I don’t know if it’s so much as holding on as letting go. Like I doubt there’s any way to prevent death by any amount of willpower, but I’m sure a lack of willpower can if not cause at least maybe hasten death. Though admittedly I’m still alive so that’s probably not true either.

I doubt it. It’s the sort of thing that would be prone to confirmation bias. If someone dies at an opportune moment, it makes a nice story and is repeated. If someone dies randomly in spite of something they’re looking forward to, it tends not to get mentioned.

That being said, the placebo effect is real, so it’s not impossible.

*dying

I’ve seen the opposite being true… A loved one dies after a lifetime together and the other person no longer has the will to keep going. I think you can keep going as long as you have the desire and your body doesn’t give out on you (and your insurance company doesn’t deny you a life-saving procedure because they think you’re too old and need to die).

Kinda related. My aunt, my father’s sister, was quite ill and the doctors were telling us it could be any moment that she passes on. That “any moment” ended up stretching into a week. My father was also quite ill for other reasons, and it was difficult to transport him. We finally arranged for him to be able to go visit his sister after this week of "any moment"s, and he got to hold her hand. Less than an hour later, she passed.

I don’t think there’s any way to do a non biased study.

Having said that — there sure are a ton of anecdotal evidence

My FIL was dying in hospice and held on until his wife and daughter told him they were going to be okay.

Keith Olberman tells the story of how he was reading a story to his dad, and he says as soon as he finished the story his dad took one last breath and passed.

I truly hope Mr Carter could remain with us for about another month and a half.

In my work I have followed the process of maybe a hundred people dying of various things that we in everyday language sort of collectively call “dying of old age”. Usually there’s a couple of serious conditions underlying, and a general physical frailty. This is anecdotal, but my experience is that people make a conscious effort to get up in the morning and eat food and move around in the ways they can, until they enter a downward spiral where they for example eat less than they should, which means they get tired, they then stay more in bed, leading to less eating, etc. Something relatively minor like a cold, an aching tooth, a fall, a UTI, etc, can accelerate this quickly. Until they have shorter time awake and more time drifting in and out of consciousness, if they are in pain they will get something for the pain, which usually makes them even less responsive. Then eventually the body starts shutting down, they stop urinating etc, and some days later they die.

In this overall process, there’s a time when making an effort to eat and to be active will prolong life, but it seems so easy for them to just… let go, and soon they will be dead. We (the patient + the health care team) usually talk about this at least once, to know what their wishes are. What surprised me in the beginning was that most old people I’ve talked to say that they are done, so for example if the heart stops they don’t want attempts to save them.

All this together, I think old frail people can “hang in there” for a while if they feel motivated, but of course anything can happen at any time anyways.

There really isn’t much in the way of empirical evidence regarding this. It would be difficult to set up studies and experiments to even get to get that evidence.

So, you’re stuck with anecdotal info.

On that level, absolutely. I did health care as my main job from 92 until 2008. Nurse’s assistant.

During that time, my two biggest patient bases were geriatric and hospice. People that were dying, in other words.

The patients that had no dementia lasted longer than the ones that did, in terms of time from needing an NA to keep them cared for to time of death. The ones that had a goal, a thing they wanted to see happen, or to do, absolutely did better not only in terms of time, but in how they managed their life until they died.

Something as nebulous as “will”, that we don’t even have a way to quantify at all is difficult to impossible to credit with anything at all. But we know that the mind and body influence each other. But I am convinced that we have some ability to maintain our lives to some degree in extremis. The only question is how much, and how much of that is individual.

Looking back at all of it, things blur, but there were so many patients with terminal cancer that just didn’t die while moving towards a goal, that died within days of that goal being met. And it really didn’t matter what that goal was. Could be something as minor as seeing crocuses bloom again, to something like seeing their child married or graduated. But it happened so fucking often it’s a little scary.

When my dad was in hospice, laying in a coma, I poured my heart out to him saying good bye and all that. The next day he died. Might be a coincidence; it might not. I like to think that he got closure from my ramblings the night before.

My friend Mary said her grandpa just stayed alive to spite her mother, he was mean. Should have been dead for years but hung on to make her take care of him.

On the other hand, my mom’s dad shut himself in his house, laid down and died when his wife (my mom’s mom) finally divorced him after decades of abuse. Not killed himself using anything, just died. She lived for her happiest years after that, just sitting on the porch with her boyfriend shelling pecans.

i can’t source it and it’s tangential but i do remember hearing about some study that looked at people’s reactions to their cancer diagnosis

• some people react with melancholy
• some people react by entering into a strict regime to give themselves that maximum chance of surviving, like heavily controlled diet, exercise, etc.
• some people react with outrage and denial, just refusing to allow the fact that they have cancer alter their lives

and the outcome was that the second groups had better outcomes than the first, but more interestingly, the third group also had better outcomes than the first

I feel like if there’s any truth to this, it’s for the other way around: you can give up on life, and your body gives up with you. If you don’t give up, and your body still has something to give, you stay alive.

Motivation is a powerful drug. I’ll say that much.

My grandmother, at 95 years old, told me she was only staying alive long enough so that she could vote for Trump. She did vote for Trump in 2016, and then died a few months later.

I think it can have positive benefits. It can’t change that your terminal cancer is aggressively killing you, but it certainly would improve your odds (of lasting another day) vs giving up.

There are quite a few anecdotal cases of people dying shortly after retirement, or shortly after a spouse dies. Death is complicated and sometimes people “hold on” for weird and unexplained reasons.

People in terminal condition have a habit of dying when loved ones are out of the room.

Does Jimmy Carter feel like this election is something major he needs to accomplish before he goes? Maybe. Or maybe he just keeps busy with all of his volunteer work and other philanthropy, which is keeping him around.

Maybe he’s just one of the lucky ones that happens to be healthy and sharp at 100 for reasons we don’t know.