When It’s Time to Go
Most of us want to live a long life, even though longevity has its downsides. Still, researchers are pursuing anti-aging therapies and do not hesitate to self- experiment.
Valter Longo, director of the University of Southern California Longevity Institute, goes on multiday fasts. Other scientists take the diabetes drug metformin, in the belief that it protects cells from wear and tear. Charles Brenner, a biochemist, imbibes milk with high doses of nicotinamide riboside, a type of vitamin B that might defend against aging.
But lots of longevity experts did not live so long, Pagan Kennedy reported in The Times.
Back in the 1930s, an American nutritionist named Clive McCay fed his lab rats a low- calorie diet that kept them super thin. Dr. McCay’s rats were active and looked healthy, and two of them were the equivalent of 130 years old, he said. He himself ate small amounts of food from his own farm and stayed fit and trim. But he had two strokes and died at 69 .
The wild-foods enthusiast Euell Gibbons advocated for a plantbased diet long before it was fashionable. He died at 64 of an aortic aneurysm. The nutritionist Adelle Davis warned about refined foods like white bread, but she died of cancer at 70. Nathan Pritikin, who spread the gospel of low-fat diets, died at 69, nearly the same age as Dr. Robert Atkins, who believed in the opposite regimen.
Since we are doomed, we should embrace the inevitability. That’s the theory behind WeCroak, an app that sends alerts five times a day to your phone, such as: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”
WeCroak, its 35-year- old founder Hansa Bergwall said, was born of Bhutanese folklore saying that contemplating death five times a day brings happiness. Call it a different type of mindfulness.
“Meditation urges you to focus on your breath,” Mr. Bergwall told The Times. “It’s the same thing with remembering that you’re mortal. You forget, so you need something strong, someone telling you straight out.”
The messages alternate between uplifting and the somber: “The grave has no sunny corners.” “Begin again the story of your life.” The words come from a variety of sources, including work by Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Bukowksi, Lao Tzu and Margaret Atwood.
Karen Rosenberg, 50, a corporate recruiter in Miami, finds WeCroak’s daily alerts liberating. “I think, ‘Oh my gosh, I can wash dishes with a smile. I can talk on the phone,’ knowing all the while that this life is not a dress rehearsal,” she told The Times. “It helps me enjoy the moment.”
It’s because there are so few moments to enjoy anymore that David Goodall, a 104-year- old Australian scientist, traveled to Switzerland for his assisted suicide, which happened on Thursday. Dr. Goodall regretted having to leave Australia to die, but added: “I’ve lived quite a good life until recently. The last year has been less satisfactory for me because I couldn’t do things.”
He earned three doctorates and worked at an Australian science agency until his semi-retirement in 1979.
Until 2016, he worked as an honorary research associate at Edith Cowan University in Perth, taking two buses and a train four days a week. His world shrank as he was forced to give up driving and performing in the theater.
“It was just the beginning of the end,” said Carol O’Neill, a friend and a representative of Exit International, an assisted-suicide advocacy group. Then, last month, he fell at his apartment and was not found for two days. His physical condition deteriorated.
“One should be free to use the rest of one’s life as one chooses,” Dr. Goodall has said. “If one chooses to kill oneself, then that’s fair enough. I don’t think anyone else should interfere.”