Dying Too Soon
Today my youngest son and I went to go see a movie that had a lousy Rotten Tomatoes score of 43. I was skeptical of the score since the fan rating was 79 and it starred Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup and Michelle Williams. The movie was After the Wedding. It’s the story of a successful entrepreneurial woman (Moore) and her sculptor husband (Crudup) who wants to make a large charitable gift to an orphanage in India. She insists on meeting the orphanage director (Williams) and requires her to come to NYC in order to finalize the grant. In the process she invites Williams to the wedding of their daughter. The story unfolds that Williams is the birth-mother of Moore’s daughter, having been involved with Crudup in her youth. The orchestrated meeting is ultimately revealed as being due to the fact that Moore has a terminal illness and being the Alpha in the family, she wants to orchestrate the post-demise fixes for all the needs of the family. She sees Williams as the key to this strategy.
Moore is a rock. She’s tough, she’s driven, she knows what she wants and is determined not to take no for an answer. When confronted by Crudup about the chances for treatment, she states quite coldly that there are no options. She is prepared to accept her fate. And then she’s not. In a penultimate scene when she is alone with Crudup in their bedroom, she breaks down and cries on his shoulder that she doesn’t want to die. Julianne Moore is 59. I think it’s fair to suggest that in the movie, her character is at least 50. I am 65, so by definition, I consider Moore’s character to be too young to die.
Psalms in the Bible refers to the days we are allotted as being three score ten or 70 years, and Moses says “The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength they are eighty years, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away”. 2,000 years ago that was a good long life. In fact, while life expectancy at birth was only about 30 years then, once a person reached 20, their life expectancy was about 50. The point is, allowing for literary prerogative and the need to give mortals as much hope as possible, three score ten was a good long life.
Since learning about Moses’ words while attending Catholic prep school in Rome in the late 1960’s (when the U.S. and European average life expectancy was spot on 70 years), I always took the point of view that 70 was a sort of breakeven age. If you got past it, you were ahead of the statistical game. Now the average life expectancy at birth is close to 80 (higher in selected countries) and on a very personal level, a person who attains age 65 (did I mention I was 65?) is expected to live to age 84. For years I have said what the Smithsonian says, “Big dogs die younger – the bigger they are, the shorter their lives.” It doesn’t necessarily hold for other species, like elephants and blue whales, but longevity humility seems more like a good than bad thing.
At this age you actually have to do some longevity math as part of decisions about how long to work, how much you need in a retirement nest egg, and when to start social security payout (though there are lots of other factors to weigh on that particular decision). As a “big dog”, I just assumed that my personal goal was three score ten. With a few months over four years until that benchmark, I’m not sure how I should think about that issue now. Many of my classmates and business colleagues are or were older than 70. I just had a friend die at 66 and another at 78. Then again, I have friends who are vital and well at 88, 82, 79 and so on. I watch my 1975 Cornell cohort in the Alumni magazine obituary column. Strangely enough, from eyeballing the decades, the classes of the 60’s are significantly more prolific in the death department and we in the 70’s seem to be. Maybe there is something to this longevity crisis.
Watching a movie about someone who has reached a point in her life and career that one can characterize as a watershed, with the marriage of her daughter and the sale of her company, makes me ask myself again about when one is likely to feel the time for their departure is right or at least OK. Nature has a way of voicing its opinion without regard to logic, desire or convenience. She is a student of Dylan Thomas and wants us all to “rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” She clings to life with all the strength that the cerebral cortex can muster. It is not about rationality or even thought, it is simply instinct. It seems to me that dementia may well be nature’s assistant in making sure issues of quality of life or loneliness do not interfere with nature’s plan.
As people are aging (a big and pervasive problem all across the developed world) there are many problems that countries must face and solve. Last year, the UK set up a Ministry of Loneliness to address the impact that people perceive loneliness represents to the senior citizens of that country. It turns out that different countries are aging faster than others. The time that countries have to adjust to the aging of their population impacts the solution choices they have available to them. Using an aging coefficient range of 10% moving to 20% (percentage of the population over 65), countries like France have had over a century to adjust whereas China and India are going through that transition in 25 years. The U.S. is in between the two. When I think of aging, I think of Japan as the real problem child of the world. Not only do they have the highest old age dependency ratio in the world, but their reduced birth rate, extended longevity (all that fish oil, I guess) and naturally xenophobic attitude towards immigration makes them a hot mess in a few years. I’m not sure how or if they are dealing with loneliness, but my guess is they feel they have more pressing problems.
I don’t know if it’s the big dog syndrome or all my work on the global pension crisis, but I no longer worry about dying too young. I’ve seen my oldest son married. I’ve seen my youngest graduate from college, I’ve walked my daughter down the aisle and I’ve gotten to know my granddaughters a bit. Is it enough? Obviously not. I want as much time on this earth as I can wrangle. I love spending time with my wife and still enjoy many pleasures, especially motorcycling. I even still have some alpha business instincts and lots of wisdom I think is worth imparting. I think that all translates into purpose, which is clearly the key determinant of vitality. I neither have any regrets nor any deep hankerings. I may well rage at some point, but I can assure you that rage will come from the cerebellum or cortex and not the cerebrum. My point is that I have made my peace with life and what comes will come, there will be no dying too young here.