Life may be longer than you think

Life expectancy has changed in the last 50 years. Think about your parents' age. When my mother was 64 she died of complications of an earlier accident, of lack of knowledge of the human body, and of lack of confidence in the medical profession. I was 31 and never thought much about age. I expected to deal differently with 64 when I got there because I understood Mother's history.
A friend named Ron at age 55 verbalized concern about having only a few more years to live. Why did he believe that, I asked? His father died at age 57 when Ron was in his teens and Ron fantasized his health so similar to his father's that he expected to also have a heart attack by age 57. Several years passed and Ron was doing well - no heart tremors, no high blood pressure, no heart attack. I hope he relaxed. Maybe he simply wondered that he had made it past a major hurdle in his life.
He was not the first person I heard predict their life expectancy to be the same as their parents. But people have been living longer than their parents for the last century. Each generation had longer life spans than the previous one. I am well past 64 and expect to live to be 100. So I've gone from shrugging about age 64 to looking ahead much farther.
Don't dwell on it, kids, but you will live longer than your parents. Is that scary or what?
Naomi Sherer