How old do you want to live to be?

How old do you want to live to be?


Most people would say a hundred, thinking that's about how long any of us lives and still has any brain cells working. But what do we look like at that age? Have you ever seen someone who was a hundred? Or even a picture? They don't look good. They're starting to fall in on themselves. Whatever they looked like when they were young is long gone. Only their best friends would recognize a young face amid all that ruin, and those friends are all pretty much dead.


Most hundred-year-olds are gracious when they're interviewed and get applause for living that long, but most seem embarrassed at all the fuss, because they're thinking of themselves as the beautiful young men and women they used to be, ripe and ready for whatever life was about to throw their way. They're generally polite, God bless 'em, but they know their best times are behind them and that the best they can do is hope for something miraculous.

So how about ninety? Woud you like to die at ninety? Have you ever seen anyone who was ninety? They look pretty much like the hundred-year-olds but maybe not quite so bad off. They may not need the wheelchair -- maybe just the walker -- but they're creeping around. Their brains may still be functioning at a high level -- maybe -- but their bodies are starting to show the wear and tear of existence. Their reflexes are off, their muscle density down. They've come down from a Pontiac LeMans to an older Ford. If they've really kept themselves up, they can still walk, but not very fast. Time is bearing down on them, and they know it. They're also not pretty anymore. Even the best-looking girls have lost that skin tone that brought them such attention all those years ago!

A ninety-year-old prom queen is not something anyone wants to see. To be fair, you also don't want to see the ninety-year-old prom king. Trust me: you don't.

On the other hand, to give them credit, they're probably the wisest subset of census data in any given year (or century). If you have your wits about you, don't go out at ninety.

Is eighty better as a time to go out? Well, maybe it depends on your criteria for ending it all.

Make a list:


1) I can't stand living anymore.

2) I'm so in debt that I'll never get out of it.


3) My wife/husband hates me/left me.


4) I'm addicted to something that might kill me.

5) I'm losing bodily functions.

6) I'm physically impaired and/or in constant physical pain

7) I'm a worthless person.

Such a list could go on forever: all the reasons we don't want to keep living. So what if you reach the age of eighty and are agreeing with most of these statements? Are you ready to give it up?

Not necessarily. You're probably still walking around, admittedly a little slower, but you don't want to miss all those birthdays for your grandchildren and watching them bud into real people, right? As for yourself, you don't look as good as you used to but aren't totally unrecognizable. Some eighty-year-olds look pretty good. And there are still books to be read and fish to be caught and holes to be made (golf we're talking) and maybe even something new, somthing you hadn't done before but wanted to and now have time for. No, eighty is too soon to die.

That means, of course, that seventy isn't, either. At seventy, you're still pretty strong and agile. Granted seventy used to be considered old, but not any more. I defy you to look at a line-up of guys 55 to 75 and pick out the 70 year old (assuming the old guy is in good shape). Medicines and diet guidelines and exercise routines, including yoga, have extended the average lifespan. A guy or gal in his or her seventies can still do pretty much what he or she did at sixty. Or fifty. Just get the right prescriptions. Oh, and take care of yourself.

Stick around, okay? Life is still good.

And if you don't want to die in your seventies, you certainly don't want to in your sixites, when you feel -- if you've taken care of your body -- not much different from how you felt at forty, assuming you also felt good then, as most of us do.

There really is no best time to die. It depends on the kind of life we've lived, the condition we've kept ourselves in, the quality of our family life. And more. Our interests in different subjects, our tolerance and/or zeal for travel. Our own internal, totally personal, make-up.

Whether you want to live to be a hundred or thirty depends on who you are as a person, and no one can make that decision for you.

My advice is to live as long as you can, but only if you're enjoying life and looking forward to the next day. If you ever reach a point that you're not doing either, then it's time to find a therapist and/or start planning how to exit this life gracefully. If you decide to do the latter, make sure that you've cleared it with those left behind: you don't want a loved one to find you hanging from a rope in closet (not good). Plan your exit gracefully and with care.

But that doesn't mean that anyone should ever consider ending his or her own life. There is always the option of just dying of natural causes, which, unfortunately, often means wasting away to the point that you don't want any of your loved ones looking at you -- and they don't want to look at you either. (I always remember hearing that Sammy Davis Jr., that superb singer, weighed something like seventy pounds when he died of lung cancer. No thanks.)

Tough options, no?

I guess the best thing to hope for is to live to a ripe old age and then die in your sleep. My mother did that, but she put up with a few years preceding when she was restricted to a sofa and a walker and hated her confinement. She was almost 99 when she died, either getting into bed or out.

Whatever age we do die, we hope we've lived a good life and have people who will mourn us when we're gone. But what is that "ideal" age?

I knew boys in Viet Nam who died, violently, before they were twenty. My best friend from high school died at 25 in a traffic accident. The poet Keats died at the same age, of TB. His friend Shelly, the poet, drowned at 30. A neighbor of mine, a wonderful woman, died just last year of cancer at 49. Another woman, who I didn't know, died at 105 in a nursing home.

There is no set age at which it's "the right time" to die. And even thinking about it --if you rule out suicide (as I hope you have) -- is just hypothetical.

But aren't hypothetical questions the most interesting?

What/who might you have been if you'd taken a different path somewhere in your life? Not married this person but that other one? Not chosen this career but another one? Had children or not? Etc.

Thinking about the "right" time to die is just an exercise in thinking, nothing more or less. We'll all probably die when the time comes, and we may be old and decrepit or in the prime of life -- or somewhere in between.

Just another of those things to think about, or not, as we see fit.

Live long and prosper, as they say. Or die and be a lovely corpse. Embrace the mystery!