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Patrick
D. Killebrew, an avid fan of baseball in general and the Washington
Nationals in particular, more than once shared a private joke with his
son, Jake.
“He had a great
life and I think he knew it,” said Jake. “He used to tell me, ‘You know,
I’ve got absolutely nothing to complain about.’ And then he’d always
stop and say, ‘Except maybe for the Nationals’ bullpen.’ ”
Even
in death, Mr. Killebrew, of Midlothian, continues to grumble about his
favorite team’s woeful relief pitching. His obituary, published in
Sunday’s Times-Dispatch, said the 68-year-old attorney “passed away
peacefully at home, June 20, 2017, after watching the Washington
Nationals’ relief pitchers blow yet another lead.”
The
obituary refers to the June 19 game between Washington and Miami. The
Nationals lost 8-7 after their bullpen surrendered the tying run in the
seventh inning and the winning run in the ninth. A week earlier, Atlanta
scored twice in eighth and three times in the ninth to defeat the
Nationals 11-10.
Washington’s bullpen has blown 12 of 32 save opportunities and ranks 26th among 30 major league teams in ERA (4.88).
In lieu of flowers, Mr. Killebrew’s obituary requested donations to the “Nationals Bullpen Fund.”
Mr.
Killebrew died in his sleep on June 20 — hours after the painful
late-inning loss to Miami. Jake said his father’s passing was “pretty
unexpected.”
When Jake sat down to compose the obituary, he did what he thought — no, what he knew — his father would have wanted.
Said
Jake: “I was working on the first draft and all of a sudden I said,
‘Oh, man — this is our chance. We’ve got to do this ... we’ve got to
take one more little jab at (the Nationals’) bullpen.’ I figured, ‘Dad
can’t do it, so now it’s up to us to do it for him.’”
Jake said his mother, Mr. Killebrew’s wife of 32 years, approved the final draft.
“She
understands,” he said. “She has a son — me — who has played baseball
for pretty much his entire life and a husband who watched baseball
almost every night” during the major league season.
Jake
said the family’s grief has been diluted to some extent by the
knowledge that Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo will see the
obituary — if he hasn’t already done so.
Jake said his father “is loving it, I’m sure. He’s probably watching and laughing right now” at Rizzo’s reaction.
Baseball
helped reinforce the bond between father and son. Jake said his father
“never missed” a televised Nationals game. More often than not, the two
watched together. Jake and Mr. Killebrew visited 14 major league
ballparks. Ironically, perhaps, they never visited Nationals Park as a
twosome.
“We wanted to,” Jake
said. “It was No. 1 on our list. We were planning to go next month.” He
fell silent for a moment. “Now it won’t happen.”
Mr.
Killebrew believed — as does Jake — that the family is distantly
related to the late Harmon Killebrew, a six-time American League home
run leader who was inducted in 1984 into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Harmon Killebrew played with the Washington Senators from 1954-1960.
A
celebration of Mr. Killebrew’s life will be held Sunday from 6-8 p.m.
at the Shenandoah Community Association (9601 Redbridge Road).
It’s just after 10:30 a.m. on a pleasant weekday morning at SENS, a
biotech lab in Mountain View, California. I’ve come to speak to its
chief science officer, Aubrey de Grey. I find him sitting in his office,
cracking open a bottle of Stone pale ale. “Would you like one?” he
offers hospitably. De Grey drinks three or four pints of ale a day, and
swears it hasn’t kept him from maintaining the same vigor he felt as a
teenager in London.
Now the 54-year-old’s long hair, tied back in a ponytail, is
turning gray, a change that would be unremarkable if he weren’t one of
the world’s most outspoken proponents of the idea that aging can be
completely eradicated. De Grey first gained notoriety in 1999 for his
book The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, in which
he argued that immortality was theoretically possible. Since then, he’s
been promoting his ideas from prominent platforms—the BBC, the pages of Wired,
the TED stage. He delivers his message in seemingly unbroken
paragraphs, stroking his dark brown wizard’s beard, which reaches below
his navel. Unlike most scientists, he isn’t shy about making bold
speculations. He believes, for example, that the first person who will
live to be 1,000 years old has most likely already been born.
In 2009, de Grey founded the nonprofit SENS, the world’s first
organization dedicated to “curing” human aging, not just age-related
diseases. The organization, which conducts its own research and funds
studies by other scientists, occupies an unassuming space in a small
industrial park. Its walls are affixed with large, colorful posters
illustrating human anatomy and the inner workings of cells.
The basic vision behind SENS is that aging isn’t an inevitable
process by which your body just happens to wear out over time. Rather,
it’s the result of specific biological mechanisms that damage molecules
or cells. Some elements of this idea date back to 1972, when the
biogerontologist Denham Harman noted that free radicals (atoms or
molecules with a single unpaired electron) cause chemical reactions, and
that these reactions can damage the mitochondria, the powerhouses
within cells. Since then, studies have linked free radicals to all sorts
of age-related ailments, from heart disease to Alzheimer’s.
De Grey takes this concept further than most scientists are willing
to go. His 1999 book argued that there could be a way to obviate
mitochondrial damage, slowing the process of aging itself. Now SENS is
working to prove this. Its scientists are also studying other potential
aging culprits, such as the cross-links that form between proteins and
cause problems like arteriosclerosis. They’re looking at damage to
chromosomal DNA, and at “junk” materials that accumulate inside and
outside cells (such as the plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s
patients).
The area of research that gives the organization its name has to do
with senescent cells. (SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered
Negligible Senescence.) These are cells that stop dividing but
accumulate inside us, secreting proteins that contribute to
inflammation. It’s widely accepted that inflammation is involved in
arthritis, heart disease, cancer, dementia and any number of other
conditions that define old age. As de Grey’s thinking goes, if we could
figure out how to remove senescent cells using approaches like drugs or
gene therapy, along with other types of repair, we could potentially
keep our bodies vital forever.
This desire to eradicate aging has, in the last decade, inspired a
mini-boom of private investment in Silicon Valley, where a handful of
labs have sprung up in SENS’ shadow, funded most notably by tech
magnates. The secretive Calico was established by Google, in
collaboration with Apple chairman Arthur Levinson, to tackle the problem
of aging. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have
invested $3 billion in the attempt to “cure all disease.” Amazon’s Jeff
Bezos invested some of his fortune in South San Francisco–based Unity
Biotechnology, which has been targeting cell senescence in animal trials
and hopes to begin human drug trials next year.
It’s this influx of wealth that has brought novel anti-aging
theories out of the scientific fringes and into gleaming Silicon Valley
labs. De Grey notes that developing the means to make everyone live
forever is not cheap. “This foundation has a budget of somewhere around
$4 million a year, not $4 billion, which is what it should be,” de Grey
says. He invested $13 million of his own money in SENS, the lion’s share
of the $16.5 million he inherited when his mother died. (He says she
earned her wealth through property investments.) SENS has also been the
beneficiary of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, perhaps Silicon Valley’s
best-known advocate for curing death. As Thiel told the Washington Post in 2015, “I’ve always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing....I prefer to fight it.”
**********
This mouse at the Buck Institute was engineered to accumulate
senescent cells at an accelerated rate, making it age more rapidly.
(Timothy Archibald)
Immortality, it turns out, is not such an easy sell: Most people
don’t like the idea of living forever. In legends of old as well as in
recent popular culture, eluding death typically comes at a terrible
cost; like zombies or vampires, immortal beings must feast on the
living. Besides, a large percentage of today’s population also
subscribes to religious beliefs in which the afterlife is something to
be welcomed. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans in 2013
whether they would use technologies that allowed them to live to 120 or
beyond, 56 percent said no. Two-thirds of respondents believed that
radically longer life spans would strain natural resources, and that
these treatments would only ever be available to the wealthy.
I ask de Grey about how the world would change—socioeconomically
especially—if no one ever died. Would people still have children? If
they did, how long would the planet be able to sustain billions of
immortals? Wouldn’t every norm predicated on our inevitable deaths break
down, including all the world’s religions? What would replace them? At
what point might you decide that, actually, this is enough life? After
decades? Centuries? And once you made that decision, how would you make
your exit?
“I find it frustrating that people are so fixated on the longevity
side effects,” de Grey says, clearly irritated. “And they’re constantly
thinking about how society would change in the context of everyone being
1,000 years old or whatever. The single thing that makes people’s lives
most miserable is chronic disease, staying sick and being sick. And I’m
about alleviating suffering.”
To explain his vision, de Grey uses the analogy of a car that has
its parts continually repaired. People receiving cell regeneration
therapies would be able to constantly add more time to their lives
whenever their bodies began to break down. “We have a warranty period,
it’s true,” he allows. “But cars also have warranty periods, and yet we
still have vintage cars—because we know how to do comprehensive,
regular, preventative maintenance.”
De Grey spent several years after college working as a computer
scientist in the field of artificial intelligence, which might explain
why he likes to compare human bodies to machines. He has a PhD in
biology from Cambridge, but he received it for theoretical work rather
than lab-based research. He often refers to himself as an engineer or a
“technologically focused biologist.”
I ask de Grey how a planet full of immortals would support itself.
Would people want to work for eternity? He answers that automation will
take over most jobs. “We will be able to spend our lives doing things
that we find fulfilling and we won’t have to worry about remuneration,”
he says. De Grey has been closely associated with transhumanism, a
movement that believes technology will help the human race evolve far
beyond its current limitations, but he dislikes the term, noting that it
“just scares people.”
De Grey has robust faith that humans will come up with “some new
way to distribute wealth that doesn’t depend on being paid to do things
we wouldn’t otherwise do.” The first step, he believes, is issuing a
universal basic income. It’s an idea that’s shared by other Bay Area
entrepreneurs, many of whom are in the business of developing automation
technologies. Last year, Y Combinator, a highly successful start-up
incubator, gave 100 Oakland families between $1,000 and $2,000 a month
in unconditional free income to find out how they’d spend it. The city
of San Francisco recently announced plans to launch a similar pilot
program. But these are small-scale experiments, and if robots do take
over more jobs, it isn’t clear whether our economic and political
systems would reconfigure to support all unemployed people in time,
least of all forever.
And that 1,000-year-old person: He or she has already been born?
“Oh absolutely, yeah,” de Grey assures me. “It’s highly likely.”
**********
In fact, the human body is not at all like a car, in the same way
that the human brain is not like a computer. Such comparisons
oversimplify the staggeringly complicated organic systems that
researchers are only beginning to glimpse. The chaotic interactions
between our trillions of cells and their enzymes are still poorly
understood. We know almost nothing about why some people hit the genetic
jackpot and live much longer and with much more vigor than others who
have similar life circumstances. The question is all the more vexing
because elderly humans are themselves an extremely recent phenomenon.
Judy Campisi is saying all this to me over coffee near her home in
Berkeley. She works 45 minutes north in Novato at the Buck Institute for
Research on Aging, a gleaming non-profit research institution. “For
99.9 percent of our human history as a species, there was no aging,” she
says. Humans were very likely to die by our 30s from predation,
starvation, disease, childbirth or any number of violent events.
Judy Campisi sits in the atrium at the Buck Institute. The campus
was designed by I.M. Pei, the architect of the Louvre pyramid.
(Timothy Archibald)
Life spans in the developed world have more than doubled over the
past century or so, but this hasn’t happened through any interventions
against aging itself. Rather, it’s a byproduct of innovations such as
clean water, medication, vaccinations, surgery, dentistry, sanitation,
shelter, a regular food supply and methods of defending against
predators.
A biochemist and professor of biogerontology, Campisi has spent her
career studying aging and cancer, and the role senescent cells play in
both. She has researched these cells in her lab and published widely on
the possible evolutionary reasons they remain in our bodies. She posits
that for most of human history, natural selection didn’t favor living to
old age. Evolution protected younger people so they could pass along
their genes, and senescent cells play a very important role.
“One thing evolution had to select for was protection from cancer,”
she says. “Because we are complex organisms, we have lots of cells in
our body that divide, and cell division is a very risky time for a cell
because it’s easy to pick up a mutation when you are replicating three
billion base pairs of DNA.” If a cell doesn’t divide, there are fewer
chances for such a mutation to creep in. “So evolution put into place
these very powerful tumor suppressant mechanisms—senescent cells—but
they only had to last for 40 years at the most.”
What serves as a preventive mechanism in early life later can
become a cancer-causing agent of its own, Campisi says. Senescent cells
contribute to inflammation, and “inflammation is the number one risk
factor for all diseases of aging, including cancer.” Eliminating these
cells might cut down on various ailments, but no one is yet sure what
the side effects would be.
The idea that senescent cells contribute to aging was first
postulated in the 1960s. Yet 50 years later, scientists still don’t
entirely understand the role they play. All Campisi can say definitively
is that, for most of human history, there was “no evolutionary pressure
to make that system better because everybody died young.”
When I ask Campisi why some scientists talk about “curing” aging,
she says it comes down to getting interventions approved. “There are
people who want to consider aging a disease for the purposes of going to
regulatory agencies and having a specific drug able to treat a specific
symptom, which you can only do if it’s recognized as a disease.” But
Campisi stresses that living forever is not the goal of most research on
aging. Instead, she says it’s primarily aimed not at life span but
“health span”—increasing the number of years that people can remain
physically and mentally agile.
Campisi has known de Grey for years, collaborates with SENS and
even serves on the organization’s advisory board. I ask what she makes
of his assertion that someone alive today will reach the age of 1,000.
“I have to tell you Aubrey has two hats,” she says, smiling. “One
he wears for the public when he’s raising funds. The other hat is when
he talks to a scientist like me, where he doesn’t really believe that
anyone will live to 1,000 years old. No.”
Cell samples are stored in liquid nitrogen so SENS researchers can
later study their metabolic processes for clues about aging.
(Timothy Archibald)
**********
One thing we do know is that there are more elderly people alive
now than there have ever been in the history of the planet. Even if
today’s life-extension researchers made meaningful breakthroughs, the
therapies wouldn’t be available for many years to come. That means we’re
about to face a lot of death, says Rachel Maguire, a research director
focusing on health care at the Institute for the Future, in Palo Alto.
“By 2025 or 2030, there will be more of a culture of dying and lots of
different ways of experiencing it. There are early signs of new types of
funerals and spiritual formations around this.” Maguire foresees new
end-of-life plans, including assisted dying. When it comes to aging, she
points out that biological research is only one piece of a puzzle that
must also include economics, politics and cultural change. “I don’t
think we have answers yet for how we’d do the other pieces. And the
financial piece alone is huge.”
There’s already a huge disparity between the life spans of rich and
poor Americans, and critics of the new longevity research worry the gap
may only grow wider. A 2016 report from the Brookings Institution found
that, for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life
expectancy between men at the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent of
the earnings ladder. For men born in 1950, the difference was 14 years.
For women, the gap grew from 4.7 to 13 years. In other words, advances
in medicine haven’t helped low-income Americans nearly as much as their
wealthier counterparts.
I had a glimpse of that discrepancy as I used ride-hail apps to get
around the Bay Area. On my way to Mountain View, where the median
household income is $103,488, my driver, a woman in her 50s, told me she
had trouble paying for gas and was sleeping in the car between nights
on relatives’ couches. Sometimes, she said, she was stricken by bouts of
rheumatoid arthritis. If her joints seized up while she was driving,
she had to pull over and wait until the episode passed, usually not
working anymore that day. I did not want to ask how she would feel if
she ended up living so long that her future included another two decades
of driving.
Jake Dunagan, the director of design futures at the consulting firm
Very Nice, studies the cognitive biases that make it difficult for
people to plan ahead. “That’s one of the conundrums of futurist work:
The future doesn’t exist,” Dunagan tells me. “It’s always a projection.”
Our minds, he says, have not evolved to be very good at seeing our
future as connected to our present, as we spent so much of our early
existence concerned with outwitting immediate threats.
Dunagan has little patience for Silicon Valley’s longevity
research; he says proponents are not sufficiently interested in the
details. “The rich people are defining the terms of the longevity
conversation and have enhanced access to these technologies,” he says.
“Everyone wants to live longer, to some degree, but it’s also the sense
of privilege, of selfishness to it that’s ‘I want mine. I always want
mine.’ Well, what if everyone had this? What would be the long-term
implications of that?”
**********
In 2006, the magazine MIT Technology Review published a
paper called “Life Extension Pseudoscience and the SENS Plan.” The nine
co-authors, all senior gerontologists, took stern issue with de Grey’s
position. “He’s brilliant, but he had no experience in aging research,”
says Heidi Tissenbaum, one of the paper’s signatories and a professor of
molecular, cell and cancer biology at the University of Massachusetts
Medical School. “We were alarmed, since he claimed to know how to
prevent aging based on ideas, not on rigorous scientific experimental
results.”
More than a decade later, Tissenbaum now sees SENS in a more
positive light. “Kudos to Aubrey,” she says diplomatically. “The more
people talking about aging research, the better. I give him a lot of
credit for bringing attention and money to the field. When we wrote that
paper, it was just him and his ideas, no research, nothing. But now
they are doing a lot of basic, fundamental research, like any other
lab.”
In marked contrast with de Grey, however, Tissenbaum doesn’t see
aging itself as the problem. “I don’t think it’s a disease,” she says.
“I think it’s a natural process. Life and death are a part of the same
coin.”
Add caption
Rachel Maguire of the Institute for the Future chooses to live in
Austin, Texas. She finds Silicon Valley “a little too Truman Show.”
(Timothy Archibald)
Instead of seeking out a universal cure for aging, Tissenbaum finds
it more useful to look at the genes involved in specific factors, such
as good metabolic function and resistance to stress. For her own
research, she has artificially extended the lives of C. elegans roundworms
and mice, but she’s found that the creatures are sluggish and frail
during that extra period of life. In other words, extending life through
lab-based means doesn’t necessarily lead to good health. “If applied to
humans, this would likely lead to unsustainable healthcare costs,” she
and her co-authors concluded in a 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
There are all kinds of theories about how to close the gap between
life span and health span, and not all of them focus on senescent cells.
Some scientists think taking aspirin and vitamin D could reduce
inflammation throughout the body and lower the incidences of all kinds
of diseases. Others believe the key is to repair telomeres, the
sequences at the ends of each chromosome that unravel with stress and
age. Research is still very much in progress on all of these ideas.
Meanwhile, scientists are trying to understand why the brain
deteriorates over time, losing mass and neural circuitry. Tissenbaum and
others are trying to understand these mechanisms, hoping to find new
treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. But she doesn’t expect any
intervention to keep humans healthy forever. “It may be that the brain
has a finite life span,” she says.
For now, Tissenbaum recommends the usual methods of fending off
frailty. Studies have shown that regular physical exercise can stimulate
neural networks and keep connections alive. So can challenging mental
activities. “If you always do crossword puzzles, try Sudoku,” she says.
“Where we have really progressed is in our understanding of how keeping
your mind and body active is fundamental to healthy aging.”
Many of the world’s oldest stories are quests for eternal life,
from Herodotus’ fountain of youth to the medieval Holy Grail. There’s a
great deal of money and brainpower invested in the hope that science
will finally deliver on this promise. The research in these labs might
yield more incremental breakthroughs, revealing the mechanisms behind
Alzheimer’s or certain types of cancer. But for some true believers,
that won’t be enough. De Grey, for one, dislikes the idea of seeking
cures for individual age-related diseases. “I believe that the term
‘disease’ has become one that does far more harm than good, as has
‘cure,’” he says, “such that some aspects of aging are inappropriately
described as curable diseases and others as ‘aging itself.’”
I asked Judy Campisi if she thought there was an upper limit to the
human life span. “I suspect there is,” she said. “Like you’d say
there’s a limit to running a marathon. You aren’t going to ever run one
in 30 seconds.” When it comes to extending life, she says, “we think the
upper limit we could get to is around 115 to 120 years old—if we don’t
blow ourselves up before then, or the planet doesn’t melt down.”
If Campisi and others are right, we may come to accept that we’re
profoundly mortal creatures after all. Still, we seem to be driven, as a
species, to overcome every adversity we encounter. We may not live
forever, or even to 1,000, but a more vibrant old age could yet be on
the horizon for all of us. Editor’s Note, May 25, 2017: An earlier version of this article
erroneously called the Buck Institute a “gleaming profit institution”,
as opposed to a non-profit, and described its distance from Berkeley as
two hours instead of 45 minutes.
This article is a selection from the June issue of Smithsonian magazine
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About Elmo Keep
Originally from Australia, Elmo Keep is a freelance writer
based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Matter, The Awl, the
International New York Times and other outlets.
This is What Would Happen If,
a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we
look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take
it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if you died
alone at home?
Living
alone can be the best thing. You only need to clean up after yourself.
You can freely walk naked from the bathroom to your bedroom And most
importantly, you have peace and quiet whenever you need it.
But one close call with piece of sandwich getting sort of lodged in your throat has you wondering: Jeez, what would happen if I just died here in my home?
Who would find you? How would they know you are, well, you. And how would the unfortunate news reach friends and family? To answer all of these uncomfortable questions, we spoke with Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and author of Working Stiff.
Dying
alone in your own home is, arguably, one of the saddest things to think
about. But take solace in the fact that if it does happen, someone
will, eventually find out.
Things get more complicated if your body started to decompose.
"The typical scenario we have is a
neighbor is concerned that they haven't seen a person in awhile, or the
person doesn't show up for work, or the mail starts piling up outside
their door," says Melinek.
Just hours after expiring, a body will start to smell. Depending on your proximity to your neighbors, the smell alone might prompt them to alert someone.
"Usually
there's a call made out at some point, for what is called a well-being
check," says Melinek. "Either the police will get that call or sometimes
it'll just be the manager of the building."
Whomever's
been assigned to perform the check will, if need be, break down your
door and, well, check your home. Because you are dead, they will find
your dead body. It might sound obvious, but just because someone
thinks they've found a dead body, doesn't officially make you dead.
Paramedics are called in to examine you, and determine that, yes, you
are dead.
Once your corpse has been wheeled away, you'll be sent to the local medical examiner or coroner (yes, there's a difference) to figure out how you died and who you are.
In
any case of a death, it's the job of a forensic pathologist to
determine the cause and manner of death and — depending if it's a
coroner or medical examiner's office — rule out foul play. Because you
died alone, it's safe to assume there was no foul play. Still, they need
to figure out how you died.
"In
some cases, if we have sufficient medial history we won't necessarily
do an autopsy, we'll just do an external examination of the bodywork
signs of trauma," says Melinek. "If there is significant decomposition,
enough that would obscure any trauma, or if there's any question of the
cause or manner of death, then we'll do an autopsy."
How
much time has elapsed between you dying and this unlucky person finding
your corpse will determine how complicated the next step will be:
Identifying your body. Remember: You are dead, and these are people who, most likely, don't know who you are — but they're going to try.
If
your corpse is still relatively fresh, and the medical investigators
assigned to your case find solid leads on contact information from
families, then the process is pretty straight forward. The authorities
will bring in someone who knows you to view your corpse and say that
yes, this is you.
If they have trouble
finding a next of kin, all is not lost. "In the majority of cases we can
get fingerprints. That's another reliable scientific way of identifying
people," says Melinek.
Things get more
complicated if your body started to decompose. "A lot of times with
decomposition or skeletonization the skin sloughs off and you don't even
have fingerprints," says Melinek. "So the next step is to contact their
healthcare providers and find out if they have, dental or other
x-rays."
Since someone's smile is
pretty unique to them, the pathologist can compare dental records with
your corpse to see if you are you. Things like fillings or missing teeth
or leftover orthodontic hardware can also be used as ways to ID you.
Somehow, if your teeth or head is missing, forensic pathologists still have other methods of figuring out who you are. "If
they have any pacemakers or medical hardware in them, usually there's a
unique serial number associated with those, so we could identify the
deceased that way," says Melinek.
In
some cases, the pathologist just doesn't have enough information to
establish a definitive identification. "Sometimes we can only get a
presumptive ID. Just based on the fact that they were known to live
there, they weren't seen in awhile, and the anthropological examination
of the bones is consistent with their gender and age," says Melinek.
"But if we can't confirm their identity they might have to be buried as a
John or Jane Doe."
So the authorities
have determined you're dead. They know how you died, and they've,
hopefully, informed someone that you've died. In which case, your body
will soon rest in peace. If they haven't been able to contact a
next-of-kin, then the government takes over handling your estate,
auctions off anything of value, and arranges your burial.
So yeah, living alone: awesome. Dying alone: not the best.
