Anna Törner: ”Mom, do you think you’ll ever get married again?”
The question catches me off guard. My dear second daughter and I are on vacation, deep in conversation about something entirely different. I pause, curious about what lies beneath her words. Intrigued by what she’s truly trying to ask, I choose to answer honestly, despite having no plans of ever marrying again.
"Maybe," I say.
"But is there really any point?" She pauses, then adds, matter-of-factly, "You don’t have much time left."
It takes a moment for her words to sink in. In her youthful eyes, at 55, my life is practically over—not because I’m ill or frail, but simply because she sees me as… old. She doesn’t seem particularly sad. To her, it’s just a fact, an inescapable truth - no more extraordinary than the sky being blue.
This conversation happened a few years ago, and to be fair, she was only 20 at the time. Yet I find myself returning to it often—not because of the idea of marriage, but because, in a way, she wasn’t entirely wrong. With each passing year, I become ever more aware that my time is gradually slipping away.
As a statistician, it’s natural for me to think about exactly how much time I might have left. The easiest thing would be to quickly Google the average life expectancy for women in Sweden (84.9 years). If I look instead at my remaining life expectancy—and maybe even factor in that I have a post-secondary education and was born in Sweden—I might expect a few more years. Also, being a statistician, I know there must be more sophisticated models to use—maybe a predictive model with data points from my family (relatives with known lifespans)? Both my mother and grandmother lived to 79, my father and uncle only 50 and 59, respectively. As a statistician, any prediction I make wouldn’t exactly tilt in my favor, and with only four data points, the margin for error is considerable. I realize I’m slowly descending into that familiar statistical rabbit hole, where life’s biggest uncertainties are reduced to point estimates and confidence intervals.
An average life spans roughly 30,000 days—some get more, others less. Most of us have little say in how many days we are allotted. And here is where I’m supposed to say something profound, that it’s not the number of days that matters, but how we choose to fill them. Yet the truth is, I don’t always make the most of the days I’m given. There are times when I skip the workout I know would do me good, convincing myself I’m too tired. More often than I’d like, I fall short of being the person I strive to be.
That’s when I think of a tattoo a female professional in my field has inked on her forearm: “Who do you want to be today?” It’s a daily reminder that we are granted the chance, each day, to make a choice—about how we spend our time, and about who we choose to become.
My daughter and I often laugh about her candid remark from years past. Now 26 and home only occasionally—mostly during the summer—she still playfully teases me when I head out for drinks or to catch up with friends. “Out again?” And she always knows exactly how I’ll respond.
“Yep,” I reply with a warm grin. “I don’t have much time left.”
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