farmdoc's blog post number 2

It may seem unusual – if not crazy – for the first entry in a blog to be about mortality and death. But in recent years these matters have been increasingly on my mind – first as I approached and then passed the age when my father died, and then as I entered the seventh decade of my life. Which is why I found Michael Kinsley’s 7 April 2008 New Yorker article titled 'Mine is longer than yours' so fascinating. Kinsley writes that ‘We are born thinking that we’ll live forever…Then death becomes an intermittent reality…And then at some point it becomes a normal part of life – a faint dirge in the background that gradually gets louder.’ He goes on to determine when that ‘some point’ is, and ‘…the answer is sixty-three’. So I’m there early! I should feel bad about that – but I don’t, because the statistics tell me that if a man reaches the age of 60 then his life expectancy is a further 20 years or more. However if I do live until my 80th birthday, I wonder how loud my dirge will be then.