Josie, my wife in the 90’s married for 57 plus year is cooking karela (bitter melon, a favorite Filipino food) with shrimp today!
For fun, I checked some actuarial information on how many people around 90 might still be married after 50 or more years.
I could not find a reliable statistic for the very specific combination of age, length of marriage, and both spouses still being alive. But it made me realize how unusual our situation may be.
No wonder we sometimes feel that we are living on borrowed timeâespecially when we consider the statistics for both members of a couple surviving to these ages.
And yet, longevity itself is changing.
More People Are Living Longer
Japan has crossed an extraordinary milestone: more than 100,000 people aged 100 or older.
As of September 2026, the number was reported as 107,677.
At the same time, an entirely different kind of longevity research is developing.
Scientists and biotechnology companies are investigating whether some aspects of cellular aging can be modified through cellular reprogramming, regenerative medicine, and stem-cell-related technologies.
Companies such as Calico and Altos Labs are studying aging and cellular rejuvenation in different ways.
The idea is fascinating:
Perhaps aging is not simply a one-way biological clock. Some processes associated with aging, at least at the cellular level, may someday prove capable of being modified or partially reset.
We are already seeing experimental work involving the eye.
Stem-cell-based approaches are being studied to repair damaged corneal tissue and to replace or restore cells affected by degenerative eye diseases.
Some of these approaches have reached early human clinical trials, although they remain experimental and are very far from demonstrating that human aging itself can be reversed.
And then there is the much larger philosophical question that fascinates me:
What exactly is preserved in biological memoryâindividual memory, family memory, cultural memory, perhaps even the information carried forward through generations?
That is where science ends for the moment and philosophy begins.
âAmra Je Becha AchiâŚâ
I always remember my dear friend Enam Choudhury, who I have known since we went to college and University together in Dhaka, Bangladesh, who in his later years would greet me by saying:
âTaslim, Amra je becha achi, setai to aschajjer bepar!â
In English, roughly:
âThe fact that we are still alive is itself an amazing thing!â
And Hamida Bhabi , my eldest bother National Professor Salahuddin Ahmed‘s wife, would respond to my question about how she was doing:
âWe are still in the Waiting Room. The Train may arrive any timeâŚâ
So are we.
We are all in the Waiting Room, although none of us knows when our Train will arrive.
Meanwhile, we try to make the most of our conscious existence before moving on to whatever comes next, according to our own individual and collective spiritual beliefs.
So many of the people we loved have already left the Waiting Room.
A Conversation in the Nursing Home
This reminds me of something I once said to one of my clients who was lying in bed in a nursing home, continually complaining about family members and events from the past.
I told her:
âYou and I are going to die someday. We donât know when. Do you want to go angrily, or would you rather go happily and smiling, with your own spiritual beliefs and practices? We all have our own individual and collective beliefs.â
She calmed down.
I was not trying to tell her what to believe.
I was trying to help her shift from repeatedly reliving the past toward the limited but still meaningful present.
Perhaps that is one of the things we can do while we are still in the Waiting Room.
The Train may arrive any time.
Until then, there is still life to live before we pass on to our next stage of Eternal Existence within the Unity of One, whether understood through religious and spiritual faith-based beliefs and practices or through cosmological, science-based perspectives.
