Lately, I've thought a lot about death. I guess that's normal as we get older. (Actually, I am older today. It's my 49th birthday.)But it does seem to me there have been a lot of deaths that have had an impact on me personally this year — more than usual.
The year began with the death of my stepmother's mother — who was, it should be said, in her 90s. It's fair to say her death had been expected in my family for at least a few years.
As the year has progressed, I've seen the deaths of: a close friend's sister-in-law; two old friends of the family; two of my high school classmates; a schoolmate who was a year ahead of me; another schoolmate who was a year behind me, and a former teacher.
Those are the deaths I'm aware of. There are so many other people I've known in my life and lost touch with over the years — former classmates, co-workers, neighbors — who may have passed away this year and I knew nothing about it.
And, as always, I've been touched by the passing of prominent people who were important in my life — especially the ones who made me laugh, like George Carlin and Harvey Korman.
These days, whenever someone I know dies, my first question is, "What was the cause of death?" Frustratingly, I don't always get an answer.
So it's not necessarily comforting to read David Kenner's statement in Financial Times that "Everyone dies. The question is when and how."
The "how" part, the logical mind tells us, might yield some clues that could be beneficial in the long run — like those warnings on cigarette packages about the hazards of smoking.
But such an assumption is based on faulty reasoning. It depends upon acceptance of a false cause-and-effect relationship. If, for example, you hear of a friend who died in a car accident, what are you supposed to do with that information? Stop operating — or even riding in — cars?
Kenner, to his credit, tries to give everyone a head's-up by identifying "three causes of death that will grow dramatically more likely, and three that might be on the way out" in the next 20 years.
He uses, as his primary source material, the World Health Organization's Global Burden of Disease: 2004 Update, which suggests to him that the following causes of death are likely to go up between now and 2030:
- Heart disease
- Lung disease
- Traffic accidents
- HIV/AIDS
- Tuberculosis
- Diarrheal disease
And the fact that one may die of AIDS, not heart disease, will be of scant consolation to that person's survivors. Fewer people may be dying of a specific cause, but there will still be people dying from it.
It's good news when medical science conquers a disease that has been killing people. But the bad news — the constant news — is that disease itself will not be conquered.
The best proof I can offer of that is the flip side of Kenner's conclusion that HIV/AIDS deaths will be on the decline in 20 years. HIV/AIDS was the #6 cause of death in 2004, but, Kenner writes, "Researchers at the Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS now think that in some parts of the world, notably in Africa, the epidemic has plateaued and might be starting to decline."
That's good news, right? Thirty years ago, when I was about to graduate from high school, AIDS wasn't even on the medical radar. It was first recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981; the cause (HIV) wasn't identified until the mid-1980s.
Prejudice and politics restricted research funding for many years and slowed human progress in fighting AIDS — perhaps causing needless suffering and premature death — but the fact remains that cancer still hasn't been eradicated, heart disease still isn't preventable and new diseases emerge all the time.
At best, one can be prepared for death. One cannot avoid it.
We can only encourage ourselves and others to make the most of the time we have.
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