Peeking at the longevity tables

Matters of health are on my mind these days. On Tuesday I had a colonoscopy, with two benign polyps snipped out, the same result as the last colonoscopy 5 years ago. People in my life have been dealing with serious health matters, too, like leukemia, congestive heart failure, cancer, and hip replacements.  

With all this going on, I decided to use an online longevity calculator to figure out how old I can expect to live. I answered questions about physical activity, drinking and smoking habits and other indicators. One said 88, another said 90. I can live with those figures, although for all I know they may be as accurate as a Buzzfeed poll or a Ouiji board. But the numbers are pointing in the right direction. My father passed away at 92 in March. His father lived to be 91 or so, another good indication. My father’s younger sister lived into her early 80s and then—Parkinson’s disease.

The wild card? My mother. A smoker, she died of cancer at 63, when I was only 26 years old. She lived long enough to see my brother married, but she missed my marriage and her three grandsons. I tell myself the smoking and the state of cancer treatments in the early 1980s made her cancer more lethal than it would be today. Maybe. But the number 63 stays lodged in my mind, looming like a stormcloud just over the calendar’s horizon. I’m now 61, the age when she got the last diagnosis. She left her job, closed down the house we had rented for 21 years and moved in with her older sister for the last two and a half years of her life.

For all these reasons, I can hear what poet Andrew Marvell called “time’s winged chariot” at my back, hurrying near. What should I think, should I respond to hints of mortality? I’m not in a midlife crisis – at 61 I’m a little past that, although this fall I got a 2015 Toyota Prius and an iPhone 7 Plus, big lifestyle upgrades for me. But I am in a time of reflection on what I’d like to do in X number of years or decades remaining.

A big change came in the spring, when I stopped commuting after 22 years and now work at home for the same job. I have replaced train time with things like sleeping later and lunchtime walks to the library. I’m not as exhausted, so I have more time for personal writing projects—short stories, blog posts, those long-delayed ideas for novels. I’m helping a 93 year old World War II veteran edit his memoirs of his escape from Germany in 1941, then his return as a GI in 1945, and that’s deeply satisfying. 

After a lifetime of writing, I finally have the energy and focus to actually get projects moving and completed. Maybe not quickly, but I don’t give up like I used to in frustration. Because if I don’t write it now, I may not remember what I want to say down the road.

I’m going back to old loves. I signed up for an online harmonica class, a thwarted interest of mine for a half-century. I may never be the King of the Delta Blues Harpists, but maybe I can finally learn to bend a note. This fall I took a Photoshop class so I can improve the digital photos I’m always taking.

Personal stuff? I talk to my brother more and he sends me photos of his twin grandkids. I write letters to friends, always delighting them when a real handwritten letter shows up in their mailbox. I text my son, our preferred way of communicating. My girlfriend and I go out for date-night dinners, movies in Pleasantville at the Burns Film Center, hikes around Westchester County, trips to New York City to dash from one museum to another (the Society of Illustrators to the Guggenheim to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on one recent Saturday). I don’t obsess over the latest political uproars; to me, many of them are sound and fury, signifying nothing. At the same time, I very involved in my synagogue and have attended zoning hearings at Bedford Town Hall as a form of civic engagement. I don’t even check my retirement accounts unless the market is up. And I only get on the scale when those numbers are down.

So what about those longevity surveys? Do I enjoy 90 and beyond, or is time’s winged chariot closer than I imagine? I’ll hope for the best, but, as the Good Book says, no man knows the day or hour. I’ll get what I can from my days, take what I want and leave the rest. And there’s always technology. I joke around with Princeton cronies about our reunions, a big deal for us. I tell them I plan to attend my 100^th reunion in 2080 as a hologram stored on the Amazon cloud. I just hope Amazon offers post-mortem Amazon Prime for the eternal support of my uploaded personality.