I sort of still recall as a kid, living on Bloomfield Avenue in Franklin Township, New Jersey, making the shocking discovery that people die.
I used to help a friend deliver the afternoon edition of The Daily Home News, now apparently the Home News Tribune (and more distressingly, judging from the website, a Gatehouse/Gannett abomination of a news operation, similar to what we have where I now live where the motto secretly is 'no news is good news and that's all we ever have, no news.'), and one of his customers no longer received the paper because he'd died over the weekend.
My memory is that we'd seen him earlier in the week working in his yard and he seemed fine, so the notion that people just plop down dead was a disturbing revelation. Since that time, I've learned of and/or witnessed enough people passing from all manner and means to fill a medium-sized city and have spent more and more time as I've aged making the acquaintanceship with new and more medical specialists who work harder with each passing year to keep me on this side of the daisies.
At seventy years of age, it's no longer a blinding glimpse of the obvious that growing old sucks. I had already concluded that by the time my voice started to crack and nothing in my experience has changed my opinion.
Every once in a while I run into something with an 'if I knew then what I know now' attitude or, arrogance personified, 'it's a tragedy youth is wasted on the young,' and all I wanna do is sock them in the jaw. In theory, we trade the wide-eyed wonder of youth for the wisdom of age and in my case, I got gypped badly but there's no turning back the clock, or at least there hasn't been until now.
If you see your body as a machine and accept that machines wear down and break what do you make of this line? "While DNA can be viewed as the body’s hardware, the epigenome is the software." I know, knowing what the hell an epigenome is would be helpful, but this report suggests aging can be reversed, not just theoretically but in reality.
If you could do your life over, could you and would you? And what, if anything would you do differently? It may soon no longer be a rhetorical question.
-bill kenny
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