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Dying of Old Age

Eventually, “old age” became a last resort phrase to describe an unknown cause of death. Or it became useful where a person may have died from a number of complications, but where it was not practical or ethical to order an autopsy to find the precise underlying cause of death. It’s common, in our society, to say that someone “died of old age.” But nobody ever actually dies of “old age.” There are always other pre-existing diseases—or new diseases—that cause the deaths in question. “Old age” isn’t something you’d put on a death certificate—most likely, it would be something like cardiac arrest, which occurs due to some underlying issue such as an infection, heart attack, or cancer. For example, a clot could go into the lungs which prevents somebody from oxygenating their brain or their body, and which then causes the heart to stop. When somebody dies, whether or not they’re young or old, some disease or disease-process has caused their body to stop working. Illness can present in different ways in older people. As we age, there is a normal wear and tear of the body, and we don’t respond as resiliently to health problems. Younger people can and do die from the same things as older people—heart attacks, lung clots—but older people might react in different ways to these diseases. With pneumonia, for instance, they may not show the normal signs of infection—they may instead present with high blood sugar, if they’re diabetic, or if they have dementia, they may just present with changes in their mental status: heightened confusion, an inability to do the things they would normally do. When we’re older, and that sort of thing happens, we may not pin it on the underlying disease process. People always talk about wanting to “die in their sleep,” but this isn’t a specific phenomenon: someone who dies in their sleep might just have had an undetected cancer or infection that happened to occur when they were asleep rather than during waking hours. It’s important to note, too, that sometimes when people have a serious illness, like end-stage congestive heart failure or terminal cancer, they might opt to “allow natural death”— focusing on alleviating symptoms and being comfortable rather than going into the hospital and getting aggressive treatment.