Has dying of old age died of science-induced obsolescence?

The past month has been a particularly brutal one for my family with the deaths of multiple members.  These deaths were a mixture of expected and kind of unexpected, and like any death, have brought about discussion, reflection, and introspection.

When loved ones die, even those who are quite old, we want to know why.  Knowing can be difficult, because in some cases the death could have been prevented, or you wonder if it could have been; you wish you had known, you would have bugged him more about drinking or smoking or his cholesterol, or nagged her more about taking her medicine.  My grandmother had numerous health problems, which grew worse during the last few years, but as I was growing up and she was already well into old age, she was supremely fit, swam several times a week, had a healthy diet, and climbed ridiculously non-regulation stairs up to her apartment on a daily basis.  She was in her nineties when she died three weeks ago, and upon her death, in the conversations that arise from grief and from memories and from the need to have both meaningful and pleasant conversations in a time of heartache, my father and I attempted to hash out a line between her symptoms — between those of senescence and those of illness.  The more we talked, the more we came back to the idea that people no longer want to accept old age as a cause of death; that our scientific and technological progress, combined with our natural curiosity and need to know and categorize, necessitates an exact cause of death —whatever it was that caused the heart to permanently cease beating at that exact moment— regardless of whether or not it gives the most accurate picture of why death has occurred in general.

I’ve been scanning current obituaries for Detroit and from the New York Times, and for those remembering people of age 79 or older, a specific cause of death, frequently cancer, is usually given.  I found one in the NYT, for a man who was 93 –one year older than my grandmother– that did say he died of natural causes; ditto for one in Detroit Free Press of a former cop, 94.  But another in the NYT, of a man who was 102, gave cancer as the cause of death.  At 102?  Are they sure?  It’s not impossible; people do live to be 115.  But at 102, isn’t it possible that the cancer was secondary, if not in this particular person than in others?  Is the idea that sometimes we just die of natural causes, even if we do have other health problems, something that was reserved for a more primitive people without the know-how to find an exact cause of death?  Is the idea becoming too folksy for a culture with our scientific and technological knowledge?  It’s as if we’ve convinced ourselves that if it weren’t for things like cancer, we would all live to be 120, if not forever.

Out of the health problems from which my grandmother suffered, any or all of them could have been a key factor in her death — that is, her death in the moment that it happened.  Elderly people do die of things that, if absent, would likely have allowed their host to live longer.  But even people in their nineties (or eighties, or even seventies, if we’re going by reported life expectancies) in optimal health probably won’t be around for more than a few more years.  Because we age, and we die.   Our bodies can only last for so long.

So, the question at which my dad and I arrived was this: Isn’t there be a point where a cause of death may really be just secondary, a side effect of old age?