Phoning Home: Essays

Divided Expectations

Divided Expectations I am approaching my half-life. According to the most recent data from the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the average American now lives 77.9 years, which places our mean halflife at approximately 38 years, 11 months, and 12 days. That is discouragingly short when compared to uranium (t½ = 4.47 billion years), but an eternity by the standards of the mayfly (t½ < 12 hrs.) or the morning-glory blossom (t½ < 4 hrs.). Assuming I myself prove average—and I can boast a wellestablished track record for mediocrity—I will arrive at my own half-life on February 2, 2013, around three o’clock in the afternoon. From that moment forward, I’ll be more history than future. Afterwards I may suffer existential remorse—buy a crimson Corvette Stingray, elope with an eighteen-year-old au pair—but technically, it will be too late for a mid-life crisis. 172 Phoning Home Of course, I might not be average. I may be middling in most respects, but when it comes to truly high stakes matters —romance, automotive safety—I have a tendency to underperform . So I could already be more than halfway toward my expiration date, clinging to the shorter strand of my mortal coil, obliviously puttering my way down the back nine. The problem with human half-lives is that they can be calculated only in retrospect. Who could have imagined that twelveyear -old James Dean, opening gates for an uncle’s tractor on his Indiana homestead, had already bought more than half the farm? Or that John F. Kennedy had eclipsed his halfway mark as a senior at Harvard? For the overly optimistic, one also has the example of French supercentenarian Jeanne Calment (1875–1997), who had more life ahead of her than behind her at retirement age. Relying on the law of averages often turns perilous, a lesson learned dramatically by attorney André-François Raffray, who agreed to pay Mrs. Calment 2,500 francs monthly in 1965—when she turned ninety—in return for the deed to her apartment on her death. After Raffray ’s own demise in 1995, his widow (presumably “in for a centime, in for a franc”) continued the annuity payments, which ultimately totaled twice the value of the flat. In short pacing oneself, difficult enough during bike rides or foreplay, becomes a Herculean challenge when one does not know in advance what interval one has been allotted. That is likely why so many folks exceed their lifetime allocation for cheesecake . If there is an afterlife, it is undoubtedly brimming with Monday-morning quarterbacks. Divided Expectations 173 My own half-life serves not merely as a flashing neon announcement that time is running short, but also a reminder of all the accomplishments now beyond my grasp. I will not become a Rhodes Scholar (maximum age = 26 yrs.) or a member of the Swiss Guard (max starting age [msa] = 30 yrs.) or a New York City police officer (msa = 35 yrs.). My chance to serve as an FBI special agent (msa = 37 yrs.) is gone. Even with gender reassignment surgery, I have no shot at being crowned Miss America (max = 25 yrs.). In addition many doors have been closed, not by rules, but by reality: I am unlikely to play shortstop for the New York Yankees or join the Astronaut Corp or make out with my teenage crush (now happily married) in the backseat of a car. No elderly relative will ever mention my potential, unless in reference to an objective unfulfilled . If I do attend a high school prom again, it will be as a chaperone. While I suppose I should take solace in the knowledge that I can still join the French Foreign Legion (msa = 40 yrs.) and eventually the AARP, my opportunities for accomplishment have rapidly dwindled. As my favorite high school teacher used to say (before he died prematurely of a brain aneurysm), “When you reach middle age, you have to divide your expectations in half.” His mistake—a common one, I have discovered—was placing “middle age” on the far side of sixty, rather than the near side of forty. The human lifespan is far shorter than we think it is. Average life expectancy is itself a misleading statistic, as it actually applies to children born today. So while an infant born in 2012 can expect to live to 77.9 years, my own prospects are likely 174 Phoning Home somewhat shorter. That 77.9 figure also does not take into account my gender or the roughly 300,000 Newport cigarettes that I smoked before my craving for pleasure succumbed to my fear of sudden death. Basically, I am deluding myself. I like to pretend that I am still in the first half of the game, but I am really somewhere in the third quarter. Many Baby Boomers who think that they are in the third quarter are well into overtime.* Needless to say some actuarial tricksters try to cheat the biological realities by leaving childhood out of the calculus. The noted psychologist Erik Erikson, for example, cleverly referred to the period from age 40 to 65 as the “middle adult years,” ignoring the fact that a sizable number of people drop dead during this “middle” period. Yet even if one were to exclude the first ten years of human existence from the halflife equation—on the grounds that toddling in diapers is not really “living”—we would still hit our average halfway point in our mid-forties. And one could just as easily lop off the final ten years—on the grounds that doddering in diapers is also not really “living”—which would push our mean half-life back under thirty-five. Any way one crunches the numbers, the period between exiting the university dorms and entering assisted living is objectively more fleeting than it seems subjectively at the outset. If the average life expectancy is seventy-seven years and change, half the people out there— and half the readers of this essay—are bound to die younger, *You have now reached the halfway point of this essay: a cause for either relief or regret. In any case half the author’s argument now lies behind you. Divided Expectations 175 often much younger, than that. For every Jeanne Calment, someone must suffer a massive heart attack at fifty or choke to death on a chicken bone at thirty-five. Life expectancies have increased dramatically over the past century, and human half-lives have lengthened accordingly. When my great-grandparents keeled over in their fifties and sixties, six decades was considered a full life. One of my favorite headlines, from the St. Petersburg Independent of September 25, 1930, reads: “Average 1930 Child May Expect to Live until 58 Years of Age.” Critics argued Ronald Reagan, at 69, was too old to serve as president. After all, he had already outdistancedTeddy Roosevelt (who died at 60), Woodrow Wilson (67), FDR (63), and LBJ (64)—none of whom had perished young by contemporary standards. As a child, my paternal grandmother—now nearly ninety-one—had hoped to live to seventy. In the 1960s, when my mother’s uncle turned eighty, theeventwassonovelamongthesefirst-andsecond-generation Jewish immigrants that they catered a formal event as lavish as a wedding. Today many people—if they can remain in good health— aspire to live past ninety or even one hundred. As a physician I would never dream of consoling someone that a relative lived a “full life” at seventy or even eighty. Anything short of eightyfive , in my experience, leaves surviving family members feeling cheated. What is most troubling about human half-lives is not their brevity, but what is revealed when they are seen in relationship to each other. We may all play by roughly the same statistics, 176 Phoning Home but we are not all operating on the same timetable. By the moment I reach my own half-life, I will almost certainly have used up half of the time I will ever have with my parents, who are in their mid-sixties. Even if my grandmother lives to one hundred, three-quarters of my time with her has already passed. When I have kids of my own, their time remaining with me, as they age, will diminish by the same proportions. This rule explains one of the great mathematical conundrums of my childhood: if at twenty-five a man is half the age of his fifty-year-old father, and at fifty he is two-thirds the age of his dad, at what point in time will the two men be the same age? For those of you who have forgotten your college calculus, the short answer is never. What happiness one achieves in life derives, at its foundation , from the recognition that a human being is more than just twice a half-life. Some people transcend their mortality raising children, others raising cathedrals and skyscrapers. A few scribble humorous essays, hoping future generations will still find references to the French Foreign Legion mildly amusing . So Mozart lives not three and a half decades, but three and a half centuries. Keats may have died at twenty-six, but a Keats poem remains a joy forever. And that is the miracle that separates us from the morning glories and the mayflies and the uranium: an utterly irrational wish that our contribution will leave the world a better place, even after we no longer remain to reap the benefits. Even if this essay is relegated to the obscurity of college libraries, and then to off-site storage Divided Expectations 177 facilities, the potential remains for its rediscovery, or a great twenty-fifth- or thirty-fifth-century renaissance in celebration of its author. When one includes the possibility of posthumous influence , no human being ever reaches his or her half-life. We remain always on the front nine, always with more coil ahead than behind. We are all approaching our half-life—me as I write this essay, you as you read it. Mercifully it remains forever beyond our reach. This page intentionally left blank ...