Contra indications

When I was an analyst covering the life insurance industry, I remember at some conference in Vegas somebody saying to me that people get either Alzheimer's or cancer, but not both. As more and more people in my orbit pass away, primarily friends' parents but increasingly contemporaries too, that seems anecdotally true. So using the power of the interweb, I looked it up, and lo and behold there is actual research supporting this "inverse comorbitidy" and even of a potential molecular reason why both tend not to develop.

There seems to be an almost divine mercy to this. Either there is cancer, causing a lot of pain to the dying person, accompanied often by great cognitive lucidity and presence (when not addled by chemo). So that families are able to take leave of one another and, when the person has passed, a sense that at least the burden of suffering has been lifted. Or there is Alzheimer's/dementia, in which case those left behind suffer from a lack of closure and from the protraction of a shadow of the beloved and also sometimes with struggles in the earlier stages when cognition is slipping and there is denial and resistance, but when she passes it is also a relief.

Of course the inverse comorbidity is not absolute, but it seems to be largely true. As the affluent adopt better and better health habits and chronic diseases recede as causes of death, these seem to be becoming more frequent paths out of this mortal coil. We come to place where two roads diverge, and the path chosen for us makes all the difference. In the short term.