None of us want to die young, and the older we are the older we think "young" might be. So let's suppose you fend off heart attack and stroke, and dodge the early cancer bullet. That buys you a few more years.
On the other hand, if you live long enough your mind rots: you get Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or senile dementia. And your chance of getting cancer only goes up with the years. Plus your hearing goes to hell and blindness from macular degeneration looms.
If you manage to be too healthy to avoid heart attack and stroke, you get a lingering, messy, and possibly painful death - what a treat! COTTonLINE is morbid tonight.
As philosopher Kenny Rogers says in The Gambler "the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep." Implicit in that lyric is not to wait too long to do it.
