It’s jarring to think that our age—unlike our height or weight—can’t be precisely measured. One can count the rings on a tree to calculate how many years it was alive, but there’s no equivalent marker in humans. Every so often, in the hospital where I work, I notice that a patient has a listed age of more than a hundred and twenty. This is disorienting until I realize that the patient may have come into the hospital with no I.D. and no known contacts, and that they might be suffering from a condition—dementia, schizophrenia—that makes it hard for them to remember who they are, let alone how old. In such cases, the hospital’s computer system defaults to a birth year of 1900.
~ Dhruv Khullar via The New Yorker

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In 2010, on Respect for the Aged Day, Japanese officials sought out a Tokyo man named Sogen Kato to congratulate him on living to a hundred and eleven. Instead, they found a mummified corpse in his bedroom. Kato had been dead for three decades, and his family had fraudulently collected more than a hundred thousand dollars in pension money. A government investigation later revealed that hundreds of thousands of “living” residents of Japan had in fact gone missing or died, including eighty per cent of Japanese centenarians.
~ Dhruv Khullar via The New Yorker

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