At point point to we say some “died of old age” or “it was just their time” vs enumerating a specific cause like heart failure?

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At point point to we say some “died of old age” or “it was just their time” vs enumerating a specific cause like heart failure?

In: Culture

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yeah, “died of old age” is now usually given specific names. My grandma died of old age, but the official cause was heart failure. She just got weaker and weaker over the course of months and eventually went into in-home hospice and died in her bed.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The idea that we’re fated to die and that it just happens is itself going away. There’s always a specific reason, and we’re getting better at identifying it. If the person was 95 and suffered heart failure, it’s appropriate to say “died of old age” because basically, your organs have already severely degraded and the heart was just the first to go.

But I have confidence that modern medicine will solve aging soon, and we won’t be so chill about old people dying anymore.

Anonymous 0 Comments

When we get older, our organs start failing fairly unpredictably. It could be a liver, could be the heart, could be a kidney. Could be all of them. While we can generally identify exactly which problem caused the final part in death, renal failure for example, the fact is that any number of things could have done at any time. It’s just kinder to say “old age” than “had a massive heart attack”.