No old age and death

Well, that was refreshing - a cool dip into the question of my life expectancy.

I know, I know - there is no certainty. A friend of mine would like to die being hit by a giant meteor, a very unlikely thing, but death can be that unexpected. You have a nagging stomach ache and it's advanced esophaegal cancer. A mole hidden under your hair (and a stupid barber) and you die of metastasized melanoma. We've known people these things happened to. They didn't deserve it. Nothing predicted it.

I looked at my mother and her siblings and came up with an average age of 70. But three of her siblings are still alive, at an average age of 75, the ones born later. Just as you'd think, the earlier-born died younger. And they were men who fought in WWII, so had experienced years of huge stress.

I am 67, only 4 months from 68, so I did what anyone would naturally do in the quest for longer longevity than that: I went to the internet and came up with this life expectancy calculator. It was devised by professors at U Penn to take into account all manner of things, like the diversity of your diet and the probability of dying in an automobile accident. It didn't ask me whether I had kidney disease, so I didn't say anything. It gave me a life expectancy of 90.52!

Only a fool would look further than that.