Are We Living Too Long?
The actuaries will not save us.
“You should call your mother.” It’s a phrase you expect to hear in college and maybe in the early years of raising a new family. But there came a point I thought if someone wanted to talk to me, they could call. Or email. Or text. Or even send a fax. The idea that as I approach the age of retirement I should have a responsibility to initiate a conversation with anyone who has been an adult for a half-century or more is, in my view, ridiculous.
Even so, as the holidays unfold, I get this sense of pressure to perform some annual Christian/Hallmark/Amazon Prime duty to make contact with people who don’t really know me or respect my values. But here I am leaving voice mail and sending emails across several days looking for signs of life. The reality is a 10% chance of a corpse at the bottom of the basement stairs, so at a minimum, I am curious.
Ah, the landline number! Picked up, so no wellness check by the local constabulary will be needed. The ramblings about Biden jacking up the cost of camping, Wikipedia being written by just anybody, and The Epoch Times being good journalism, have me thinking about the basement stairs again. Hearing glad for the call and getting bored these days, raises a lot of questions. Why not call someone, anyone? Has everyone stopped picking up? She can talk the horns off a billy goat by her own admission but the logical extreme of loquaciousness is pontificating to an empty room.
A conversation is a connection and the connection has to run both directions. If one end is a diatribe and the other a wooden post. Then this is nothing more than the classic “Old Man Yells at Cloud” headline.
When my father took his life at age 77 it was to escape the effects of Parkinson’s and was statistically right on target. He was always a kind man and did this without warning as required in a state without right-to-die laws at the time. His affairs were in order and his burial was arranged as “pre-need”. He died alone but did not live alone, he was expected at a dance that evening.
“In 2021, life expectancy at birth was 76.4 years for the total U.S. population — a decrease of 0.6 year from 77.0 years in 2020” — Centers for Disease Control
In contrast, my mother is now too old to participate in the evangelical missions that gave her purpose but not old enough to require nursing care. Spending her days reading, praying, and walking the dog she lives alone in a life of her own making. She has friendly interactions at the market, shops, and church but ends up alone and bored. If the stroke had been in a different medical era, it would have been final and the isolation would not have bloomed, depriving The Epoch Times of a new subscriber.
I cannot save her, nor can I let “responsibility” overwhelm me. I will call when I feel like it and answer the phone when called. In the meantime, we both wait and wonder if expectancy is the right measure of life.