The average age of a car is now reported to be 12.5 years— Cars are smarter, meaning their mechanics are improved by things like electricity and computers. Once, I read that an engine is like a house built to contain explosions. After ignition, gas fires up the pistons and the resulting chain of combustion creates enough energy for turning the wheels. In 2022, even in the midst of a global pandemic, the average life expectancy of humans is 72.98 years, not counting cryonics experiments like the one in Arizona, where a hundred and ninety-nine bodies and heads float in shiny tanks of liquid nitrogen, waiting for a future science which, surely, will know what to do with them. How is it possible for a woman to live past her 105th birthday, longer than any of her doctors, despite smoking daily for over half her life? Someone pronounced brain dead after a car crash can still make a gift of their tissues, corneas, or kidneys to a waiting organ recipient. My mother, now mostly propped up in bed in a nursing home, feels too weak to do anything but sleep—any day now, I'll think. Yet there are times when she rallies or quarrels with her caregivers, days when she confides she wants a slice of cake and wants to live to be at least a hundred. We know there is an end—when the mind's engine sputters and stalls in endless rewinds, when the body torques more vividly into a question without answer; when the mottled flesh and fruit of this life peels steadfast into itself, shedding honey for bone.
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