Image by Andres Simon on Unsplash.
At age 80, Leonard Cohen announced he was taking up smoking. Yes, it’s not a great idea. Besides your own health, there’s the matter of exposing others to second-hand smoke.
These points were made in a New York Times article 10 years ago, yet they’re still feeling real today.
I’d always thought I’d start smoking again at some point in my life.
After all, as the article points out, “Aging in the 21st century is all about risk and its reduction.”
But at some point, the article also says, it’s “time to start saving and start spending some of our principal.”
And, “By preventing heart disease and cancer, we live longer and so increase our risk of suffering cognitive losses so disabling that our caregivers then have to decide not just how, but how long, we will live.”
The author asks why Medicare doesn’t pay everyone to have a weekly dinner-and-drinks event with friends. I like that idea.
I’m very fortunate to have doctors who mostly get this.
One doctor tells me his parents were just fine till they hit their 80s. Then they spent all their time dealing with illness. He doesn’t push me to get more than the bare minimum.
Another doctor shrugged when I asked about getting coffee and a cinnamon bun in a coffee shop. “Ideally you’d never have sugar, but you’ve got to enjoy life, too,” he said.
Life in the 80s doesn’t offer much to look forward to, for many people. If the big things don’t kill you, you’ll get arthritis, lose your hearing, weaken your eyesight, and feel all kinds of aches and pains. You can’t do the things you used to enjoy. You’re doing things to pass the time, not pursue a purposeful life.
Why not have a glass of wine or a cinnamon bun now and then? Why bother with a diet of spinach and boiled eggs? You could call this the Leonard Cohen style of getting older.
And if Medicare costs too much, give everybody over 75 a cyanide pill to use when they want. As I say in my book, you could also provide a gift certificate to a hitman in South Philly.
That’s a little easier on the relatives. Instead of feeling betrayed by a medically assisted death, the funeral theme is, “Well, you know what the streets are like in the city. It could be worse…”
