One of the things that has struck me while reading posts about Michael Jackson this morning is the number of pieces that have described him as dying “tragically young”. He was 50, an age by which many people have become grandparents. It is also a commonly assumed starting point for old age – for example SAGA, a UK-based company that markets specifically to “older” people, takes 50 as its base age.
With Jacko I suppose his Peter Pan image might have caused people to believe that he is younger than he really is, but generally the posts I have seen have mentioned his actual age alongside the “tragically young” comment. So I’m confused. Tell me, O blogosphere, have we really reached a time when dying at 50 is perceived to be a tragically early departure, or are all these posts just being written by people who are over 50?
It depends how you define it, I suppose. Is it as tragically young as someone who dies in their 20s? No. But these days 50 isn’t old, neither is early 60s and as I sadly have horrible first hand experience of its something that leaves folks feeling robbed, that they should have had maybe 2 or 3 more decades with that person (not that its ever enough really). Obviously we get no guarentees, but most of us in the West probably expect to live into our 70s and 80s and hopefully remain fairly healthy at least into our 60s.
At the end of it all though its like Neil did in the Sandman, when a man who has somehow managed to live for centuries is finally killed. He turns to Death and says, all those centuries though, I did pretty well, eh? And she looks at him and says its not the length, everyone gets the same, they get a lifetime. Been trying to remind myself of that line a lot in the last year, but its harder to be philosophical about it when you lose someone and it is too young.
I was watching a documentary about Okinawa, famous for its people’s longevity, and there was a bit where the locals were getting upset about the tragically early death of a woman. In her 90s.
Good thought starter. No surprise here, but as I get older myself, the definition of “old” magically seems to move higher up the scale. I’ve also spent a good amount of time recently hanging around folks older than I am (by 10, 20, or more years) and they seem to me to be much more active (physically and mentally) than what I considered “old folks” to be awhile ago. “50” is indeed a milestone but so many of the icons of *my* life are near, at, or beyond that age, so perhaps it is “tragically young.”
In 1975 the US National Center for Health Statistics estimated life expectancy at birth for a nonwhite Illinois male born in 1959 as 61.48 years. (Jackson was born in 1958, but I couldn’t find that table.)
In 1997 the NCHS estimated the remaining life expectancy for a black male at age 50 as 23.8 years.
So I think 50 at least counts as tragically non-old, if not strictly tragically young.
50 isn’t young, but it’s tragically young to be dying of cardiac arrest if reports were true that he got a clean bill of health after a recent rigorous check-up. Maybe “sudden” or “unexpected” would be better descriptions than “young”.
I once read a proverb that said, “Old is 20 years beyond your current age.” If you’re reading LJ, most of your friends on there are in their 40’s and up, so 50 is pretty young. On the other hand, rumors seem to be floating about that Jackson was using drugs, and certainly cocaine can cause a sudden, massive heart attack.
He had a difficult life; I don’t think he ever really found his place in the world, nor was ever at peace.
Hi Cheryl,
Yes, I think that these days (in the wealthy, developed countries of the world, at least) fifty is considered a young age to die, and as medicine continues to advance, it won’t be long before we reach the stage where seventy or eighty will be seen as tragically young to die. (The downside of this of course is that we’ll all be expected to keep working until we’re eighty.)
BTW, I’ve finally started using the livejournal account Tanya Brown set up for me more than six years ago and have you listed as one of my friends.
This is all very interesting. Both here and on Facebook people seem to be saying that these days people expect to live to be 70 or 80. Personally I don’t. It was only through the miracles of 20th Century science that I lived to be a teenager. While it is possible that 21st Century science could keep me alive a lot longer, I expect that socioeconomic forces will prove more powerful. Given the circumstances of my life, I regard having made it to 50 as something of a triumph. I certainly don’t expect to survive to 60.
And all things considered I think I’ve done pretty well out of life. Certainly much better than I would have predicted as a kid. So if Morpheus’s goth chick friend were to tap me on the shoulder tonight I might be disappointed — there are still many things I’d like to do — but I wouldn’t consider it unfair, let alone a tragedy.
I think there’s also an element of “I just thought of Michael Jackson in Thriller, and he was too young to die! So my mental picture of Michael Jackson is too young to die!”
Interesting – 50 is definitely younger than it was when my mom was hit that age – at least in “1st world” countries.
Sure, it’s true that I would have been a sickly, weak pale thing without modern meds (some fairly cutting edge surgery fixed that), my life expectancy is long enough that 50 seems pretty tragic to me ;>.
From what little I know of you, I would expect you to be around for quite some time (you certainly seem healthy!) – and given the number of folks who don’t die until their late 70’s, 80’s or even 90’s these days, 50 os pretty young for an apparently healthy man.
I was talking with my mom about this last night. She’s approximately four months older than Jackson, so this has hit her strangely. But one of the points is that those folks in a band between 45 and 55 pretty much grew up with Jackson, and thus, are going, “He’s dead? But I’m not old!”
So that’s where I think a lot of it’s coming from.
-kat
50 is not old and this is coming from a 30 something. My mom is in her 70’s, so that may put why I don’t think 50’s is young.
It seems to be pretty common nowadays to consider ages 40-59 to be “middle age”, and 60 as the start of “old age”. In the 1960s those might each have started 5 years earlier, but it wasn’t a huge difference. The main difference was that nobody expected to have a lengthy old age. You got old, and the expectation was more that you would die in a few years, maybe as many as ten if you were lucky. Now there are so many more people living into their late 70s and beyond, that dying at 59 or 66 or 70 seems “too young”—and 50 is way too young.
But there still are plenty of people dying in their late 30s, or in their 40s or early 50s. Which is tragically young, even if it’s not uncommon. The averages come out in the upper 70s because of the many people living to be 80 and 90 now.
I’m 64, and believe me, I think that would be tragically young age to die at.
Well, I think you inadvertently put the finger on it: dying at 50, for someone in his demographics, is tragically “early”, at the very least for his children, companions, and kin, and obviously for many fans.
But he was not “young” in any concrete sense of the word, no.
If there were any true proofreaders left in the media, they might have been well-advised to change “young” for “early” and spare the English language another minor insult.