The New York Times examines people living to 100 and beyond, and the impact on parent-child dynamics, sibling rivalries and other relationships.
Susan Dominus writes (excerpt):
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In the annals of human longevity, the Blaylock sisters represent a happy aberration, an anomaly so rare that they have donated blood for the sake of genetic research. They have all sailed past the current life expectancy of 79 for women in the United States, showing little serious wear along the way. The three sisters over 85 have beaten the unnervingly high odds of developing Alzheimer’s (50-50 for people that age and older), and all four have survived bouts with at least one of the most common causes of death for women — heart disease, cancer and stroke. It’s tempting to say that the sisters look young for their ages, but in Audry’s case, at least, there isn’t much basis for comparison: there are fewer than 70,000 centenarians in the United States.
Over the coming decades, though, researchers expect that figure to jump. Even conservative demographers predict that there will be 10 times the current number of centenarians in 2050, when what remains of the boomers — the generation born between 1946 and 1964, a group representing one-third of the U.S. population — hits old, old age. According to United Nations population projections, close to 1 in 20 American boomers are expected to live to 100, thanks to breakthroughs in treatments for heart disease and cancer, lives relatively free of hard labor and longstanding memberships at the gym. Those centenarians may not even be the most senior members of society, either — the National Institute on Aging predicts that the boomers will be playing bridge with a growing number of people 110 and older, or supercentenarians. Demography, of course, is a game of interpretation. (Some contrarian experts predict that life expectancy will decline if obesity rates keep escalating.) But if American demographers have made one mistake consistently over the past two centuries, it’s underestimating the rate at which life expectancy has grown.
The quickening pace of biotechnology might also add to the longevity boom. Some of the country’s top cellular biologists will sit in their offices at Harvard and M.I.T. and announce, their faces alternately grave and gleeful, that within the next 10 to 30 years a drug will appear on the market that will slow down the process of aging. They point to recent examples of yeast cells and worms and lab mice whose life spans they have extended as much as five times as long with feats of genetic manipulation, and they suggest that they will be able to achieve more modest results in humans. They don’t talk about immortality, but they do talk about healthy centenarians.
Even if those scientists are wrong — medical history is filled with failed promises of just this sort — the experience of old, old age, whatever its furthest reach, will no doubt change in the coming years. Even now, there are signs of preparations for a generation’s worth of Audrys: retirement homes are busily upgrading their housing with cable and Internet access; economists are dutifully reporting on the enormous burdens Social Security will face; design experts are adding style to formerly utilitarian canes and bathtub rails, the better to seduce the powerful market of the elderly-to-be.
The rise of old, old age will also have more intimate, less easily quantifiable implications. How will the foreknowledge of an extra 15, 20 or 30 years shape the pacing of the lives that precede them? Will people save more for retirement, or plan on embarking on second careers the way they currently plan on a bungalow in Florida? If life suddenly offers a more generous gift of time, how might people decide to spend it? You can imagine tricky periods of transition, as children realize they have to rethink their assumptions about how long their parents’ lives will affect their own — consider the inheritance that never arrives, the matriarchal mantle that never gets passed down. The natural sequential phases of old and new generations — the younger cohort’s rise, the start of the older’s descent — may no longer fall so neatly in sync, creating tension or confusion. More optimistically, there may be second opportunities for reconciliations and resolutions, as families have the boon of extra years, and the wisdom that comes with it, in which to come to terms. The philosophical impact on family dynamics will be profound, as parents continue to lean on children long past retirement themselves, and people in their 80’s learn what it means, at that age, to still be somebody’s child.