Living till 125? No thanks! I’m already going deaf, forget names — and have to spend several pennies a night

WhAT’S a good age to die? Forgive me for striking such a gloomy note, but there are two particular reasons why the question has been weighing heavily on my mind this week.

One was the news in yesterday’s paper that Dutch scientists predict people could live to 125 within two generations. This challenges last year’s finding by American researchers that human life expectancy is unlikely ever to exceed the age of 115.

The other was the death on Wednesday night of my friend Lucy. She was the mother- of-two of whom I wrote on this page in February, when I described a party she threw to say farewell to friends and family after her doctors had told her they could do no more about her cancer. She was 48.

As it happens, I was reading the report of the Dutch research when my iPhone pinged with the message that Lucy had died peacefully in the night, with her mother beside her.

Until that moment, I had in fact been thinking not of her but of my late grandmother and the family Christmases we shared together.

For several years before my ancient relative died, it had become a regular feature of these occasions that she would arrive at our flat and announce that she hoped and prayed this Christmas would be her last.

Boredom

She was fed up with life, she would say, and just longed for release from its aches and pains, boredom and frustration. Though she had her jolly moments, she was a gloomy old girl towards the end.

As readers with long memories may recall, I remember in particular her 91st Christmas — which did indeed turn out to be her last — at which one of our guests was an old family friend, a Roman Catholic priest.

No sooner had he arrived than my grandmother delivered her traditional festive speech, asking Father Michael why God didn’t just let her die.

At first he tried to humour her, saying: ‘he will, dear. he’s just not ready for you yet.’ But it was when we sat down to eat that he seemed to lose patience with her droning on about her woes and said: ‘All right, we’ll all say a little prayer for your death.’ I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t.

he stood up, motioning the rest of us to do the same, bowed his head and asked God in his mercy to take my grandmother from us before next Christmas.

Though I muttered ‘Amen’ with the rest of the family, I think we all felt acutely uncomfortable. I certainly did, thinking in my theological ignorance that praying for a death was distinctly unChristian —not to mention unChristmassy.

It was only much later that I recalled at least one sound Biblical precedent for our prayer, in the sublime words of the Song of Simeon, or Nunc Dimittis, as recounted by St Luke.

As better Christians than I will be aware, tradition has it that Simeon was one of the original translators of the Book of Isaiah, from hebrew to Greek, in the third century BC.

When he reached the words ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive’, he was just about to change the word ‘virgin’ to ‘woman’ when an angel appeared and told him he would not die until he had seen the Christ born of a virgin.

Still alive more than 200 years later, he was present when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem for the ceremony of the consecration of the first-born son.

It was as he took Christ in his arms that he uttered the words, still recited at many a funeral more than 2,000 years on (including mine, please, when my time comes): ‘ Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; to be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.’

Indignities

Such were my musings as I read the Dutch finding that by 2070, human beings may be doomed to live to 125.

And I must say that, like world-weary Simeon and my ancient grandmother, I wondered why anyone would wish to survive that long.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I want to die — not for a good while yet, anyway. But then nor would I wish to live for another 62 years, on top of the 63 I’ve already put in.

heaven knows, I’m already beginning to suffer some of the indignities of old age: incipient deafness; forgetting my colleagues’ names; repeating myself (see the above story about my grandmother); having to get up in the night to relieve myself; watching the celebrity editions of game shows without having a clue who any of the competing celebrities actually are. And so it goes on. What would I be like 62 years on, in the year 2079 — apart from a burden to myself, my family and the state? It hardly bears thinking about. yet even as I write, scientists the world over are thinking of little else but how to prolong human life. Meanwhile, companies such as Google invest fortunes in the quest for new ways to stave off the Grim Reaper, whether through genetic engineering, magic pills or microscopic robots, designed to course through our bloodstreams, repairing faulty immune systems.

In his brilliant book Sapiens, if I remember correctly (a big If these days), yuval Noah harari even raises the nightmarish possibility that mankind may actually not be far from finding a ‘ cure for death’.

Nor is there any shortage of Russian or American billionaires willing to pay a king’s ransom for the elixir that will give them eternal life on this earth.

As Woody Allen put it: ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.’

Are the rich especially keen to stick around because their lives are so much better than ours, and they want the fun to go on for ever?

The squalid drama now being played out in the ecclestone/Stunt divorce case suggests otherwise.

Fear

Or is it, perhaps, because billionaires tend to make their fortunes by unscrupulous means and are therefore terrified of hellfire in the hereafter?

Whatever the truth, I’ve often thought science has done quite enough already to lengthen our lifespans, landing us with all sorts of problems about how we’re to cope with our ageing population.

Would it really be such a bad idea if they just shut up shop, before the creepy calls for legalising euthanasia become a clamour for compulsory murder by the state, at an age to be determined by Parliament?

But as I say, it was while I was musing along these lines that my mobile pinged with the desperately sad news of lovely Lucy’s death.

In that moment, I realised that her mother, sisters and two young daughters would have given everything they possessed for a magic elixir that might have granted her a few more decades of life and health. So do let the scientists go on searching.

I also recalled that my ancient grandmother, despite her protestations about longing to die, had a look of fear in her eye as she said ‘Amen’ to Father Michael’s prayer for her death. It was as if he had called her bluff. even at a frail 91, she wanted at least a few more Christmases on this earth.

So I have no definitive answers to my opening question about the right age to die. All I will venture is that 125 is too old. And 48 is much, much too young.