Pondering life, death, civilization, and longevity.
Regular readers know that I am disenchanted with civilization and modernity. I am often chided for my failure to appreciate how much civilization has extended human life.

2. "Do you not know," learned people say, "that civilization has extended human life by decades? Life expectancy used to be 37. A forty year old man was *ancient.*"
This is rank falsehood.
Life expectancy is an average number.

3. (By the way, 37 up there was an arbitrary number. As are all the ones slung about by them who claims to know.)
It is unlikely there has been a time in the past 250,000 years when a forty year old was old.

4. For sure, when Henry David Thoreau died at 44 his friends mourned a productive life cut short. When former President John Adams died 36 years before, he was a ripe old 90. There was virtually no medicine except trauma care.
Jefferson died the same day at 83, also old.

5. More people used to die young.
That's the only difference. Old then, was old now.
Thoreau died, at 44, of tuberculosis. His siblings mostly also died of tuberculosis, none living past 57. For now, we can cure tuberculosis.
"Consumption," also known as "she's sickly," killed.

6. Another place where we have extended life is at the very end. My mother died at 94. Without advanced medical care she'd have probably died at 92. She said to me once, "I sometimes think they want every single one of us to live long enough to get Alzheimer's."

7. Her last two years were ambulance rides, hospital stays, rehab, back home, ambulance ride, repeat. I was her home caregiver for part of that time. I didn't mind, but she didn't gain anything by it. Misery and fear. Two more years for the all-important Life Expectancy number.

8. Without penicillin I'd probably have died in the autumn of my seventh year. As a six-year-old I sustained a minor injury to my face, which became infected. Almost for sure a fatal infection. 43 penicillin shots in five days saved my life. I have a lifelong aversion to needles.

9. Now I am old myself. Not ancient, but old. 73. So there's a big difference in averages, from 6 to 73.
That doesn't mean a 40-year-old was ever old. Just quit it. That's bull - um - oney.
That guy they found in the ice - in his 40s, just going gray. He didn't die of old age.

10. The Ice Man died of misadventure. There weren't any helicopters to go pick him up. He was still a man at the peak of his powers, vigorous, strong, been broken but he'd healed.

11. But beyond the bald-faced lies about how people used to die of old age about puberty, what about the value judgements we make? I have read that Arctic societies used to put an old person with dementia on an ice floe and send them out to sea. Don't know if true, but why not?

12. Philip Bolger, brilliant iconoclastic boat designer, took his unmistakable undeniable diagnosis of Alzheimer's, said goodbye to his beloved wife, and shot himself in the head. My friend and barber did the same about his brain cancer. OK.

13. Do you know anyone personally who has had one of those near-death experiences? I personally have had one.
I'm going to tell you a war story, but first: DO NOT THANK ME FOR MY SERVICE.
Please. https://www.nopackagedeals.com/2017/03/24/thank-you-for-your-service/

14. It was the wee hours of the morning on the 28th of May, 1968. I was in a bunker, a dugout dug into the face of a hill overlaid with a layer of logs which in turn was covered with a few feet of layers of sandbags full of mud. The mud out of the hole.

15. The other side was dropping half a dozen or so mortar rounds on us, then picking up their mortar and disappearing into the jungle night. Half an hour later they'd do it again. I was tired of it. A squad leader. Pulling guard. And I saw the muzzle flash as they did it again.

16. I grabbed my compass and leaned out the bunker window to get an azimuth on the mortar so I could call in some of our artillery on them.
The round I had seen flash as it went up hit the ground right by my head. Five, six feet away I think. Level.
And I was across the river.

17. I didn't hear anything, I didn't see anything, I didn't know anything, except I was in a different place. A good place. Welcoming. But... I had to go back. I had responsibilities. I was a squad leader. I had a wounded soldier. The new guy. Just got there today.
And I was back

18. It was a rough ride. I was in and out of a coma for a month. Lost 30 to 40 pounds, from skinny at 150. That's why I have a hole the size of a walnut in the side of my brain, why I'm a disabled veteran. Had a couple hundred pieces of metal in my back, shoulder, arm, and head.

19. Made a helluva fancy x-ray for 20 or 30 years, before most of the little pieces eroded away in the saltwater environment of the human body.
And I resented being back. For a long time. Culminating in a near suicide in 2,000, and a turn to VA mental health care, and recovery.

20. I was 20. And I've never seen life quite the same. I don't resent being back anymore, in fact I have the best life any person could possibly have, and hope to live for more good years. But I have to die, because I was born. It is all one thing. We are just part of the whole.

21. Do I think that it is an equitable trade-off that fewer humans die young, and all the rest of life on Earth dies off forever in their places?
No. I do not.
Had I died at 6, from an infection, I would have rejoined the carbon pool in the sky. I would have cycled theough again.

22. I'm not talking about an immortal soul, or a religion, or an afterlife, because I didn't get to stay. I was sent back. I don't know what's over there. I can't prove that, had I not returned to this life, to my (barely, thankfully) wounded young soldier, I wouldn't have ended.

23. But no, I do not believe that we have some magical right to kill off all the world because one of the benefits we gain is to extend, on average, human life.

24. I would, instead, heal this incredible Earth of which we are but a transient portion, and with her health make the lives of all the humans who are born richer, and deeper, and more fulfilling, for whatever portion each might have between birth and death.

25. And when death came for each, as it surely must, then it is right and proper that we might weep for our loss, and celebrate who we had, and continue as part of an endless chain of human experience as part of the Earth from which we spring, and to which we return.
--jeff