Living to 100
My mother was born in 1916 and died in early 2017. She made it to 100 and six months. This week, I noted that Henry Kissinger died at the age of 100 and six months. I recently watched a recent interview with Kissinger and with all due respect to my mother, who remained intellectually sharp until only a few years before her death, I must say that Kissinger at 100 seemed as sharp as ever, even publishing the last of over a dozen books, this one on nothing less current than the risks of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the realm of international relations and diplomacy/peace. I also note that Sandra Day O’Connor, the long-time Supreme Court Justice (and first woman to serve on that august body), died at the age of 93 and sight months. She died of dementia, from which she suffered during the last ten years of her life. That is not unlike Rosalynn Carter who also recently died at the age of 96 and three months. She’d was only diagnosed with dementia at the very end and, like my mother, entered hospice only days before her demise. All of this old age and last moment events has caused me to once again ponder extreme old age.
When I was younger, I, like most young people thought of old age as something that started at 60 or so. I was never so naive as to think it started earlier than that, but eventually that sense shifted back to 70 (the Biblical three score ten age that the Bible implies we are all afforded in life) and then, as I got into my seventies, it shifted to 80. I just attended the birthday of our friend Gary, who turns a spry and lively 80 this month. Even as I stand on the precipice of 70, which I reach in less than two months, I am still prepared to say that 80 is a good old age which some, like Gary, will enter with lots of vitality, whereas others will limp into if they are even that fortunate. I have decided that people who die in the sixties or before have died young and people in their seventies have sort of broken even, but I have yet to feel that someone who dies in their eighties has somehow been slighted with a truncated life. The nineties are another matter altogether. More and more people are getting to their nineties these days. 34% of women get to 90, but only 16% of men do so. To further confuse the issue, they say that if you are a relatively healthy 65-year-old you have between a 43% and 54% chance of getting to 90. While my odds at age 70 are supposedly at the high end of that, 54%, of getting to 90, the Social Security Administration, who has a vested interest in my longevity (or more accurately, the lack thereof) says I will likely live to 85.4 years at this stage. My pal Gary is expected, actuarially, to live to 87 whereas my friend Frank, who turned 86 this year is expected to go until 91.5. And yet, in America, only 0.027% of us live to 100. That puts my mother and Dr. Kissinger into rarified air.
The thing about aging that we all come to realize soon enough is that it has less to do with how long you live and a lot more to do with the quality of your life when you do live that long. I can say that when it came to my mother, her quality of life was pretty good through age 95 and only then did it start to deteriorate. That deterioration took the form of having less and less to do and less and less awareness of what was going on around her. It is hard to find someone approaching 100 who has 100% of their mental faculties like Dre. Kissinger did. I can personally testify to that since I met him in 2019 when he was 96, and he was as sharp as a tack. The fact that he traveled to China to meet with Xi Jinping, at his invitation, and help meaningful talks with such a prominent world leader, is a testament to his sharpness.
Kim and I often joke about which of us is more likely to fall apart mentally or physically. We are both in good shape on both fronts right now and depending on which side of the bed we wake up on any given day, we choose one side of the equation or the other. We figure that the key is to be able to fill in each others gaps, so whoever starts to fail in one direction or the other, it is presumably the other’s obligation to stay strong in that way and choose the other path to demise. Hopefully we have a while to go before that fun game becomes a grim reality. The one thing we know for sure is that sooner or later we all go one way or the other or, God forbid, both ways.
One of the things that I am convinced will help me fend off mental erosion is my writing. I feel that it is easier than ever to stay connected to world events and to do light research online, and both of those things contribute greatly to my ability to write meaningfully. The mental agility of writing is very helpful to giving me daily purpose and to keeping the cobwebs cleared away in my brain. It is also important as a stress relief valve for me since I can use writing to get things and ideas off my chest and out there into the world. I am also finding increasingly that friends and family stay in touch with my life better by virtue of getting into the habit of reading my daily stories like this one. I like the self-selecting nature of all of that in that people who are interested and able to keep up, do so, and those who couldn’t be bothered or are less cogent choose not to. That is as it should be and I am glad to say that the people I enjoy the most tend to stay connected and reading my pieces, at least in part.
Every once in a while I stop and ask myself how long I want to live. I like preparing myself in life for all eventualities and I certainly don’t want to be caught with my figurative (or literal for that matter) pants down on something as important as death. I have thought about many silly elements of death like preferring to be cremated than embalmed and buried. Some of that is the silly issue that I do not want my 4-6 best friends to be carrying my casket only to have their last thought of me being that I was a heavy bastard. I also do not have enough self-love to want my physical form maintained in approximate form for eternity or however one’s body truly lasts in a casket. That thought is somehow less comfortable to me than the thought of being burned to dust and scattered in the wind. Taking up more space in death seems unnecessary and I know, as should most of us, that my memory will last a generation or two and then blend into the obscurity of mankind. Being part of the bulging part of population curve of humankind should mean that we recognize that we are more likely to be obscure in history rather than a standout. Kissinger, Carter and O’Connor were standouts and I’m not sure how long their memory will last. My mother was an exceptional person who deserves to be remembered, but I doubt she will be beyond my children’s generation. Since I do not claim to have reached her heights of impact on the world, I will be lucky to be remembered even as long. But that’s OK with me, just like its OK to not make it to 100. I’m happy to get into my 70s on a healthy basis. I wouldn’t mind getting to 80, don’t really expect to see 90 and hope like Hell that I don’t linger and feel the need to stick around living to 100.