To me, they offered a lesson about decline. I know that our bones will soften and our arteries will harden. Our hearing will dull and our vision will fade. We’ll slow down. And, finally, our bodies will fail altogether, and we’ll die. How this decline unfolds is up to us. The calculus of aging offers us two options: We can live a shorter life with more years of disability, or we can live the longest possible life with the fewest bad years. As my centenarian friends showed me, the choice is largely up to us.
