Life Expectancy

I have been dead forever--or for 13.8 billion years if you count time from the Big Bang. I am alive now, of course, but I was dead less than a century ago, and don’t miss all of those oblivious eons. According to actuarial tables, I can expect to be dead forever again in about ten years. My longest reasonable expectation is a bit more than double that, and it overlaps with likely dementia and disability. At most, my life expectancy is one billionth the time I've  already spent comfortably dead, so why I should take health and safety precautions for a reward so trivial: a fifth of a lifetime and an infinitely smaller proportion of my inevitable death-time?

Healthy behaviors are a game of diminishing returns, especially since many risky indulgences tend to kill or disable us slowly. It may take years, even decades, for fat to clog arteries, smoking to kill lung tissue, alcohol to destroy the liver, or speeding to kill. Most people die from only one of these (if not from something else), so one writer suggests adopting an unhealthy habit every year after eighty, when odds are it won’t shorten your life noticeably anyway. This hedonistic logic contradicts usual practice. Octogenarians, as a rule, are more risk-adverse than “immortal” teenagers, half as likely to die in accidents or homicides and far more inclined to visit doctors and take preventive medicine. Somebody driving with an excess of caution is probably a senior. Presumably, like the godson of Death in the fable I told earlier, they’ve been warned and are squeezing out every remaining drop of life. I’ve heard old folks say, “Every day I wake up is a good day,” and I’m beginning to feel that way myself.

Another math seems to guide human behavior, at least as long as we keep our health and libido. Maxwell Anderson wrote in “September Song,” “The days dwindle down to a precious few,” and, in keeping with the economy of scarcity, dwindled days may indeed grow more precious. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 celebrates the tendency “to love that more which thou must leave ere long.” The poem references deeper love for a beloved near end-of-life, and the math does work that way in my experience—an outflowing of love toward friends I knew to be mortally ill, a strange, poignant, and irrational sexiness of dying. But it also works the other way. Many people never love life more than on their deathbeds. The calculation in this case is not a ratio of the present day to years past—certainly not the present day to eternities dead—but the present moment to time remaining. The factor is not eternity but entirety, not infinity but totality. One month in hospice or one hour on failing life support becomes one hundred percent of earthly existence--everything from larger than the sum of all galaxies down to smaller than a dust mote. A dying minute may collapse all the world into a tiny expanse more vast and precious than a century lived, the universe in a grain of sand. Sometimes life plays backwards into a singularity.

Most philosophies of life and religions offer maps for living toward a good death, saying in various forms of myth and counsel, “Don’t worry, die happy.” This goes back to the Egyptians and the philosophical schools of Ancient Greece. Some deny Death’s reality. Others enable acceptance of finality. Most agree that it doesn’t help to ignore the inevitable. It's no good to regard dying as what other people do—a ploy we easily fall into if we don't pay attention. This ploy—associated with western consumer culture, condemned by Pascal as the root of religious disbelief. and probably as old as our world—is to distract ourselves as long as possible with diversions. Of course, unless we croak in our sleep, the time comes when diversions fail and death bushwhacks us. The Roman stoic Seneca advises preparation: “a blow which has long been foreseen falls much less heavily upon us.” Another argument for acceptance of death is the heroic one, recalling Dan Daly’s shout to troops charging German machine guns in WWI, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” Acceptance of the inevitability of death and loss can drive us to bravely use the time remaining.

Nevertheless, a common coping mechanism is denial. Death may be real, but it may seem far off, like a hurricane in the Gulf. Of course, it isn't, not reliably. When I lived in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta near Emory University, we had an ice storm that dropped limbs all over town, and I read about an assistant professor—a young family man successful enough in his career to have such an excellent academic address—killed a week after the storm by a falling limb as he rode his bicycle to work under it. The improbability and unpredictability of it was shocking: the fibers of a ice-weakened limb fraying for seven days until, at the exact quarter-second that the professor rolled under it, it fell.  Of all the deaths read about (the funerals passing my house, in Seneca’s phrasing), this one remains a poster boy for the fragility of existence. 

And two words stamped onto my young brain on December 10, 1949: “Watt’s dead.” (I know the date from ancestry.com.) Watt was the two-year-old son of the agronomy professor next door and died a hundred feet away from my bedroom across a shared driveway. All I know of his death is that it was unexpected. There was no warning (at least to me) before that cold morning. Watt’s death killed any confidence that my own youth protected me, that death’s hurricane churned safely miles away in the Gulf.

I remember exactly where I was standing (childish philosophical breakthroughs are like 9/11 or the Kennedy Assassination) when I realized that the pulse I felt would beat only a finite number of times (side yard) and also when I calculated that I was almost certain to outlive my parents and the GI-bill student who lived in our front room (left front yard). Both predictions presumably came true. My parents are dead, and the GI would be ninety-five, but “Watt’s dead.” Actuarial comparisons are no consolation at my age, but such comparisons have often given me false comfort, like the time I worked registration at LSU as a 23-year-old teaching assistant and felt flush with futurity at a table with gray professors—men, by the way, all more accomplished than I ever became, my worldly superiors even today. 

But, back to the heartbeat countdown, I trembled in the side yard under a pine tree to feel each heartbeat like a step toward an open grave but then comforted myself to calculate that there were millions of likely pulses ahead, the tombstone many decades away. Still, each beat did mean one fewer until I died. I have tried again and again since that time to push death away with diminishing success. I mow the lawn or ride ten miles on a bicycle and imagine that I am still somehow young, invulnerable. No fool like an old one. I still try to maintain healthy habits, answering yes items that subtract years off a virtual age calculator, and plan for the future, imagining (as Montaigne says of even the frailest of us) that I have twenty good years.

For years I ran an open mic at The Java House, a coffee shop in Bowling Green, Kentucky. My pay was free coffee, so I spent afternoons there, being semi-retired, talking with regulars. One Friday afternoon, I sat with James (not his real name). His type is common in university towns—he went off to school, made friends, and ended up stuck there. James might even have earned a degree, but at the time was underemployed as the caretaker of an old man with dementia who was preoccupied with tearing newspaper into narrow, uniform strips. James was killing the afternoon at a table with his ward, and for an hour or more, we discussed all sorts of things, including hiring an entourage if we were filthy rich, but smoking is the topic I best remember. 

This was before the public smoking ban, and James was a chain smoker. We were friendly enough that I challenged him on the habit, calling it suicide. I’d be dead already if I hadn’t quit, I said. Addiction seemed to me the only sane motivation. James disagreed. He enjoyed smoking, he said. It gave him pleasure, and if he was going to die anyway, why not enjoy tobacco while he was alive? Of course, there’s no refuting this argument, so we moved on, and a few topics later, I left him with the spaced-out old man and a pile of newspaper strips.

The next Monday at the Java House, I learned that James was dead. He’d gone hiking in a state park that Saturday and was found the next day at the foot of a cliff. I see all sorts of morals to this story, including some that might be excluded if I knew more. The most obvious is James’ “Smoke and be merry for tomorrow we die.” He rightly believed tobacco wouldn’t kill him. Of course, maybe he had inside knowledge. Maybe he was suicidal and jumped off the cliff, but I doubt it. Though he was a bit of a nihilistic underachiever, James seemed full of life. 

A more likely moral has to do with with risk taking. Years ago, I was hiking with my wife in a Georgia park, rambling carelessly through the woods, and stopped short at the edge of a thirty-foot drop, so near the precipice that I dropped to hands and knees and crawled back. I see James at the foot of that cliff. He was alone, of course, his body not found until the next winter morning. My wife would have run for medical help if I had fallen, and who knows how many hours James lay alive on the cold leaves, maybe bleeding internally? The friends who told me about his death were going to “clean up” his apartment before his parents got there, referring to drug paraphernalia, so more than tobacco defined James as a risk taker. Maybe that personality trait was what caught up with him in his twenties in those winter woods

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming James, but I do suspect that an aversion to physical risk, including but not limited to tobacco, is one reason I’m an old man now and he never will be. Not that that that means either of us will be dead a noticeably lesser percentage of eternity.