Note - the title may not be appropriate. Last month in the wake of my cousin who died of a heart ailment, his brother Ray was talking with us. Ray mentioned that his brother was only 66 years old and their other brother died when he was just 61 while their parents died in their 60s as well. Now that Ray is 64, he is saying that his challenge is to reach 70 years old because it seems that their life span is below 70 years. My father and Ray's father are brothers so that makes us closely related in genes. My father died at age 68 and that gives me goose bumps. Maybe my mother can bail me out from that lineage of early dying because she is now 82 and still alive although not kicking anymore.
I'm counting on genes....specifically my dad and his mom. He was 93 and she was 97 but I was a smoker and they weren't. I don't think anyone died before the age of 83 in my family that I can recall. There was also no dementia, even my 97 year old grandmother was still almost on her own. It's also something I don't worry about....if I died today, I can say I lived a good life. All I want is to die Peacefully in my sleep though, that's a biggie for me. Don't want to suffer.
I read somewhere that genetics are only 20 percent of your lifespan that your lifestyle is the biggest part of it. 3 Genetics are pretty good on my side as 3 of 4 of my grandparents lived into their 90's and I had some hundred year old relatives on both sides. My parents are also alive and in reasonably good health, although they both have had some challenges. I expect if I can make myself happy, and take better care of myself I will live a long time too. If I died today, I would think it was unfortunate.
I have already far outlived both of my parents' ages, as my mother was in her early 30s, I think, and my father was in his early 50s when he died. But a large part of his problem was that he was burned badly in a house fire, so I don't know how long he may have lived otherwise. My grandparents on my mother's side lived to be quite old, I think, although my paternal grandparents died before I could know them. I think I was maybe two when my grandfather died. I don't know how old they were, though.
Longevity is absent in my family, on both sides. My Mother's Mother suffered a massive heart attack on a train in France, in the late 1940s, bound for a visit to her birthplace in Czechoslovakia. She survived it, and had a number of lesser ones over the years, dying in about 1964. Her husband, my Grandfather, I never met; he hanged himself just before I was born, in response to his estranged wife (the grandma with the heart attacks) having given birth to a baby boy, fathered by a household border, who fled back to Czechoslovakia when told she was PG. The kid thus conceived was my Mother's kid brother; she had two others fathered by my Grandpa. My Dad told me of all these shenanigans when I was about 14. On his side, most were loving and true, no divorces or suicides. He had 3 uncles, one of which I really liked; he showed my Dad & I how to work with dynamite, clearing pasture of stumps. That when I was about 15; at 17, my friend and I proceeded to the hardware store in Michigan where my Dad's Uncle Joe told us he buys his dynamite, and bought a case, no questions asked. This was 1959. We had a lot of fun with that stuff on my folks' farm in Michigan, where ,my Dad's mother finished out her final years, living there alone. She was in her 70s. My Dad died at 70 in 1972. My Mother, whose own mother had all those heart attacks, died at 89. She never experienced any type of heart trouble, never smoked in her entire life, did not drink. My Dad's demise is dubious. Doctors called it Parkinson's Disease, but the classical symptoms were absent. They "went to town" on him towards the end, when he couldn't protest, and we were too stupid to do so, performing a "Transurethral Resection", TUR, to relieve prostate obstruction, which may or may not have been present. I cringed and almost cried seeing him lying there with a bag of deeply red blood-stained urine issuing from the catheter. He was not conscious, then, and I never saw him awake again. I saw that doctors will encouragingly and freely impose procedures upon folks needing to die, to further enhance their positions. It sickened me. Anyhow, my Dad never had any heart problems, either. I believe he suffered from Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, PSP, a degenerative condition of the brain only recognized at first in 1963. My Dad's uncles all lived to be quite old, but their sister, my Grandma, only late 70s. No idea how this historical account has any bearing on my own being able to sit here gibbering at 74. None of them were, to my knowledge, drunkards. I believe I'll have a beer! Frank
My great granddad was in his 90s, my granddad in his 80s, my parents were in their 70s so following that tren I'll die in my 60s. OOPS, I'm 74 now, I ruined the family tradition. My sister is older but my brother is still young enough to keep the tradition alive. Hmmm, maybe alive isn't the right word. Not to wish my brother harm, but he is a liberal democrat.
We both want to live at least as long as my wife's mother did......89. Well, that's what we are hoping for anyway. My real dad died of cirrhosis of the liver some 25 years ago. The dude was a heavy drinker and owned a bar. His idea of lunch and dinner was bottles of Lone Star beer, when he had the bar. My real mom died when I was around 9, in surgery from an auto accident. My step-dad died a number of years ago......smoking a pipe for years definitely contributed to that! I was never a heavy smoker and was able to totally stop when I met my wife. I als stopped using "chew/dip" (Skoal and Red Man) in 2005 after noticing my inner lower lip becoming irritated. Wife and I would love to "go" together in someway. Sort of like the end of the movie, The Notebook. Yes, we like to meet The Lord at the same time!