometimes requiring extreme concentration to figure out who's speaking, sometimes requiring us to "fill in the blanks," so to speak, regarding key pieces of narrative: e.g., in The Crippled Man WT never directly tells us whether the eponymous man has died, but the concluding lines of the story give us the information we need to find the missing pieces. One story - about a couple out to scam an elderly man seeking a woman's companionship - is so oblique that I really can't figure out the end. The first story, The Piano Teacher, is quite sudden in its conclusion - and in fact I think (though I could be completely wrong) that the story as it appeared some years ago in the NYer was longer, with some material on the star student's stunted career. Perhaps the strongest among the first six is Mrs. Casthorpe (sp?), about a woman, "liberated" by the death of her much older husband, tries to attract another man - a story that with few deft strokes gives us a painful portrait of the life of this woman as well as great insight into the life of the man she is trying, unsuccessfully, to attract. Another story, The Missing Girl (?), about a cleaning woman who dies in a pedestrian accident - possibly a suicide - and her stunted relationship w/ the son of her former employer; again, the story is oblique and understated, we learn little about the actual relationship - I wished for more information. So these stories are pared to the point of near minimalism, but as a collection we we a theme emerge: the fear of death, of aging, and of a brutal and uncaring world.