As my 90+ YO (now dead) aunt put it to me, “90 is enough!”. She lived on her own and was relatively healthy right up to the end, but had no fairy-tale beliefs about the joys and virtues of extreme old age. I once asked her, after she made such a proclamation, why anyone who, like her, wasn’t put away in an old folks home or suffering from illness/injury would prefer The End arrive, and she said “there’s just so much you can’t do anymore”. I took that to mean a) activities that you are newly physically incapable of (say, rock climbing), b) activities that are now too difficult and/or dangerous (say, solo long-distance hiking), and c) activities and life-paths that are practically-speaking now closed off to you, like finding one’s soul-mate, traveling the world w/same, getting an advanced degree, being hired-into and rising through the ranks of some admired org … all the sort of stuff that might still seem perfectly possible in one’s 20s/30s/40s/even 50s. I can see how even in the best of cases, the world slowly but surely crushing your dreams and closing you out of any potential joys could bring you around to the belief that ‘90 is enough’.
One of the last things my grandfather told me before he died at 101 was “People aren’t supposed to live this long, why won’t God let me die?”
It made it easier to see him go. He was beyond ready.
I don’t ever want to be this old…
As my 90+ YO (now dead) aunt put it to me, “90 is enough!”. She lived on her own and was relatively healthy right up to the end, but had no fairy-tale beliefs about the joys and virtues of extreme old age. I once asked her, after she made such a proclamation, why anyone who, like her, wasn’t put away in an old folks home or suffering from illness/injury would prefer The End arrive, and she said “there’s just so much you can’t do anymore”. I took that to mean a) activities that you are newly physically incapable of (say, rock climbing), b) activities that are now too difficult and/or dangerous (say, solo long-distance hiking), and c) activities and life-paths that are practically-speaking now closed off to you, like finding one’s soul-mate, traveling the world w/same, getting an advanced degree, being hired-into and rising through the ranks of some admired org … all the sort of stuff that might still seem perfectly possible in one’s 20s/30s/40s/even 50s. I can see how even in the best of cases, the world slowly but surely crushing your dreams and closing you out of any potential joys could bring you around to the belief that ‘90 is enough’.