How Long Will I Live?

That's an awful title, but it is constantly in the back of my mind, occasionally in the front.  I've lived longer than the ages of my parents and all my grandparents, with most of them dying of cancer of one sort or another.  Fortunately, I have never had even a scare and am monitored rather closely due to the amount of cancer that seems to run in my family lines.  Positively, though, both my maternal great grandparents lived into their mid-late 90's.  My great grandfather died from heart problems but lived most of his life quite healthy.  I knew them both very well, up until my early 20's.  I adored my great grandfather because he was a kind, quiet person.  And one of the things I enjoyed most was for hours at a time, he would tell me about his life and what went on in the rural Southern farm country where he grew up.  

My great grandmother was not so friendly, but I learned a lot from her anyway, especially about cooking.  Until their retirement, they owned and ran a large boarding house, and Grandmother was the boss of the entire enterprise, telling Granddaddy what to do.  She did all the cooking for the tenants, and she was an excellent and efficient cook and housekeeper.  I learned so much about cooking techniques just by hanging out in the kitchen and watching her cook.  Being a Southerner, she baked biscuits, lots of chicken and dumplings (which the dumplings always seemed to me to have almost no weight and might float right out of the huge pot she cooked them in, and incredible desserts. And I'm sure a lot of other nutritious foods, too.

But she was an all-business person, whereas Granddaddy was always a very meek, quiet sweetheart.  Up until his death, his favorite "job" was tending a fairly small household vegetable garden, and he definitely had a green thumb.  Maybe that's why I always love to garden, just watching him at work in his garden.  

I did do one thing that was absolutely awful when I was a young pre-teenager.  He grew beautiful turnips, and I always loved the turnip roots.  So I would sneak a plant out of the ground from time to time, pull off the turnip, and stick the plant back into the ground.  I often wonder if he ever knew I did that,; but knowing him, if he did know, he would only  have chuckled about it.

So back to my title:  When will I die?  Obviously, any of us could get hit by a meteorite at any moment, fall off a ladder, have a car accident, etc., etc.  But, putting aside all those possibilities, I think we (I) most often wonder, and fear in my case, that we'll come down with some slow-moving illness or condition which inevitably will lead to our demise.  That's my greatest fear, especially with so many cancers in my family.

But I also have one condition I fear even more than cancer, and that's cognitive decline.  I think like many people my age, I have forgetfulness situations every day, oftentimes several times a day.  Those frighten me!  I simply couldn't bear becoming dependent on others for my "care."  

I do everything in my power to avoid that most-fearful of maladies.  I exercise physically every day, always challenge my mind, I eat extremely nutritional foods, drink no alcohol (except for a sip of my daughter's wine from time to time). I get frequent medical checkups (there's never anything wrong except for a very small blood pressure issue that's been the same for well over a decade.; and I have dealt with hypothyroidism, perfectly corrected with medication, for over two decades.)

And I have a great purpose in life, too:  I absolutely love my work, if it can be called work since I enjoy it so much.  I don't make much doing it, but I look forward to getting started in my studio every morning, and I very often think about new ideas that I want to try -- almost daily, in fact.

Socially, I have my family just next door.  I don't have a social life outside my family, which I suppose is called a negative, but except for my bouts of depression, which have existed my entire life, I have a happy, contented, full life.

So maybe all those factors will give me the opportunity to have many more healthy, happy, productive years of life.  My goal isn't to live past a time when I'm not able to live independently or with purpose; it's to be able to extend the independent purposeful life.  

Oh, and one final goal:  As I've mentioned before, I think, I'm reading Marcel Proust's "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu," (In search of -- or studying -- lost times), and I absolutely must get to the end of it!!  (It's the longest novel ever written, and I'm only 17+ percent through it.)