Do we have more control over death than we think? Or, to put it differently, is death caused by more than physical conditions and problems?
Joe Paterno, legendary Penn State college football coach, died on Sunday. On the surface, death at his point in life isn’t surprising. The man was 85 years old, and had announced in November that he was suffering from lung cancer. What’s notable about the timing of Paterno’s passing is that it comes just two months after his dismissal from Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child molestation and sexual abuse scandal. 
That Paterno’s death came so soon after he finished a long life of employment is far from unique. There is a long list of people – both famous and in our own lives – who passed away shortly after retiring from their jobs:
- Journalist Andy Rooney appeared on the TV news program “60 Minutes” from 1978 until October, 2011. He died one month later.
- Charlie Brown creator and cartoonist Charles M. Schulz drew the “Peanuts” comic strip daily from 1950 until February 13, 2000, during which he only took one vacation. After drawing what he planned to be the final strip before his retirement, Schulz died the night before it was to be printed in newspapers.
- Another college football coaching legend, Paul William “Bear” Bryant, started his coaching career in 1936, and worked as head coach at Alabama beginning in 1958. He retired following the 1982 season, then died in January of 1983.
It’s true that all these people were at advanced ages (Andy Rooney was 92, Schulz 77, and Bryant 69), so the argument can clearly be made that it was simply “their time.” But might the timing of their deaths have to do with something more than health and old age?
WebMD reported that a study of Shell Oil employees found that people who retired at age 55 and lived for at least 10 more years died younger than employees who retired at 65. The UK’s Telegraph describes a study that found that retired people who carry on in a part-time job had fewer serious diseases and were better able to function day-to-day than people who stopped working altogether. It went on to report that among the retirees who took part-time jobs, those who found a position related to their ex-career field also reported better mental health than those who found completely unrelated part-time employment.
“If a person fails to see a point in their existence, a reason to get up in the morning and be alive, they will cease to exist. This is plain as day,” writes a paramedic at EmergencyMedicalParamedic.com. “I have seen patients who have worked hard all of their lives, only to die suddenly two days after retirement. This does not mean that you should never retire, but that you should have some purpose for living past retirement.”
Could a lack of purpose have something to do with the timing of the deaths of Paterno, Rooney, Schultz and Bryant?
2011-2012 was Paterno’s 62nd consecutive season on Penn State’s coaching staff, a streak that began in 1950 (he had been head coach since 1966). Think about that for a moment. He had been waking up and
going to work at the same place for roughly 2.5 times longer than the lifetime of the average NerdNexus reader. That’s a very long time. Disrupted routines can leave us feeling empty when they come to an end: ask anyone who has ever experienced culture shock, or has felt disoriented after the end of a long romantic relationship. And Paterno’s was far from an ordinary job: he was the central cog of a large athletic program of a major university; he affected the lives of thousands of student-athletes and employees who he came across in his decades of work. Did Paterno lose a sense of meaning to his life when he no longer came across these people? Did that accelerate his health problems in ways that our modern science and medicine can’t explain?
How about legendary musician and singer Johnny Cash? Cash’s beloved wife died on May 15, 2003. Cash himself followed her just four months later, causing many to claim that he had “died of a broken heart.” If retiring can cause a loss of purpose, then couldn’t the death of a loved one do the same? A personal story: an elderly member of my family was very close with her granddaughter, and often said that she wanted to live to see her get married. And it happened, too, as she outlived every medical prognosis given by her doctors and fought off a vast array of medical problems that seemed too much for anyone to survive just long enough to be there when her granddaughter walked down the aisle. Could Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple in August, 2011 have sped up his health problems and caused his death on October 5 of the same year to be earlier than if he had kept working?
We’ll likely never know.
The truth is, as much as we know about the inner workings of the human body, there is still a much greater deal that we don’t know. Matters of the mind and spirit are in a realm that we can only speculate on, and perhaps it’s better that way.
As for me, I’m going to go find something to keep myself busy with.
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