A story I like to tell.
Being chronically ill I have to have a blood test every few months to see if anything has changed. A few months ago I went for the test, the nurse looks at my details on the computer and says, "Seventy-three, you look really well for your age."
Now I look like something that crept out of the crypt; greyish coloured skin, jet-black rings under the bloodshot eyes, a shambling wreck of a body. I couldn't really let her remark go unquestioned. "Do you really think so?" I asked. "I think I look pretty rough."
"Well, look at it this way", she said, "At your age most people are dead."
My own attitude is similar, apart from the 'living = well' equation. I may look and feel dog rough, but I'm alive.
Since then I've read that life expectancy for people living in my home town is 72 years, so I am a bit past the mean. Does that place me among the elect? Have I outlived most of my concitoyens of the same age? I know that I'm missing several contemporaries, friends, comrades, even a sister born seven years after me.
"La vida es una tómbola" (Manu Chao)

All doom and gloom at the moment, I fear.