How Long Will You Live?

If you remember your Bible at all, you know it says again and again that our days are numbered, that only God knows what those numbers are, and that our earthly demise can come unannounced at any time.

Of course, sometimes we wish we knew just how long we actually have to live. I mean, if we knew we only had a few months left, we might cash in the CDs and probably wouldn't worry about doing winter maintenance on the lawnmower.

Despite the fact that mortality remains a mystery, there's always someone trying to make a science out of predicting how long we have to live, whether by examining the length of lines on our palms, reading the stars or looking into a crystal ball. Now, some high-tech geeks have gotten in on the act with an online tool.

When you go here, you'll find a panel that asks you questions about when you were born and how healthy your lifestyle is. When you fill everything out, it supposedly tells you the exact day you should die.

There are some bugs I should warn you about. Mrs. Muley and I figured out that when it asks you about your "medicine status," it doesn't want to know if you take prescription pills. It's asking if you abuse your body with harmful drugs. The reason why we figured this out is, when we checked "yes," it had us dying fairly quickly. And when Mrs. Muley's 77-year-old mother tried it out and answered in the affirmative to the drugs question, it told her that she should have died back in 1986, a fact that she found both comical and a bit bracing. When all of us changed our medicine status to the negative, however, the program changed its tune and gave us all much longer lives, even raising Mrs. Muley's mother from her early grave.

What did it tell me? Well, I am supposed to die on Saturday, September 18, 2049, which means that Mrs. Muley will have to teach 6th grade Sunday School by herself the next day. As far as Mrs. Muley goes, she is expected to shuffle off this mortal coil on what would have been my 98th birthday, July 11, 2058. That will leave her almost nine years of wild widowhood in her 90s to go out and party without me.

You'll probably either think this is too morbid to mess with, or you'll take it with a big grain of salt, as I did, and have fun with it. If you fall into the latter category, let me know what the mystical cyber swami tells you.