As my 90+ YO (now dead) aunt put it to me, “90 is enough!”. She lived on her own and was relatively healthy right up to the end, but had no fairy-tale beliefs about the joys and virtues of extreme old age. I once asked her, after she made such a proclamation, why anyone who, like her, wasn’t put away in an old folks home or suffering from illness/injury would prefer The End arrive, and she said “there’s just so much you can’t do anymore”. I took that to mean a) activities that you are newly physically incapable of (say, rock climbing), b) activities that are now too difficult and/or dangerous (say, solo long-distance hiking), and c) activities and life-paths that are practically-speaking now closed off to you, like finding one’s soul-mate, traveling the world w/same, getting an advanced degree, being hired-into and rising through the ranks of some admired org … all the sort of stuff that might still seem perfectly possible in one’s 20s/30s/40s/even 50s. I can see how even in the best of cases, the world slowly but surely crushing your dreams and closing you out of any potential joys could bring you around to the belief that ‘90 is enough’.

Yeah. A bigger deal than the titanic is that she most likely met people who fought for the south in the Civil War. It ended in 1865, only 44 years before she was born. An 18 year old soldier in the civil war would have been about 62 when she was born. They would have been old men, but she probably ran into a few of them in her life.

Aside from that, the Tulsa Race Massacre would have happened when she was a pre-teen. Her teenage years would have been filled with countless stories of lynchings. Then she would have had to deal with the great depression in her 20s, then WWII in her 30s.

On the other hand, think of how many racist pieces of shit that treated her badly in her life that she outlived.