How long should we live?

Today would have been Wendy's 86th birthday.

A theoretical physicist was talking on the radio about the future: the future of computing, use of quantum computers, the future of nanotechnology, the concept of parallel universes (which are theoretically possible and might exist for all we know); and the future of human life spans. That’s when I wrote him off as a crackpot, because he asserted that theoretically humans could live forever. Whether he meant selected humans or all humans wasn’t clear, but either concept flies in the face of biological, not to mention demographic, realities as I understand them. We all die, some early in life, some after many decades – all in accord with the biological reality of death and renewal. Ideally, our decomposed bodies recycle in the biosphere into other living creatures, although inventive and sometimes misguided or perverse people have developed many ways to preserve (as opposed to commemorating) the dead. We can have ourselves preserved – or our bodies anyway – by various forms of embalming. Jeremy Bentham and Lenin come to mind; we can be encased in bronze, as in a bizarre and intermittently funny film by the Dutch-Australian film maker Paul Cox. There are limitless variations in styles of monuments to the dead, many like the pyramids and the ornate cemeteries in Rome, Milan, Malta, Havana implying or making explicit a belief in life after death; others like funerary urns are probably more often intended to be decorative ornaments that gratify the living than commemorate the dead. What about eternal life? The idea shrivels my marrow. At age 85, I look back on a wholly satisfying life that has been immensely pleasurable; the 55 of these years that I shared with Wendy were much more than merely pleasurable. But even if Wendy had not departed this life eleven months ago, I’ve had just about enough. She and I talked about life expectancy a few times; we both felt we had already lived as long as we could have wished when we last talked about this, driving home from the clinic where the neurologist Pierre Bourque had given us her diagnosis of ALS, or motor neuron disease. We were both then just short of 85, and were reassured by what Pierre told us about how her disease would probably progress in the coming months. It did indeed evolve much as he said it would, with progressively more pronounced weakness, longer and longer periods of sleep, but no pain and no deterioration of her mind. Now that Wendy has gone and I’m on my own, I no longer feel that I have much incentive to go on indefinitely. Like many others who reach this age, I’ve seen many others die who were my friends, acquaintances and about my age or younger, and as my father once said to me when he was about the age I am now, it’s easy to get very lonely as friends and colleagues die off all around me. I’ve always been inclined to be a ‘loner’ so being alone for a greater portion of my life than formerly doesn’t trouble me much. I find plenty of ways to keep myself busy and amused. My apartment is full of books to read, and to reread – mostly to reread: I get more pleasure from rereading familiar and much loved books than from starting something new. But I often do start something new, though I confess that I start many more than I finish. And I’ve got quite a lot of writing to do, 3 chapters to write in Public Health and Ecology, the reincarnation of Public Health and Human Ecology, this time with two co-authors rather than all on my own as before. Then I want to finish off as well as polish my memoirs, submit a few pieces for the CBC’s annual literary contests, and if I’m still going strong after all that, assemble, edit, and publish some of the stuff I wrote over the 30-odd years that I edited various medical and public health journals. All that should be enough to keep me off the streets and out of mischief for a few years.