Jacob Appel
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
half-life 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 prove myself average—and I can boast a well-established
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.
Of course, I may not be average. I may be middling in most
respects, but when it
comes to truly high stakes matters—romance, automotive safety—I’ve
always had a
tendency to under-perform. 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 twelve-
year-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 half-way 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 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 upon 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.
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 = 30 yrs.) or a New York City
police officer (msa =
35 yrs.). My chance to serve as a 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 Corps 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 to observe
that I haven’t lived
up to it. 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 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 somewhat
shorter. That 77.9 figure also does not take into account my gender
or the roughly
three hundred thousand Newport cigarettes that I smoked before my
craving for
pleasure succumbed to my fear of death. Basically, if I believe I
will break seventy-
five, 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.* Some
actuarial tricksters try to
cheat the biological realities by leaving childhood out of the
analysis. The noted
psychologist Erik Erikson, for example, cleverly referred to the
period from 40-65 as
the “middle adult years,” ignoring the fact that a sizeable 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 half-life 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 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, 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 that
Ronald Reagan, at 69, was too old to serve as President. After all,
he had already out-
distanced Teddy Roosevelt (who died at 60), Woodrow Wilson (67), FDR
(63) and
LBJ (64)—none of whom had perished particularly 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, the
event was so novel among her clan of first- and second-generation
Eastern
European immigrants that the family 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 years. As a physician, I would never dream of
consoling
someone with the observation that a relative had lived a “full life”
at seventy or even
eighty. Anything short of eighty-five, in my experience, leaves
surviving family
members feeling cheated.
What is most troubling about human half-lives is not their brevity,
but the
relationship of those half-lives to each other. We may all play by
roughly the same
statistics, but we are not all starting at the same point on the
calendar. The
imperfect overlap between our lives means that our time on the
planet often far
exceeds the time we share with those we love. By the moment I reach
my own half-
life, I will almost certainly have used up 50% of the time I will
ever have with my
parents, who, presently in their mid-sixties, are likely well beyond
their own half-
lives. 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
reflects 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 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 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 facilities, the potential remains for its
rediscovery, and 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 playing the front
nine, always with
more coil ahead than behind us. Thus, we are all approaching our
half-lives—me as I
write this essay and you as you read it. Mercifully, the turning
point remains forever
just beyond our reach.
* You have now reached the halfway point of this essay: a cause for
either relief or regret. In any case, half
of the author’s argument now lies behind you.
________
