A friend sent
me a link to an article published in The
Atlantic in 2014, written by a man named Ezekiel Emanuel (too bad he’s not
a religious scholar), explaining why he only wants to live to be 75.
His motives
for setting this upper limit are all ostensibly generous: he’ll be emancipating
his kids to concentrate on their own lives, he’ll have done all he wants to do
and contributed all he has to contribute, he won’t be taking up space and
resources better allotted to someone younger. Nowhere in his lengthy essay is there any
trace of a notion that his desires are anything but modest. I’ll take the 75 years as my due.
Emanuel’s
piece is off-puttingly self-serving, particularly for someone who claims to
know when to shuffle that self off. He’ll stick to his guns, he says, despite
his daughters’ most earnest pleas. If he gets cancer at or near 75, he won’t
get treated. (Unsettling, considering that he’s an oncologist.) And he wants to
have a memorial service for himself before he dies.
The article
is full of statistics, all of which point toward the fact—which Emanuel seems
to regard as a revelation—that one’s later years are generally “not of high
quality.” He brings up the concept of
the “compression of morbidity,” a term I’ve never heard before but which he
cites as a source of many Americans’ dogged determination to live as long as
they can. The gist of the idea is that the longer we live, the healthier we’ll
be. I’ve never met anyone who believes this.
In fact, a
slew of studies, some of which Emanuel mentions, confirms the opposite—that increasing
age brings increasing disability. But do we really need a study to show us
this? Experience is the best teacher—but then Emanuel was a mere
whipper-snapper of 57 when he wrote his piece.
After
spending several thousand words in adamantly defending his stance, Emanuel—spoiler alert!--demurs in his last
paragraph, saying that he reserves the right to change his mind when he reaches
the magic 75. If he’s “still being creative,” he says, then he’ll give it some
more thought.
In other
words, Emanuel is like most of us: we have every intention of bowing out
gracefully when the time comes, but time is not an absolute.
Ezekiel Emanuel is an author with his own Wikipedia page. Visit it here
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