World's Oldest Man Dies. Again.

I don't have access to Nexis anymore, but it occurs to me that an interesting data gathering project would be to search out all the iterations of "world's oldest man/woman dies", and then find the average length of time between those headlines. My guess: about six months. It is in the nature of the honor that the title holder only rarely keeps it for very long.

Fred Hale, Sr. - age 113 - went to his eternal reward early this morning in Syracuse, New York. Hale was actually from Maine, where he was born on December 1, 1890 and spent most of his life. He moved to Syracuse only four years ago, at the same time he gave up driving, to be closer to his son Fred Hale, Jr., age 82. (The harsh Maine winters did not, apparently, enter into the equation.) He outlived three of his five children and his wife, but is survived by the world's oldest woman, 114-year-old Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper of the Netherlands. Hale became the world's oldest man in March, when Spaniard Joan Riudavets Moll shuffled off this mortal coil.

By all accounts Hale was a hell of a guy - he took up boogie boarding in his 90s on a trip to Hawaii, and rarely if ever lost his temper. Amusingly, he was a Red Sox fan; probably one of only a handful who clearly remembered both of Boston's last two World Series wins.

I recall truly knowing only three people born in the 19th century - my mother's aunt Daisy who was born in 1891 and died in 1984, my father's aunt Lucy who was born in 1895 and died the day after Christmas in 1997, and Charls [sic] Lerner, a World War I vet who was my barber when I was a boy. (Lerner's wife Elizabeth was reputed to be the witch of the Jersey Pine Barrens whose spells kept the Jersey Devil at bay, which was mighty nice of her.) Mr. Lerner died about eight or ten years ago. My recollection is that he was 101.

There's something very powerful about people who retain vigor and mental acuity into their 90s and beyond. Thomas Aquinas wrote that "great age is a mark of virtue, and therefore merits consideration and esteem." There's more to it than that, I think - obviously the long-lived are genetically blessed, but to survive to great age is also to be indomitable, to never give up or become weary of life, and to surrender to the night only when the flesh fails.