People my age keep dying. I find it unnerving. I have, however, been taking notes, because I don’t feel like dying just yet. I’ll share some of my tips for not dying when you’re my age, based on the deaths of public figures, and based on the deaths of friends and family.
Be suspicious when surgeons try to persuade you that surgery will fix you, unless surgery is absolutely the right answer. The surgeon will declare that the surgery was successful, and then you will die from a minor side effect of the recovery. In fact, don’t go to the hospital. If you have to go to the hospital because you had surgery or because you have pneumonia, get out as quickly as you can. Those places kill people, and you will get all kinds of different pneumonias there, some of them drug-resistant. If you start hallucinating in the hospital, this is normal, but still a bad sign.
Get someone (friend, family, neighbor, Uber driver) to visit you every day in the hospital if you have to be there. They can just sit and scroll on their phones for an hour. Hospitals treat people better if they appear to know anyone at all who will visit them.
If you have to leave the hospital too quickly, though, go back if you start leaking blood from places you shouldn’t.
Don’t stay in nursing homes, either. Those places are designed to spread disease, and you will get sick from a perfectly avoidable common illness that only kills old people, and you will die. The same for going on cruises, for that matter. In both places, people will condescend to you and cram you into small crowded spaces.
Take care of your teeth. I know health insurance doesn’t cover dental care, but an infected mouth will absolutely destroy you. Also, false teeth stop fitting as you age, and are expensive. Eating is one of the great pleasures of the elderly, even though the appetite isn’t as good as it used to be, and even if you can’t taste things as well. The happiest I am these days is just after I ate something. I feel joyous, even though I didn’t know I was hungry. Besides, Americans are judgy about bad teeth, and it’s hard enough being old as it is without people thinking you’re homeless. Don’t look or be homeless if you can help it.
Don’t try to lose weight. Eat whatever you want. Losing weight at your age is a bad sign, and usually means you’re terribly ill. It also really accentuates your wrinkles and sagging skin, and gives you a body profile like Kermit the Frog. A leading killer of women is falling down and breaking your hip, because being skinny weakens your bones and you end up in the hospital. If you are already skinny, lift little weights, don’t let cyclists hit you, and hold onto the banister when you go up and down stairs.
Take as few medications as you can. If you are addicted to drugs or alcohol, get someone to check on you regularly, someone who won’t think you’re just passed out when you do overdose. Same if you’re on multiple medications that have interactions.
Get all your vaccinations, all of them. Get your stupid colonoscopy and your mammogram. See your doctor regularly, even though your doctor is an overworked serf these days. Your doctor will send you for many tests that will show you have too much glucose in your blood, and then lecture you about how much you eat. See losing weight, above.
Wear a mask in doctor’s offices, because doctor’s offices are just as bad as hospitals and nursing homes for spreading diseases. These days, medical personnel wear masks even less often than they used to, and everyone in the waiting room is coughing as if they have the plague. Wear an N95 over your mouth and nose and check to be sure it fits well, don’t wear it around your neck, and do not lower it to talk, for god’s sake.
If you have already quit smoking, don’t start again, unless you already are dying, in which case go for it, unless you also have asthma or other breathing problems. If you still smoke, smoke on the front step where people can see you are on fire and will beat out the flames if you drop your cigarette.
Speaking of smoking, don’t cook at home. If you have to cook, buy an induction stove, which doesn’t have open flames. The only thing that gets hot with an induction stove is the pan, and if you take the pan off the stove, the stove turns off. Don’t put candles all around the house where your sleeve could catch fire. They make really cool battery-operated candles that look like the real thing.
Clear out your house so you can find things. Also, so you can move out at a moment’s notice when you fall down the stairs and need to move into senior housing. Calling relatives to help you find things is a one-way trip to the nursing home, and then everyone will be unhappy because they will have to do the clear-out. If you do the decluttering instead, you get to keep the things you really want. Don’t try to give furniture to your children. They don’t want furniture. Hire a friend with a pickup truck who will help you go to the dump instead. Dumps are glorious.
Get out of the house every day, even if it’s just to walk to the end of the block. If you can’t walk that far, sit on your front step and talk to your neighbors. The kids are actually pretty nice, as long as you talk to them politely. Even when they are climbing over your back fence at 9 at night to get the frisbee they just threw into it, they will tell you what they’re doing when you ask, and they will assure you they won’t fall or get stuck. They will drop trash on the sidewalk in front of your house, but that’s because kids don’t realize old people can’t bend down to pick it up, or that adults don’t actually want to pick up their trash. Actually, they either think trash vanishes miraculously or else that it doesn’t look that bad.
Don’t let any friendly strangers move into your house and manage your money for you. I would say that goes without saying, but apparently not. If you have to, make sure someone else has power of attorney. My next door neighbor’s nephew cleaned him out, and if he hadn’t had a girlfriend who came and rescued him, he would have died alone, with his bad leg and his chain smoking. My own house would have gone up in flames because I live in a row home and share a wall with his house.
Speaking of getting out of the house, install carbon monoxide and smoke detectors. If they go off, don’t waste any time trying to figure out how to turn them off. Leave. Make it the problem of the fire department, or of that nice young neighbor in her twenties, the one who just gentrified the block, the one with the big dog, the one you say hello to when you’re sitting on your front step.
Don’t move into the wilderness, even though it was always your dream. You should have done it when you were young and you could still drive. Move where there’s public transit, and near where your friends and relatives live. If your kids take your car away and you threaten suicide, they are not likely to let you keep driving, they’ll just put you in a nursing home, and you will not get to commit suicide because the aides won’t let you, unless you’re willing to starve yourself to death. Even then, they might put a feeding tube into you, unless you have relatives with a health care power of attorney who won’t let them.
Join a few organizations that have regular meetings, like reading groups, senior exercise classes, lecture series, AA meetings, or clubs that offer regular bus trips to cool places. You will have a whole crowd of new acquaintances, and will stop getting on the nerves of your family because you have other people to annoy. Your new friends can’t put you in a nursing home when you loudly explain why they are wrong. They won’t even leave the room. They may stop showing up for class, though.
Also, get your hearing tested, and fork out a lot of money for hearing aids. People aren’t actually mumbling as much as you think they are. You will be able to hear your cat purr again. Birds are still singing out there. Keep using closed captioning on your television, though, because the actors are mumbling. Also, they are speaking French, you find out when you get your hearing aids.
Don’t look at Facebook or Fox News. Seriously. That’ll age you faster than anything. And don’t be an asshole in general. Everyone around you will wish you were dead, and too many people already want old people to die. If you want people to help when you’re on fire, overdosing, or asphyxiated by carbon monoxide, it helps if they are not actively avoiding you.
And relatedly, retire from the Senate or Congress while you’re still coherent. People will give you money for giving speeches, or for doing lobbying, and you will have excellent health insurance and a pension.
Note that I am not giving advice about living forever. Everyone dies, and anyway illness isn’t a moral failing, just something that happens to people. I just don’t feel like dying today.