Yesterday’s appointment with my doctor made both of us happy. My blood pressure is great, my cholesterol is great, my liver is great. While I was surprised at all this, having gone to the appointment with low expectations, my doctor was most complimentary on the changes I’ve made recently in my lifestyle and their accompanying results.
“You’re fit to live to good long time,” Dr. S. said, as if handing me carte blanche for the future. “You’ve done really well. Keep it up.”
“But I don’t want to live a good long time,” I countered.
“How old do you want to live to be?” he asked without ever revealing whether my attitude was strange or not. Most physicians see their role as extending life; and I wondered if meeting someone who doesn’t necessarily agree with that view could be jolting.
“Between seventy and seventy-five,” I answered, fully aware that life expectancies are climbing beyond that at a steady pace. In fact, as people live into their late eighties and early nineties, we’ve divided old age into categories: the young old, the old, and the elderly.
If I had my druthers, I’d die as a young old, assuming the boundaries for that category are between seventy and seventy-five. I’ve come late to the benefits of regular exercise; but I know that, even if I work out religiously from today forward, I will never feel as good as I do now. Regardless of age, one’s physical abilities decline even under the best of circumstances.
It isn’t just the physical aspect, however; the mental, the social, and the relevant are all important too. Mentally, my mind is still pretty sharp, but the things it learned in school are clearly outdated. Nobody does multiplication tables, for instance, when they are allowed to use calculators; I find this frustrating at the store when the cashier can’t compute the change from a dollar when the item costs fifty-six cents. So it’s not that I’m falling behind mentally in a brain power sort of way; rather it’s the mental schooling that I had is no longer particularly useful.
My social life has the potential of being the same way, although so far it’s holding on. But I have no siblings, so I have no strong framework for memories about my childhood or communal recollections of various family events. Couple this with the ever increasing effort it takes to stay relevant in today’s world when you come from a world that existed half a century ago, and it’s a real struggle to communicate with those younger. The burden falls on the older person too, as younger people are not particular interested in “When I was your age” observations.
This doesn’t mean I’m ready to sit in a rocker somewhere and twiddle my thumbs, what it does mean is that I’m ready to make the rest of my life be as productive and pleasurable as possible while understanding that I and the rest of my generation are moving, for the most part, from center stage to bit players. Seventy years or so seems like a great run to me.
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