Live Forever? Yes! In This Body? No.

Unicorn Farting a Rainbow:

Long life and lack of reality

Today and many other days, a nice person less than half my age said something to the effect of, "You're going to live to be 100! How can I get in shape like you?"

Usually I say thanks and change the subject.  Sometimes, I answer truthfully. Answer 1:  No, I don't want to live to 100, at least not in this body.
Answer 2: You won't like the answer.

Even before I broke my neck in a 50 mph bicycle crash 11 years ago, I was thinking about how life would be when I was older than 75, and how long I wanted to live. The modern medicine I love so much for keeping me alive will betray me as the end of my life gets closer.  I just started a wonderful book titled Being Mortal by doctor and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande. He makes clear what I already knew that the bias in medicine is strongly toward heroic measures to prolong the lives of even clearly terminal patients.

Most people simply want to live longer without much thought about how they live.  I really don't.  I love being alive, but I see old age as a minefield I have to traverse.  And crossing a minefield requires skill, sensitivity, information and luck.

The odds are, according to insurance estimates, I will have a long life.  Of course, 65 is already way longer than I ever thought I would live. I once wrote a series of blog posts about how I would already be dead if I had been born 50 or more years ago.  And that does not include waiting for World War III to start on the border in Cold War West Germany.

A few of the "How I Would Have Died" posts:
Missile Explosion
Motorcycle
Vaccination
Bicycle Race Crash I
Bicycle Race Crash II

As it turns out, I do many things the advice books say to have a good life in later years. Better still, the things I need to do are what I want to do.

I get lots of exercise because I love to ride.

I read out of love, not just for information. Two days after Christmas, I found out Mark Helprin had written a new novel about my favorite city--Paris in the Present Tense--it was like a double Christmas.

I do crossword puzzles,

I travel,

I do new things I have never done before.

I have many wonderful friends and my new life as a protester has given me new friends. All those things are supposed to give me a great life in my 70s and beyond.

But then there's medical reality.  I have had four major concussions. Four times I have seen a bright blue flash behind my eyes and lost consciousness.  My brain works now, but brain injuries will catch up with me just as surely as other injuries already have.

My wrists, especially the right wrist I broke three times, hurt nearly every day. My knees click and pop loudly in yoga class every week. The many injuries I accumulated over the last 60 years all put a kink or a twist in the life I live now. These problems are in addition to the other problems we all share with aging.

Speaking of brain health, I started learning Hebrew a few months ago.  Again, not for health, but because I want to.  This week I learned about the seven forms of the Hebrew verb. I was delighted. I have been practicing the gendered, numbered forms of the present participle.  But the most difficult thing is the vocabulary. But when I learn ten new words and forget five I learned the day before. Learning a language is natural at age 5, crazy at 65.

Spiritual life can be even more of a minefield. In The Screwtape Letters  by C.S. Lewis, the mid-level bureaucrat in Hell sending advice to a field agent tells him to prolong the life of the people he wants to lure into Hell.  It's not only that beliefs harden with age, the ability to exam beliefs and react to new information is even more difficult. Just when spiritual life means the most, the tendency is to push away new experience. Screwtape wants his patients to have a long life in which to tempt them.

No one knows what life after death is like. I have favorite guesses, but no facts. I believe that we live eternally after death, but that also is a matter of faith. I have no evidence except from people who are still alive or those who spoke about their beliefs while they were alive.

I love being alive, which makes me sure I do not want to prolong my life simply to have more years. If the end is near, I want to be ready to embrace what comes next, not struggling to remain alive at any cost.  I hope I can look at that reality squarely not be grasping for unicorns and rainbows.