Living longer than Dad did builds confidence that kin will have healthier futures

I’m fortunate to come from a family that has been relatively long-lived. My mom lived well into her 80s, as did three of my four grandparents and all of the uncles and aunts I’ve been closest to.

The exceptions are the Shapiro men: my dad, who died from heart disease and stroke short of Social Security, and his father, a New York jazz musician who died from tuberculosis in his mid-40s.

Guess who I resemble most?

I’ve had multiple sclerosis since my late 30s, but while it can be seriously disabling, it’s seldom the cause of death and I don’t worry much about threat to life.

Instead, I’ve marked my mortality by my dad’s major health crises — the massive heart attack that nearly killed him at 47, the quadruple bypass surgery that disabled him at 51 and the major stroke at 61 that left him only semicommunicative in his final years.

Those events were burned in my subconscious, and I’ve always sweated out the year leading up to those birthdays.

And it’s not only me; I’ve talked to my three younger siblings about it, and they all say they do the same thing.

As the years passed I got clear of the birthdays marking the heart attack, the bypass surgery and the stroke.

All that was left to worry about was Dad’s final health crisis: death, which I always thought occurred just short of his 65th birthday.

Dad was in the insurance business, and I believed he willed it to happen before the life insurance policies he’d bought to sustain my mom would expire when he turned 65.

I was in major sweat mode in the year leading up to my 65th birthday later this summer — until I got some information that surprised me.

I was feeling guilty that I hadn’t lit the annual memorial candle for Dad in a few years and looked up the date of his death to figure out the correct lighting date by the Hebrew calendar.

I was astonished to realize he actually died a few weeks shy of his 64th birthday, not his 65th, so I’ve already outlived him by nearly a year.

My first thought was that I’d wasted most of the last year worrying for nothing, but concluded it was a wash since I only would have spent the previous year worrying instead.

The more important thing is that however dilapidated I may be and whatever happens from here, I’ve raised the bar at least a little to give more hope and confidence to Sha­piro men coming behind me.

You could almost say I got a free year out of the deal; if only I’d known, I would have done more with it.

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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.