It was 2006, and I was in the Philippines meeting my future wife. Being a thoughtful hostess, she treated me to a tour of Bucas Grande Island, a hidden gem of Northern Mindanao in the province we now inhabit. And there, tucked away in that natural wonderland, was the little-known stingless jellyfish sanctuary of Tojoman Lagoon.
“My God,” I thought, slipping into the ocean from the paddleboat we’d rented. They were everywhere; swarms of swirling, stunning, see-through spheres rubbing against us with seeming affection. “Oh my God,” I repeated to myself in awed wonder, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
What I didn’t know then is that they were also immortal. That information came to me via a recent Wall Street Journal article about a team of Spanish scientists mapping the genetic code of a jellyfish known for its ability to be literally reborn.
“Dubbed the immortal jellyfish,” the paper reports, “the tiny sea creature can turn its biological clock backward and revert to a clump of juvenile cells…” In other words, when the going gets tough, they simply become newborns.
Having just celebrated my 74th birthday, I must admit to a certain interest in this subject. It recently came up, in fact, during a telephone conversation with my 38-year-old daughter.
“Dad,” she said, “I have to ask you a question, and I hope you won’t get mad.” It seems her mother-in-law—slightly older than me—had undergone a nearly fatal heart surgery that raised uncomfortable questions. “So I was wondering,” my daughter went on cautiously, “whether, when you die, you’ll leave anything to me or only to your other family?”
The question is more complicated than meets the eye because, while my oldest daughter is nearing 40, my youngest isn’t yet three. Not to mention a 12-year-old son whose mother is only slightly older than the daughter asking questions.
“Of course I will,” I quickly assured her. “We’ll just have to work out the details.”
The truth is that I intend to walk my youngest daughter down the aisle. Or, more likely, have her push me down the aisle in a wheelchair. Either way, I don’t expect to die anytime soon.
Ah, but recent headlines have called that assumption into question: Life expectancy in the United States, it seems, has experienced a precipitous decline. While the average American lived to 79 in 2019, according to the New York Times, that dipped to 76 in 2021. The drop was “historic,” one expert told the paper, attributing it to COVID and other factors including a rise in accidental deaths and drug overdoses.
But, hey, I don’t live in the US anymore; perhaps that’s cause for optimism. Well, not exactly: Philippine life expectancy, it turns out, is just 71.66, a number I’ve already exceeded.
Ok let’s discuss quality. “I’d seen those ‘over the hill’ birthday cards on store shelves, poking fun at crackling crones and forgetful geezers,” one of those crackling crones wrote in a Boston Globe essay published last year. “We live in a youth-obsessed society… Age discrimination pervades every aspect of our culture…”
Indeed, it’s true; here in the Philippines I’ve felt more respected, honored, cared for—even admired—than I ever did as a senior citizen in the United States. And yet there is still that unquenchable thirst for more.
Perhaps it’s an impossible dream. Even jellyfish, one expert averred, are not immune to misfortune. “The fate of everything in the ocean… is to be eaten at some point,” insists Monty Graham, a professor of integrative biology and director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography.
Not entirely unlike humans.
And yet, and yet, do I still want to carry on forever? You bet—just let me soar like a jellyfish.
________________________________________________________
David Haldane’s latest book, “A Tooth in My Popsicle and Other Ebullient Essays on Becoming Filipino,” is now available on Amazon and Lazada. A former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, where he contributed to two Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, Haldane is an award-winning author, journalist and radio broadcaster with homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Northern Mindanao, Philippines. This column appears weekly in the Mindanao gold Star Daily.
