The mortality rates among people around age 60 is about the same in both countries. But we don't do a better job at preventing people from getting sick in the first place.

On the contrary, mortality improved with increasing age at retirement for people from both high and low economic groups.

Every kid in the family, besides Marvel, left the house by the age of 16. There was less stress living on our own than trying to survive in the environment we were in. I don't know how Marvel did it. He spent his time playing football, but the cards were stacked against him.

If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems...
How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?...Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true--anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other--beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.

Death is inevitable, and, after about the age of 75 or so, you begin to care about people in a certain way. We have all loved Mrs. King in that very special way these last few years. It's just a very tearful right now.

they're kind of baby steps. We haven't made any measurable impact on the mortality rate or survival of this disease.