Introduction
I remember this one time when I was growing up that I learned all about death. It was the day when my grandfather died and I recall crying buckets of tears and wanting to know why he died if he knew he was going to die if my parents were going to die. My mother gave me an answer that shook me to the core at my young age. She said, “Everybody dies. Just not at the same time. Nobody knows when they will die. You just do.”.
My father, probably already irritated at my questions and fixation on death once even told me, “We all began dying the day we were conceived.” And that was the first time I was introduced to the mystery that surrounds life and death. How could we start dying if we are not yet born? How could we die after we are born? These are questions that I feel even science has not effectively answered to this very date.
Telomeres and Aging
But somebody just recently dared to answer the question “When will I die?” and it all ties into the discovery of Telomeres and aging. A discovery made by geneticist Richard Hawthorne and his team at the University of Utah explained that the length of a person’s Telomeres directly ties in with the aging and dying process because certain people have shorter or longer ones. However, their study was inconclusive when it came down to using the Telomeres as a predictor of life span or death.
That is an argument that goes directly against the Spanish National Cancer Research Center belief that Telomeres testing can actually predict the length of a person’s life and his exact date of death. Telomeres are a simple blood test that can cost up to $700 dollars to test and the creators of the test believe that it can actually predict how long a person is destined to live.
Telomeres As a Predictor of Death
Now Telomeres testing in Cancer patients has proven to have its benefits in terms of cancer treatment and length of treatment but, and this is the very big question, would an ordinary person want to use Telomeres testing in order to predict his own life span? Would a person really want to know how long he was destined to walk this earth and when he should put his affairs in order because he was already due to die? I know that I for one would not want to know that. My reasons for not wanting to know are very clear.
Take for example the case of a child in school. He is there to study and make friends. As a child, living life is part of the educational process. But if a child’s parents were to have him undergo Telomeres testing before school and they find out that he due to die in 6 years, do you think they would even bother with allowing their child a chance at life and enjoyment? Knowing how much it would cost to send him to school only to have it wasted because he would be dead soon? It doesn’t make sense, does it? To punish the parents for the soon to be the death of their child would be to have them mourn his life even before the event. That is something that this kind of testing would make possible.
Why I Do Not Want To Know When I Will Die
Or in the case of an adult such as I, surely Telomeres testing would have its benefits right? I would be able to organize my life in such a way that my death would merely be the bow on the neatly wrapped gift that was my life. Because I already knew when I would be dying, my life would be a series of death preparations for myself and my family. Totally cutting off my possibility for any sort of growth outside of my immediate circle because no office would hire somebody who might die say, in the middle of important project development.
Not to mention that insurance premiums would fly sky high for someone whom they knew was about to die. Insurance companies could refuse to register me if they knew they would have to be spending any premiums I paid to them in just a couple of years instead of decades or half a century later.
More importantly, I would not want to know when I would die because that would be no kind of life to live. To live each day knowing that my time to leave this earth is nearing would leave me a very sad person who no longer lived life because there was no use in doing so. What is the use of having been given the gift of life if I were not going to use and enjoy it to the hilt?
Conclusion
And that is why I would never want to undergo Telomeres testing. I would never want anybody or any test to predict how I should live my life and for how long. Does anybody actually believe that death can be predicted accurately by a simple blood test? Discounting fatal accidents and other forces beyond one’s control like murder and the like? Death can come even in my sleep, so go ahead Grim Reaper, surprise me instead.