We’re nearing the day since the last time I stared at mortality – 3 years ago. And almost 5 years since I faced my own. To be honest, while I was going through it, I really didn’t think of it that way. From advising D on picking cabs from a certain direction (because of roadwork) to calming down the cab driver when he realised what was happening, to ‘checking in’ on Foursquare before the procedure, I still felt it wasn’t time. I think only idiocy or youth makes one capable of that, and given my age, it was clearly the former.
Cut to today. As if the daily exercise regimen wasn’t reminder enough, the quarterly medical checks drive home the point of how much extra work one needs to do to live even a semblance of life as one wants it. It’s not much really – a little bit of red meat, a little bit of alcohol, dessert once in a while. It shouldn’t be this difficult before hitting 50!
In Hridayapoorvam, a Mohanlal movie with rare patches of excellence, there is a scene that cut deep. Mohanlal is the recipient of a heart, and he talks about the time he got diagnosed with a disease that was fatal. He says, imagine you’re traveling in a train with people you love. Suddenly, the TT (ticket inspector) informs you that you have to get down at the next stop, because that’s as far as your ticket goes. There can be no extension. That shock you get when you understand that you’ll not be around for the full journey with them. The feeling, when you are processing it, and trying not to let others see it. I sighed. A lot. It nailed the feeling. As if, between the celebrations of life, death appeared casually and suddenly, with a well-worn smile of having seen a zillion versions of your reaction. But for you, it is once, and personal. And the knowledge, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, that ‘there is no place where it will all live again’
On the flip side, the advances in medicine also seem to indicate that extending a life will become a choice that is harder and harder. For instance, going beyond statins, a PCSK 9 inhibitor is about10-20k a month. I wonder about the trade-off, do I really want to spend that? At this point, it’s less a life/death thing and more a life expectancy extension thing, if at all. Sometime in the future, this will be cheap enough and another appears in the horizon, and it will be a closer call – because I will be older, and at some point, life or death.
That reminds me of a brilliant movie from 1994 – Sukrutham. Mammootty plays a journalist, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He prepares himself and others for his death, but a holistic treatment, which focuses on the mind’s will to live on, cures him. However, the people around him find it difficult to allow him back into their lives. In one of the final scenes, he asks the doctor who cured him whether the same mind can now convince the body to bring back the disease.
It seems like the ‘living longer’ era might be upon us, courtesy tech and AI. We might not be ready when longevity meets liquidity.
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