My wife occasionally jokes that my stressful, high-strung lifestyle could mean I’ll die before her. I’ve hardly paid any attention, until recently. Three weeks ago, we both visited a friend who lost his father on New Year’s Day. The deceased was over 90.
This is the sort of thing my wife often said could happen to me if I didn’t do anything about overworking and under-caring for myself. However frequently she may have warned in the past, hearing it afresh from a man like me with sincere, evangelical zeal, made me stop and think. He was blunt, going back to his own father’s experience. He recalled how the load of raising 10 children crushed his father in an era when male pride and ego made it a taboo for a man to share his burden. It was bad enough that his father had many children, it would have been a mortal blow to his ego to moan about it or outsource his responsibilities to anyone of his fairly successful children. He carried his own cross because “tough men don’t cry” – or ask for help.
“I answered, as matter-of-factly as I could,” he said, “with one word: statistics. I knew that on average, women live longer than men. In fact, 57 percent of all those aged 65 and above are female. By age 85, 67 percent are women. The average lifespan is about five years longer for women than men in the US, and about seven years longer worldwide.”
Data on spousal life expectancy in Africa is scarce. Perhaps one reason for the longevity gap is the tendency, largely for cultural reasons, for African men to marry much younger spouses, sometimes with age differences of up to 10 years or more. The closest data on spousal life expectancy in Africa was a global report by the World Health Organisation in 2019 which said men are more likely to die before women because of unequal access to health services.
There is, however, a culturally peculiar factor, which my telco friend suggested could also be responsible for some women in a number of African societies living longer: the concept of. It’s a form of social bonding loop in which an increasing number of mothers with wealthier children abroad travel the world either to babysit their grandchildren or just to recharge their batteries.
We already know the reason since the days of our fathers.
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