I find that notions of what constitutes living to a “ripe old age” have changed during my lifetime, and been kicked upwards. The previous Methuselah of my family, my “Uncle Louie,” died at 88 in the early 1960’s, a lifespan considered unusual at that time. My mother beat him by two years, dying at age 90, and she shunned doctors, had no recommended health screenings, and drank like a fish! My father died at 82, whittled away for years before that by Parkinson’s Disease…
We are fortunate to live in an age of preventive medicine and health screenings. Men of my father’s generation routinely smoked and drank alcohol, and ate “meat and potatoes“ dinners as a steady diet. There was little diagnosis of high blood pressure or high cholesterol then, and no treatment. Often my father at the dinner table would report sudden deaths of co-workers…