On Being Halfway Dead

I’ve been thinking about mortality recently. This has not been something that entered my mind for most of my life, like most I felt largely invincible and indestructible for most of my life. Then, when I turned 40, I concluded that I was probably more than half way to being dead.

I had no problem with my 30th birthday. I know for some that’s a big birthday. Maybe because it often represents a transition from the wild and crazy 20s to the more calm and responsible 30s. I never had a wild and crazy 20s, so that wasn’t a thing. My kids were still young and between them, my family and my work, I really didn’t have time to think about mortality.

For some reason, things were different when I turned 40. In my head suddenly I was, to use a golf metaphor, “On the back nine” of my life. Because, I told myself, realistically did I think I was going to live much past 80? Probably not.

My grandparents didn’t do so well. One of my grandmothers is still alive, but she’s had a severe case of Alzheimer’s for more than a decade, so that certainly doesn’t sound like a good way to be. My other grandmother also passed with Alzheimer’s as did my favorite Aunt.

One grandfather passed accidentally when he was in his 40s. The other grandfather apparently (so the story goes) passed from a heart attack in the midst of an otherwise uninteresting traffic accident.

My mom passed with COPD as a direct side-effect of a lifetime of smoking, but as a non-smoker, that’s an unlikely outcome for me.

My dad keeps going having just passed his 70th birthday and he’s still pretty sharp. He can use a computer, for the most part, and send email (WITH ALL CAPS AND NO PUNCTUATION LOVE DAD). He bought a tablet and I think that’s got him largely baffled, but it’s running the Android OS, so that doesn’t surprise me. He wants to know how to watch a movie on the tablet but has no real concept how to get a movie on there. He knows I can do it, but I suspect he largely views it as magic.

A year or so ago, I did one of those cheap DNA sequencing tests for $100 and, in addition to telling me that I had a statistically large portion of Neanderthal DNA, it also told me that the only thing I was at a statistically higher risk for was Alzheimer’s, so with the family history in mind, yeah, that seems like something that’s likely to be a problem more than anything else I can point at.

Just between you and me, Alzheimer’s kind of terrifies me. I watched it strip my grandmother of her memories till she didn’t recognize any family members nor have any day-to-day memory of what was going on around her. She passed in a care home because she couldn’t be at home. It was a long and lingering death and a very sad one for someone who had led a pretty vital life – she was a jail matron in Spokane. All “her girls” called her Mom, but I suspect she could be a bit of a bad ass if she had to be.

I’ve made clear my wish that I don’t want to stick around if I lose my marbles, but if I lose who I am, I will likely lose the ability to act on that or the ability to hold that idea and I find that idea both uncomfortable and distasteful. Plus, I’ve told my wife that when that happens she may have to wipe my butt and she’s not signing up for that, so there’s that. So, yeah, pretty much all downside.

On the flipside, I still like to learn new things – almost obsessively, though definitely more slowly than when I was younger. My health is good, mostly, and I’m still playing outdoor volleyball with friends whenever I can and enjoying that every single time I get to play. Someday it will be my last game of volleyball, but that day has not yet come. When it does, I will miss it greatly! But you almost never know when that last day has come and gone for anything in life.

I do hope to not spend most of the time that I have left just working. It gave me pause recently when I thought that I’ve worked now for 32 years if we count from when I started at 16 working at Albertson’s. If I have to work till I’m 68 to get Social Security, that’s another 20 years. Really, how long can I expect anyone is going to be willing to pay me to do anything useful?

We’ve only started talking about when we might be able to retire, but that’s a very hard notion to wrap my head around because I can’t figure out how much it takes to retire if I don’t know how long I’m going to live. Or, perhaps more likely, how long I’ll require care for after I lose my marbles and am unable to care for myself. Someone’s going to have to do the butt wiping…

When can I retire? Tell me how long I will live and how the economy is going to do over the next 40 years and then I can probably project when I can retire.

I’ve got one friend who has already retired in his early 50s. It’s hard not to be a little jealous but I do realize that he is where he is, at least in part, because he lived a very different life than me (kids, divorce, etc). So, apples and oranges.

So, objectively and statistically, I was probably halfway to dead when I turned 40. Now, eight years later, it’s highly likely that we’re through with halftime and firmly in to the third quarter, to use another sports metaphor.

In the end I worked out that it really doesn’t make any difference if that’s the case. What can you do about it other than enjoy as best you can each day that you do have because, with few exceptions, none of us know how much time we have left.

While I did conclude that I’m probably more than half dead, in the end it doesn’t affect how I live my life, not really. But, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that at the back of my mind there’s a little voice that reminds me of the passing time, occasionally sits back there going “tick, tock! Time is passing.” That voice is an asshole.