The value of a life

Tamara called today. She’s on her way to her friend Sarah’s house.

You probably won’t ever meet Sarah. She’s been fighting cancer for about three years and it looks as if she’s losing.

I don’t know Sarah very well. I’ve only met her once. But I do know what an extraordinary person she is. It isn’t fair that she’s had to fight cancer. And no matter how long she lives, she’s the kind of person the world will be worse off without. And that brings me to the thing I’ve been pondering since I spoke to Tamara. How do you value a life? How do you value anything?

We all know easy answers. The reason for money is because it acts as a form of measurement. A Mercedes is more valuable than a Hyundai, and money lets you know just how much more valuable it is.

When it comes to lives, we apply the same reasoning, but instead of money we use time. A person who dies at 80 is twice as fortunate as someone who dies at 40.

The problem is, that isn’t quite true. Plenty of people waste the 80 years they get, while people like Sarah make the most of their 40. And I suppose that goes to the shame of Sarah’s situation. Someone like her would make the most of 80, so why is it that she might not get more than 40?

Tamara had the notion that maybe people have a sort of allotment of value to their lives, and Sarah, having given so much to so many, is simply out of life. I don’t know. As much as I want there to be some sort of justice to it all, I don’t believe there is. I believe that some people, like Sarah, simply get the short end of the stick.

When we first went to the pediatrician, he asked your mom and me if we wanted to have blood tests in order to figure out the odds that you would be susceptible to genetic diseases. They gave us a pamphlet explaining all the horrible things you could be born with—most of them saying that if you got whatever the disease was that you wouldn’t likely live past five or three or whatever.

We decided not to get the tests.

We feel that it doesn’t matter whether you’re born with one of those diseases or not. Either way, we want you to make the most of whatever life you have. Knowing that there’s an 80% chance that you won’t live to be 12 doesn’t change the fact that we want you, or that we want to make your life as valuable as we can, whether it’s 12 years long or 80.

I guess we already know the answer about how to value a life, at least for ourselves. But that doesn’t make the answer any less painful when we’re faced with the reality that it doesn’t last as long as we’d want.

All we know is that it isn’t time that makes a life worth living, any more than it’s a stack of money that makes a car worth driving. Those things are just feeble attempts to put a number to something. If you let the number replace the thing it measures, you’ve lost sight of what value is.