Life ends at 75
Seventy-five.
That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.
So begins Ezekiel Emanuel’s awful, depressing, wrong-headed essay in the recent issue of The Atlantic. Emanual, director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and head of the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, is a hale and healthy – and productive – 57. But he imagines a dire future for himself. He imagines that when he reaches 75, life will not be worth living.
Why? Because he equates getting older with being incapacitated. He writes, “our older years are not of high quality.” Really? Tell that to Betty White (82) because I guess she didn’t get the message.
Why is life not worth living past 75? Because, he writes, we not only slow down mentally (he gets to this after several slit-your-wrists paragraphs about dementia), but “we literally lose our creativity.” Really? Tell that to New Yorker essayist Roger Angell (94) who is writing some of his best work right now.
Tell that to the consistently brilliant E.O. Wilson (85) with an extraordinary new book just published. The New York Times calls him “wise, learned, wicked, vivid, oracular.” And, apparently a full decade past the end of his useful life.
If those reasons don’t resonate, Emanual ends the essay with the ultimate guilt trip: Think of the burden you’ll be to your kids. Worse yet, those years after 75 — the sickly, frail, uncreative, awful years? – will “inevitably become [your children’s] predominant and salient memories” of you.
Wow. Kill me now, so my kids’ salient memory will be when I rocked out at an ACDC tribute band concert this past summer.
I am just disgusted with Mr. Emanual and with our culture’s fear and denigration of what it means to get older. Thinking old, thinking the worst possible scenarios about getting older, is a shortcut to the unsatisfying, unhealthy and unhappy life Emanual imagines for himself.
Me? I imagine (and am joyfully working toward) an entirely different future. And you?
2 comments
Ah, Lauren, You are providing plenty of fodder for tonight’s class which is “Should families provide for their own?” We’ll watch Steven Colbert’s piece on Granny pods, learn about long-term care options and consider filial obligations.
We’ll also revisit the Emmanuel piece once more. I was not as negatively impacted by his essay as you were, probably because I know someone who is living out the same plan. “John” decided when his wife died five years ago that he would no longer see a doctor for checkups or take medication for chronic hypertension. He is now 93 and less than a month ago he jumped out of a plane with our gerontology club students. Granted, he was well into his 80s when he made the decision and it is hard to know if he would have resolved to do this had his wife been still living. It is clear, however, that while he is foregoing medical care, he is not giving up on life.
Also within the last month one of my friend’s moms was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She was in her 90s and was told she had less than six months to live. She was taken off her heart medication with the hope that she would have a heart attack, saving her from a slow and painful death and that is just what happened.
Legions of older folks can expect to live long, happy and productive lives but others will delay death from heart attack and stroke long enough to contract dementia or infirmities that make life difficult at best and miserable at worst. Gerontologists aim for compressed morbidity—delaying illness and disability until the very last portion of life. Unfortunately, the research does not point to improvements in this area. Indeed disability seems to be increasing for older adults.
Emmanuel seems to me to be someone like Daniel Callahan (health rationing based on age) and Aubrey de Grey (he professes that one day humans may be immortal) who press the envelope with ideas that will get people thinking. And he did just that.
Gosh, Lauren, how can I continue to maintain my Pollyanna status if you force me to argue the bad guy side?
If I thought Emmanuel was arguing for restraint using heroic end-of-life measures, I would not be angry. In fact, I agree. It absolutely is about quality of years not quantity. But his whole essay is based on the notion that old=frail,uncreative and useless. Sorry, that doesn’t fly.
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