A Date with Death
I woke up on the morning of December 3rd, 2040 with a sense of relief. Another night had passed and I was alive. I stepped outside for my morning walk. The fog was dense as steel and I could only see but a few feet in front of me. Twenty years earlier, my doctor had taken some blood tests, made me do some push ups, and checked my VO2 max on a stationary bike. She handed me a printout that late fall day. With 98% certainty, I would be dead by December 2040.
By the time I rounded the corner for the last half-mile back home, the fog had barely lifted. A car pulling out of a driveway screeched to a halt just a few feet in front of me. I leapt back. The driver shot a hand out and waved apologetically. I motioned for him to pass then clutched my arm. A shooting pain pierced the center of my chest. I felt the vessels in my neck engorge and my forehead cool. I fell to my knees as the world spun about, gasping my last breath as the end drew near, as my life left me.
Humans have a compulsion to know the future. There isn’t a ten minute period in most everyone’s day where the mind isn’t propelled forward, in search of how we’ll perform on that exam, what we’ll have for dinner, how we’ll feel if that special someone doesn’t call, when we’ll meet our end. Our tendency to extrapolate seems beyond our control as waves of worry about tomorrow arrive at our attention unprompted. No matter how irrelevant – indeed distracting and neurotic and downright harmful – such future think is, we continue to do it, unnerving ourselves in the process. So it’s no surprise that modern medicine is working to zero in on the moment of our demise.
The task will require reams of data. Personalized data about biomarkers of illness, genetic risk factors for specific diseases, environmental exposure to particulate matter, longitudinal trends about lifestyle habits (e.g., smoking, diet, exercise), comparison to populations. The list goes on and on. A recent example is a panel of just 14 biomarkers which was 83% accurate in predicting death across a large cohort. Artificial intelligence will increasingly be utilized to generate the most accurate answer out of these varied inputs. We will have to submit our bodies to constant surveillance if we want a level of accuracy in our date of expected death reports in order for this information to change our behavior.
But will knowing when we’ll die change our behavior for the good? I suspect that some of us will use it as a badge of honor, another hard metric in which to measure ourselves against our friends and neighbors. I think I might be privy to the same, although I suspect there are downsides to such soothsaying. Today, when I read a patient’s chart and see a preposterously low LDL and a lofty HDL, I feel a wave of envy pass through me. My ectomorphic body type and vegetarian diet have done little to alter that fatty low density scoundrel that has shadowed me since my parents first errantly checked my lipid profile in my late teens. Some future atherosclerosis is my genetic destiny, but to observe my numbers in relation to others may alter whether I view my lifestyle decisions as worthwhile.
What sort of disclaimers come with knowing when we’ll die? If my LDL is any guide, no one ever informed me how this sad number would make me feel. My LDL doesn’t currently make me sick, but it’s hovered as a reminder of my mortality for the better part of twenty years. I can imagine that knowing my death month will have the same effect. Some, with exceedingly long lives predicted, may wear it as a shiny medal whose luminescence will blind those of us with shorter life expectancies. Some may use it as a crutch to indulge in health averse behavior, only to watch the death date shorten for every additional donut they inhale. I would like to think that it wouldn’t bother me to know my death date, but I know it would hover over me like a ghost, a slender specter with a giant Flava Flav style time piece strung around its neck, ticking and ticking closer to that final hour.