Death and How To Avoid It - by Dave Jaffe -Part One

    Part One


       Canadians don't like to discuss death even though about 250,000 Canadians die every year.
     People laugh when I tell them what I sometimes do. I go into cinema complexes and restaurants. ""Hi my name's Dave," I tell the cashier or food server. "I'm an old man. Do you have any discounts for seniors.?"
      Yet sometimes I foretell my future. "Hi," I say again to someone I just met. "My name's Dave. I'm an old man. I'll be dead in less than ten years and maybe long before that." I don't get many laughs if any from people who hear this.
     Death is after all a serious business. You pass away, you vanish and you become extinct when you die. 50 million people die worldwide every year. Some people want to die. Every year close to 4,000 Canadians kill themselves and some of them are quite young. Yet that number is less than 2 per cent who die annually. Most of us want to stay alive.
     People jog or do other forms of exercise every day to stay alive or live longer. Of course few people roll out of bed every day to exercise and tell themselves, "I'm going to do my daily exercise
to live longer." Yet that in part is what exercise is all about. And if you exercise regularly chances are you will live longer than someone who doesn't.
     Of course there's other ways to live a long life.
     First off, be born a woman and not a man. Women everywhere in the western world live longer than men. In Canada in the year 2000 men had a life expectancy of 77 years. Yet women's life expectancy stood at 82 years or five years longer than a man's. Some women now live into their early 90's. Most men are not so lucky.
     A friend of mine was walking in a park in Victoria in the early 1970's. The second wave of feminism was just getting underway at this time. My friend met a young woman on his stroll through the park. This woman was a strong feminist. "Women are second class citizens in this world," the woman said in effect after she'd started to chat with my friend. "We are paid less than men, face more discrimination, and are treated more violently than men."
     "All these things are wrong," my friend replied. "They should be changed. But I'll tell you one thing: You woman will bury all us men." My friend's reply was spot on. Go to a long term place anywhere in Canada. These places for the aged are chock full of old women. And usually there's no more than half a dozen aging men around. The male husbands of most of these woman died off long ago.
    In the next part of this story we'll look at some of the reasons why women outlive men.