Living Past The Age Of 75 By Ezekiel J Emanuel

Have you ever thought about wanting to die early? Well for Ezekiel J Emanuel this is completely the case. In his paper he describes why he doesn’t really want to live past the age of 75 as well as the reasoning and the facts to why living past the age of 75 is detrimental to society as well not really a life at all. Ezekiel is a 60 year old oncologist as well as a bioethicist, so this gives him a bit more credibility as to whether or not he knows what he is talking about. In the article “Why I hope to die at 75” Ezekiel J Emanuel expresses his opinion on why he thinks humans life after 75 is not worth living. Ezekiel has many good points in his article but is he right? He has several main points in this article, one of his best is the fact

“Living the American immortal’s dream dramatically increases the chances that we will not get our wish.”(Emanuel 36). Although we want to set out to reach that american dream of living for a long time or even some that set out for 100, Ezekiel makes his point that we should have had a full life with millions of memories with family and loved ones. It could be great to say you lived past 100 and had that many great memories but as we age that far into our lives we can realize that those memories can start to become more of a relapse in your mind. Getting past the age of 75, people can start to lose many memories with family or even going out to dinner. “Of course, our children won’t admit it. They love us and fear the loss that will be created by our death. And a loss it will be. A huge loss. They don’t want to confront our mortality, and they certainly don’t want to wish for our death. But even if we manage not to become burdens to them, our shadowing them until their old age is also a loss. And leaving them—and our grandchildren—with memories framed not by our vivacity but by our frailty is the ultimate tragedy.”(Emanuel 38). Ezekiel does not plan to actively end his life when he turns 75 but he will do nothing in the process of prolonging it. Our mental limitations deprive us on what our body really wants and deserves. Many people try to prolong their lives with medicine

But he does touch on this topic in a pretty good way. “no child wants his or her parents to die”(Emanuel 27). Ezekiel then says that his own kids feel this way but it is not so bad, he wants to give his kids the ability to move on. He then says “ there is much less pressure to conform to parental expectations and demands after they are gone”(Emanuel 27) which is very true for people who have never been accepted by their parents. The last things he mentions on this topic is when his daughter told him that the world still has so much to offer and that he could easily make it around the world and visit places he has never been before. She wants him to be able to spend more time with him. The only reason he wouldn’t want to spend more time with his daughter is because once you get much older you change, for some people it is very good but a lot of the time it entails becoming less like you used to be, and he doesn’t want people to remember him for when he is old. This is a very good point because it is a point that I think a lot of people can relate to. Everybody has met an old person and seen what they are like, and nobody is excited to get