October 15, 2019--Life Expectancy

When a couple of years ago a neurologist told me that the tremor I was experiencing in my right hand was not an "essential tremor" but evidence of Parkinson's Disease, I asked him how long it would be before I turned into Michael J. Fox.

He asked how old I was. I told him and with a dismissive wave of his hand said I didn't need to worry. 

When I asked why, he said because at my age, before the symptoms became severe, I would be dead.

I told him that I then had something to look forward to. 

He asked what that was. 

I told him to being dead.

He didn't smile. In his business I suppose it isn't easy to have much of a sense of humor.

Thinking the other day about the intersecting curves of my slowly-developing PD symptoms and my age, in other words how I was doing on the dying scale, I thought to quantify it and so I looked up my actuarial life expectancy--how much longer I have to live.

For a white man my age it is 7.82 years. 

Not that bad, I thought, but then again, if I look back 7.82 years to 2011, as I did, it seems as if that was but yesterday.

Obama was in his second year as president--that was a good thing--and Osama bin Laden was killed--another good thing. Also, it was the year of the massive earthquake in Japan, the resulting tsunami, and the death of North Korean tyrant Kim Jung-Il. 

Domestically, in January, Gabby Giffords was shot, The King's Speech won the Academy Award for best picture, and the Packers defeated the Steelers in the Super Bowl. The Dow Jones average closing price was 11,958. Today it's 26,842.

Get what I mean? Doesn't it feel like just yesterday?

As you can see, I got carried away with this. 7.82 years. I couldn't get it out of my mind. It seemed like an OK number, but . . . King's Speech? Didn't we see that only two or three years ago?

I know life expectancy calculations are the heart and soul of how insurance companies operate. If they get it right, they make money. If not, their bottom line is effected. So traditionally considered, life expectancy is a big deal.

As I struggled with this, I wondered if this is the right way to think about life expectancy--not actuarily, calculating how much time is left, but to ask what I should expect from life. How am I doing in the living, not dying business.

Some days fine when the sunsets are especially vivid because I open myself to seeing them in their full display.

Or when dinner is particularly savory, again if I slow down and let myself experience the flavors and textures that way.

When I concentrate enough to hear the inner dynamics of a Beethoven string quartet. When I revisit some of Hemingway's stories and tune in again to his muscular prose. When the heat crackles in the pipes. When the birds, not anxiety wake me. 

When I notice how wonderful Rona looks in her red sweater. If I take the time to see even though I am colorblind and red often looks like dull gray to me. But in those moments when Rona fires my imagination and passion, red blazes and life is good.

If I manage to live this way, 7.82 years, or the time that remains for me, seems like just the right amount. 

October 10, 2016--Bar Mitzvah Boy

I'm taking a day off from Trump-Clinton 24/7.

*  *  *

So--
Even casual readers of Behind know my mother died last year at 107 plus three days. I am sure I am deluding myself when I think I can equal or outdo that. But 110 or more feels within reach.

I know . . .

But, when I read that Yisrael Kristal waited 100 years before being bar mitvahed at 113, since I also have not been ritualistically admitted to the Jewish version of adulthood (that lack I have been told is obvious), I thought there was no rush to find a rabbi willing to take on someone incorrigibly like me if I want to fill that gap in my Jewish resumé.

But then I read, also in the New York Times, that new studies of aging are coming to conclude that 115 years is looking like the ceiling for human life expectancy. Some, including me, have been thinking that with modern medicine there is no limit to how old we can get. What kind of life one would have at 130 is another matter.

A little thrown off my pins by these findings, I did a little quick calculating and, considering my age, I thought I had better get on with my Torah training if I want to be alive for the blessed event. I also thought to turn to Mr. Kristal's life story to guide me.

His life turns out to be so unique, so incredible that I can barely find anything specific to steer me but inspiration.

At 113, the world's oldest man according to the Guiness Book of World Records, he was born in 1903 in the small Polish village of Malenie--as it turns out not far from where my mother was born just five years later. Since World War I was raging when he was 13 he could not be Bar Mitzvahed at the traditional age.

After the war, with an uncle, he moved to Lodz and opened a candy store. In 1939 Lodz was overrun by the Nazis and his wife and two small children were killed. Five years later, with his second wife he was sent to Auschwitz and somehow managed to survive, the only member of his extended family to do so. When the camp was liberated he weighed just 82 pounds.

He emigrated to Israel, married, and raised another family. He now has two surviving children, nine grandchildren, and 30 great-grandchildren. Most of them were at his Bar Mitzvah. He is reported by them to retain most of his capacities.

Looking around at the family who gathered for his bar mitzvah, one of his granddaughters said, "All these people from one person. Imagine how many rooms could be filled if six million had lived."

His daughter, Kristal Kuperstoch say her father has prayed every morning for the past 100 years and attributed his longevity to that and his diet--he eats modestly but when he does, almost every day, he has a helping of pickled herring. Until his late 80s he also had a taste for wine and beer.

The herring and beer sound pretty good to me.

Bar Mitzvah Boy Yisrael Kristal