Checking Out

Our local cemetery

We live a few blocks away from an old rural cemetery—a shadowy, run-down graveyard that might show up in any number of classic horror films. Every month or so I take a leisurely walk through it, just so I can feel fully alive. 

Among the denizens there is Robert Ripley, of “Believe it or Not” fame. The first time I ran across the tombstone, complete with his signature logo, I was with my parents who were up for a visit. Looking at the grave, I remarked automatically, “I don’t believe it.”

Exploring old cemeteries was an occasional pastime my parents and I used to enjoy together. In their former town, they also lived within walking distance to a graveyard. We never found the experience morbid but as it turns out, that visit when we found Ripley marked the last time we ever ventured into one. My dad was 82 at the time, and I guess soon after that we all tacitly agreed that such visits would just be too uncomfortable.

What I notice most when walking through my local cemetery is how brief so many of the lives were. My demographer friend has assured me that infant and child mortality skewed the average lifespan in those days before modern medicine, but I’m not convinced. A statistically non-binding survey I’ve conducted shows that even excluding those first tenuous years, people tended to die in their 20s and 30s far more often than they do now.  A few lucky souls made it into their 80s and beyond but many more expired around the age of 60.

As my parents (and everyone else) move inexorably closer to their own final number, it hardly seems worth mentioning how fortunate most of us are, if you see longevity as luck. The flip side may be that after a certain point, good luck becomes bad in the way a gift can be both a blessing and a curse.

Who wants to leave the party while it’s still going strong? Most of those people lying in the nearby cemetery would have given almost anything for a few more years, if such bargains had been possible back then. The trouble is that now those bargains are possible: medical technology has given many of us the hope of witnessing a full century or more. The price of those extra years, however, is not one most people want to think about.