HOW TO BECOME AN ORPHAN

If you were born after 2000, you have a good chance of seeing 2100. But what may be good news for life-lovers, could be bad news for societies suddenly crowded with folks in their 80s and 90s. For one thing, it means almost everyone of us will live to become an orphan...!

This month's Danish life-expectancy study of more than 30 nations added that these numbers could go even higher with the development of stem cell research. However, it said nothing about becoming an orphan. Of all the searing, dislocating, desolating and tormenting moments in ones life, this is unique. It's the one that makes a permanent home in your heart at your last parent's funeral.

Dramas, operas, poetry and eulogies all give voice to this loss; but it's a loss that can only be understood once it catches up with your assumption they'll always be there. There for the parties, holidays, weddings, whenever we need them. And when finally they're not, this aberrant sense of both freedom and loss. Free to act without their judgment, but loss without their approval.

Right now we're busy arguing the merits of health care reform, for we know that with an aging population, something must be done to better manage the enormous costs and benefits involved. While some hysterically babble about killing grandma and others about their vested interests in this multi-billion dollar system, there's no committee or legislation that can address the demons of death. As always, that's an individual moment.

Medical science -- like all science -- represents some of the finest minds and noblest goals of our species. And yet, like justice, it remains blind. Neither fears nor feelings are part of the final equation. Those are for each of us to cope with as each day slips into the mysteries of night. To lose a spouse, a child, a sibling are each tragedies marked in our museum of memories. To lose ones parents, though, that's in some ways to lose ones self.

So there we have it -- the new numbers are in! We can all expect to live much longer! Which means to travel further and farther than any other generation ever dreamed of. However, life -- whether authored by god or by evolution -- is never one dimensional. For each achievement a price, for each accomplishment a pause, for each summit a clearer view...