What’s a Reasonable Age to Expect to Live?

This is the sort of thing you recalibrate when getting older.

This is Lucile Randon, a French nun who currently holds the designation as the oldest person in the world. This February, she will turn 119 years old, putting her within three years of Jeanne Calment, the oldest person who ever lived. (Calment died in 1997 at the age of 122.) One of the things I like to tell my kids to blow their mind is that my great-grandmother, whose house I used to spend weekends at as a kid, was born in 1899. “You knew someone who was born in the 1800s?” they say. Randon was born in 1904.

I turned 47 in October, and, like everybody else getting older (which is to say, uh, everybody), the higher that number gets, the more you start thinking about your own mortality. (Particularly when friends your age start dying.) My father turned 69 four years ago, and it was a birthday that rattled him, because his own father, who died in 1988, never made it. My grandfather smoked four packs of unfiltered Pall Malls for 40 years and had suffered multiple heart attacks before he died, and my father is much healthier than that, but still: It’ll get in your head. It gets in mine: I worry about him, and my mom too, who is two years younger.