The column marked eighty-five and over

One · What happened

Eight hundred and fifty-four cities and a modeled count

The AP reported the estimate on 22 October. The work came from researchers at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The study covers 854 cities in thirty countries, home to almost 173 million people, or about 40% of the population of those countries. Its authors counted excess deaths, the deaths beyond the number that ordinary temperatures would have produced. Heat deaths often go unrecorded as such, so the authors modeled the count from temperature records for each city and age group. A further 1,508 deaths in late May fall outside the summer total. People who live outside those cities are not in the count.

“The highest mortality is estimated among individuals aged 85 years or older,” the authors write, and that band holds 22,502 of the 50,391 deaths. About 833 fall between the ages of twenty and forty-four, the study’s youngest adult band. Italy had the heaviest toll of any country in the study at 13,303 deaths, with France next at 7,268. Almost a third came in the two weeks from 17 June. Daily temperatures across the cities averaged 5.3 degrees Celsius higher than the 1991 to 2020 mean across that stretch.

National health agencies kept counts of their own for the worst weeks. France’s public health agency counted 5,764 excess heat deaths in the sixteen days from 17 June. Spain’s mortality monitoring system reports 5,123 for the whole summer. The authors call the official numbers broadly consistent with their estimates once the study’s partial coverage is allowed for.

The authors attribute about two-thirds of the deaths to human-caused warming. They put the share at 65%, with an interval of 53% to 73%, and they reached it by comparing this summer’s temperatures with a simulated summer without that warming. The abstract closes on the need for rapid cuts in emissions alongside preparation for heat. Whoever sides with either camp in that argument can find a sentence in the study to cheer or to resent. What governments should do about the cause belongs to voters and legislatures. The model has limits. The authors list them themselves, among them exposure curves drawn from data for the years 2000 to 2019 and an assumption that vulnerability to heat holds constant through the whole year.

Two · What it is doing

What the age column is for

On his phone, a man comes to the AP’s line about people aged eighty-five or older and settles it in about a second. The table gives him 22,502 of the 50,391. He files them under the very old, who were frail already and had little time left. A small release comes with the thought, since he is forty-four. The release has a basis in the table, where only about 833 of the dead fall between twenty and forty-four.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Each of the 22,502 was made in that image, and age does not fade it. Weighing a life by the years left in it is partiality. A man can carry that sort of partiality for years and nobody around him will see it, himself included. The sorting reaches the man who does it. The column he steps out of is the one he is walking toward.

The fight over the cause offers a second place to set the number down. A reader who meets the phrase human-caused warming knows within a line whether he will cheer or bristle. After that the dead are evidence in an argument he already held. Gloating and contempt come cheaply there and keep his eyes on the other side and off the age column. Neither escape works unless the study hands him a statistic with no name and no room attached to it.

The study does not say where any of the 22,502 died, or who was in the house when it happened. The paper reports ages and temperatures run through a model. Into that gap go the reader’s own old people, the ones he has not phoned since spring. The old guilt about a call he did not make comes up under the new figure, and it is louder than the number. The question he is dodging is smaller than the statistic and much easier to answer.

Three · Where the ground is

Eighty-five, and he asked for a hill

Caleb told Joshua at Gilgal, “And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old” (Joshua 14:10). Moses had sent him to spy out Canaan at forty. The LORD had kept him alive through the forty-five years since. He asked for the hill country of the Anakim and said, “It may be that the LORD will be with me” (Joshua 14:12). Nothing in the account promises a reader any number of years or a strong old age.

What Solomon set beside the strength of the young

“The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair,” Solomon wrote (Proverbs 20:29). Solomon gave the young and the old a glory each. The verse puts no price on the years that remain, and it names the old man’s splendor as something any passer-by can see on his head. Filing the dead under the very old keeps a reader’s eyes on a column.

The tradition that kept a son’s money

Jesus told the scribes and Pharisees who had come down from Jerusalem that they had found a respectable way around the fifth commandment (Mark 7:10–13). A man could declare his property Corban, a gift set apart for God. The declaration released him from helping his father or mother with it. Jesus said they were “making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down” (Mark 7:13). The excuse in Mark was religious. A son reading a study reaches for a statistical one. Both give a man a category to stand behind at the moment when someone he knows needs a visit.

What Paul said about the body

“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you,” Paul wrote to the Romans (Romans 8:11). To the Corinthians he wrote that “if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Corinthians 5:1). Both verses rest on Christ, who was crucified for sinners and whose tomb in Jerusalem was found empty. The promise in Romans is made to those in whom the Spirit dwells. Anyone in the column who belonged to Christ is held in that promise, and so is every believer who will one day stand in that column himself. A congregation carries that comfort in meals and visits to the housebound long after the news has moved on.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

At eighty-five Caleb asked for a hill, and this week’s task for the reader is smaller, one old person in one house.

1. 01

   Find the last date you sat down with an old person.

   Pick the oldest person you know, a parent or the neighbor with the hedge. Write the name on a slip of paper with the date you last sat in the same room. If that date is more than a month back, put a visit on the calendar for this week and write the hour beside the name. The fifth commandment says, “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12). Take the slip to a pastor or a biblical counselor and say what the date shows.

2. 02

   Ask who holds a key to the house.

   On the visit, ask the old person which neighbor has a key and who phones each day. Copy the answers onto an index card with your own number and the doctor’s, then tape it inside a kitchen cabinet where the old person will find it. Solomon wrote, “Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away” (Proverbs 27:10).

3. 03

   Hang a thermometer where the old person sleeps.

   Buy a room thermometer for the bedroom and set it where the eye falls on it from the bed. Agree on one temperature at which you will phone. Add that number to the card beside the others. James asked the churches what good it does to say “Go in peace, be warmed and filled” to a brother or sister in need and give nothing for the body (James 2:15–16).

4. 04

   Ask the church office for the members past eighty-five.

   Call the office this week and ask for the list of members past eighty-five. Ask who has visited each of them this month. If there is no list, offer to start one with the pastor and keep it current. In the daily distribution the Hellenist widows were being overlooked (Acts 6:1). In response the apostles told the believers in Jerusalem to pick out seven men to see to it (Acts 6:3).

5. 05

   Take a child along on the next visit.

   Bring a grandchild or the neighbor’s boy along for the hour. Ask the old person to tell the child one thing God has done in a long life, and listen to the answer. Before you leave, pray over that person by name. Pray the psalmist’s words, “Do not cast me off in the time of old age” (Psalm 71:9). A second proverb reads, “Grandchildren are the crown of the aged” (Proverbs 17:6).