craschworks

Via Fight Aging:

April Smith, a nurse who was recently hired as a fulltime fundraiser for the Methuselah Foundation, explains why she wants to fight aging:

Since I've decided to take on this new challenge, I've gotten a lot of questions about “Why would you want to live longer?” “Aging is something that happens to all of us, why fight it?” “Isn't it selfish to want to cure aging?”

If you are wondering any of those things right now, I want you to try this experiment. Don't think about aging as it is happening to you: instead, picture the person you love most in the whole world. Then imagine that person getting older… not just getting a few gray hairs and needing reading glasses, but having to hold onto things to walk, afraid of going out for fear of falling on the ice and breaking a hip, perhaps even losing the sharpness of mind that drew you to him or her in the first place, perhaps unable to remember who you are. Being eaten alive by cancer cells, or barely holding onto life in an ICU somewhere, attached to feeding tubes and breathing machines and almost wanting to die but hanging on because life if just too precious to let it go, even in the midst of great pain.

Why is that inevitable? Why let that happen if you have a choice? Why would you accept that suffering, not for yourself but for someone you love, if there's anything, anything at all, that you could do to stop it?