Life expectancy
Thursday, April 3rd, 2014 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manIt's been on my mind for a while that none of the deceased ancestors I have known (three grandparents and one parent) reached their eighties. Moreover, there's a couple of not too distant ancestors of mine who died really quite young (my father's mother died when he was eleven, and my father's father's father got out of bed one morning, keeled over with a massive heart attack and died, when he was in his mid-fifties).
I'm not worrying about this too much: medical technology has advanced (the cancer that killed my father's mother in the fifties would be treatable now), life expectancies have increased, and I live a healthier lifestyle than most of the ancestors I have dates for (I exercise more, don't smoke, and don't subsist on a diet of eastern European stodge). But still, I did find myself wondering whether I came from a particular short-lived line, on the whole.
It's taken me years to get around to collating dates from my family tree, for such of my ancestors as I know both birth and death dates, to find out, but the answer:
| 67? = 80? | 88 | 77? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 69 | = | 73 | 87 | = | 86 | 72? | = | ? | 65 | = | ? | 77? | = | 88? | 75 | = | 71? | ||||||||||||||
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| 54? | = | 70 | 63 | = | 93 | 77? | = | 79 | 79? | = | 78 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| 79 | = | 44 | 70 | = | 75 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| שליט״א | = | 65 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| me (also שליט״א) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
...is no. Average life expectancy of the above: 74.1 years.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-03 11:57 am (UTC)Three of my grandparents died at 60, 68 and 72, the fourth is still alive at 94 despite being a heavy smoker for about half of that. Even looking at more distant relatives than that we're pretty much all cardio-vascular, though. So I expect a stroke or heart attack will get me, but probably not for a few decades at least and maybe not for a really a long time.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-03 12:11 pm (UTC)My mother, who had zero grasp of statistics, was convinced she was going to die at seventy-five because her matrilineal ancestors for the previous three generations had. (I never asked how she felt about this when it became apparent she was going to fall a decade short.)
but people are more prone to pay attention to / tell stories about those who died young.
Or those who survived to extreme age.
Three of my grandparents died at 60, 68 and 72, the fourth is still alive at 94 despite being a heavy smoker for about half of that.
Mmm. A lung cancer (former smoker), heart attack (lifelong smoker), cancer of the lymph system and brain tumour in my case.
Even looking at more distant relatives than that we're pretty much all cardio-vascular, though. So I expect a stroke or heart attack will get me, but probably not for a few decades at least and maybe not for a really a long time.
Excerpt from my grandfather interviewing his aunt about the family history:But I don't regard that as precedent setting for me, three generations further down the line, and with a healthier lifestyle. My main worry is to avoid being run over immediately after I've been knocked off my bike by an idiot motorist tailgating me (one reason why I avoid main roads, even though it makes my commute longer), or contracting skin cancer from too many expisodes of sunburn; if I can make it to old age past both of those risks, I reckon I'm in with a good chance of a long and hopefully healthy life.