24 March 2024 | The One-Body Problem

No one gets out of here alive.

For a long time after getting a new general practitioner, my doctor would tell me on my annual check-up, “You know, we weren’t meant to live past 50.” It got to a point where I finally said to him, “Listen, if you have bad news for me, let’s just cut to the chase.”

Well, there was no dramatic follow-up to that, but his comment added to my overall wonderment about the human body. On any given day, our bodies fight off pathogens of which we are unaware of, doing things whose central purpose is to keep us alive. Our kidneys work 27/4, our hearts beat on average over 100,000 times a day. Even at night, our brains continue to direct the body to do various things: repair muscles, form new memories, send stress hormones to wake you up and so on. If you take a moment to ponder it, these vehicles we occupy are incredibly complex structures.

But then there’s a point where the body seems to declare war against itself. I’m not talking about auto-immune diseases, I’m talking about the onset of aches and pains in your average healthy person, almost as if the body has reached a certain limit that it only knows about and that signals inevitable decline. It’s a problem that waits to kick in on some unknown timer that has been there all along. A lot of this should not come as a big surprise: as we get older, things wear out, we tend to lose muscle mass and don’t have the same level of energy like we did in our 20s. It strikes me, though, that our bodies start staging a protest and there’s no amount of bargaining that will reverse course. Our bodies are made to keep us alive, then our bodies want to kill us off.

Cancer, of course, comes to mind, but that can be exacerbated by external factors. However, I can’t help but think of a beloved former boss of mine, who literally woke up one morning and when he stood up, he immediately collapsed. Turns out his hip was riddled with cancer and even after replacement surgery, it seemed like his body was determined to finish the job in some way: he died around six months after that fateful morning.

You will hear people often say, “listen to your body, pay attention to what your body is telling you!” Except in many ways, our bodies do not tell us anything: when that hidden timer goes off, the body then begins a checklist of things that cascade down to our final breath, even when it’s also trying to keep us alive in spite of these problems. It’s almost as if it can’t really help itself.

No one gets out of here alive, but what the human body does during our lifetimes really is a marvel, even for those with auto-immune diseases where the war starts out much earlier than you expect. But sometimes it just seems so unfair that this marvelous, complicated chariot we ride in no longer wants us around.