To die at 75

So declares the Penn medical ethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, one of America’s most influential physicians (he’s a health adviser to President Obama, as well as a brother of Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel).

“The fact is that by 75, creativity, originality, and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us,” Dr. Emanuel writes in the current issue of The Atlantic.

Don’t bother to remind this doctor that Verdi composed Falstaff at 80, that Churchill completed his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples at 81, that Buñuel directed That Obscure Object of Desire at 77, that Michelangelo designed the St. Peter’s Basilica in his 80s, that Grandma Moses didn't start painting seriously until she was 78 and was still producing masterpieces past 100. Emanuel has heard these examples and dismisses them. “It is true,” he concedes, “people can continue to be productive past 75 — to write and publish, to draw, carve, and sculpt, to compose.” But “there is no getting around the data. By definition, few of us can be exceptions.”

His bottom-line message: Society and your family— not to mention you— will be better off “if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly.” (To read his full article, click here.)

Life’s ultimate challenge

To be sure, Emanuel functions here as a kochleffel — a Yiddish term, meaning “pot stirrer,” which I never would have learned if the TV producer Norman Lear had taken Emanuel’s advice and expired at 75 instead of surviving to write his memoirs at age 92 and to give an interview this week to the New York Times. (Click here.)

“Doubtless, death is a loss,” Emanuel acknowledges. “But...living too long is also a loss.” Prolonged life negatively transforms how people relate to us and remember us, he insists: “We are no longer remembered as vibrant and energetic but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

Emanuel’s thesis echoes a comment often uttered by my late father, Herman Rottenberg, during the five declining years that preceded his death last year at 97: “Everyone would be better off if I were removed from the scene.” Like Dr. Emanuel, Dad presumed that totally dependent people serve no useful function. They failed to consider that every challenge in life can offer a valuable learning experience — that even “useless” people are useful.

Alzheimer’s antidote

Even people whose creativity, originality, and productivity have dried up still have memories to contribute. It’s bad enough that many seniors today voluntarily segregate themselves in over-55 retirement villages, thus depriving younger generations of their institutional memory; Emanuel wants these elders to voluntarily check out altogether.

But what of the one in three Americans over 85 who suffer from Alzheimer’s and dementia and consequently lack any functioning memory to speak of? Here I think of my friend, the Philadelphia artist Burnell Yow. When Burnell’s father-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Burnell resolved to find some way to inject some sunshine into the man’s final years — no easy task for a patient who barely knew his own relatives. Burnell’s solution was to take his father-in-law to lunch outings at the flagrantly sexist Hooters restaurant in Maple Shade, N.J. There, for an hour or so each week, this demented man had the pleasure of being fawned and fluttered over by gorgeous young waitresses, and Burnell discovered his own previously hidden talent as an emotional problem solver.

In many respects my own father’s declining 90s presented me with a similarly unexpected gift. After gallivanting around the globe for 50 years as an international folk dance impresario, this lifelong type-A personality suddenly had time for his family, a willingness to accept help from others, and an eagerness to express feelings like “I love you” that had previously rarely crossed his lips. Those last years of caring for Dad were surely difficult, yet the experience was priceless.

Commuting by subway

And I wonder what Emanuel would make of the so-called declining years of my grandfather, Marc Rottenberg. At 65, having buried my grandmother, his childhood sweetheart, after 42 years of marriage, Marc married a very different woman — an avant garde artist 18 years his junior — and embarked on a second rewarding union that lasted more than 33 years. At 77 Marc successfully fought off two teenage muggers in New York; at 83 he was still playing tennis; at 90 he was still launching business ventures; at 95 he was still bailing out needy relatives, musicians, music schools, and Jewish organizations; at 96 he was still happily heading for work three days a week on the subway.

I think Marc instinctively grasped one secret of a long and happy life — an open and curious mind — and he hung around long enough to share that secret with grandsons in their 40s and 50s and great-grandchildren in their teens and 20s. In a world of constant change, Marc survived and flourished because he was constantly reevaluating the old and embracing the new. He never lost interest; he never yearned for the good old days or complained about the present. At an age when most of his contemporaries were defending the status quo (or trying to turn back the clock), Marc saw life’s endless changes not as obstacles but as opportunities. Even in gatherings of people 70 years his junior, he was often the youngest person in the room.

Forget for the moment the implications of Dr. Emanuel’s age 75 advice for an exceptional man like my grandfather. Would Dr. Emanuel deny me and my relatives the benefits of intimate association with such a positive family role model for more than 50 years?

Even in his late 90s, when his eyesight and hearing began to fail, Marc used to say, “The thing that keeps me going now is just my curiosity to see how everything turns out.” And he pretty much did: This man who was 23 when the Russian Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 survived to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Do the math

So what keeps me going, at age 72? Well, a few years ago I compiled a list of things I want to do before I die — mostly books I hope to write. But this week I added a new item to my list: I want to survive long enough to see what happens when Ezekiel Emanuel turns 75.

At that point, will he stop seeing doctors and taking meds (as he insists he will)? Will he depart in a manner more in keeping with his deliberately provocative Atlantic article — by skydiving without a parachute, say, or in some contrived military adventure (like the three aging war veterans in Tom Stoppard’s Heroes) or by robbing a bank (like George Burns and Art Carney in the 1979 geezer film, Going In Style)? Or will Emanuel shelve his death in the light of new medical and biotechnological advances that he failed to anticipate way back in 2014?

Do the math. Dr. Emanuel is 57. Eighteen years from now, when he turns 75, I’ll be 90. Let me say this much for the good doctor: He’s given me a heck of a reason to stick around a good while longer.