The Mortality Conference

Three hundred actuaries at the Fairmont for four days, and the mood in the room during the session on cause-of-death coding was genuinely festive.

She presented on urban longevity. Living within four hundred metres of green space is worth 2.3 years, which sounds like a lot until you hear what a highway costs you.

I sat in the back running numbers on whether the ring was a ring or a countermeasure. Conference creeps are a known hazard and the literature suggests the ring works.

At the urn she went for the decaf.

"Regular after forty is asking for standard deviation."

We're bad at risk, people who do risk. We know how things fail. We have tables.

At lunch she sat down without asking. "Your paper on suicide rates in post-industrial cities. That was almost writing."

Montreal spikes in February and bottoms out in June. Everyone assumes it's the cold. It isn't the cold, it's the length of the thing.

The conference wine tasted like a settlement.

"We're professional pessimists," she said. "We calculate how it ends. It's the job description."

That night in the bar she took the ring off and put it on the napkin. "Divorced. Officially, statistically, irreversibly."

Two people who price catastrophe for a living, doing this anyway, at a hotel bar at one in the morning after a session on pension solvency.

Friday closed with the hundred-year projections. We sat at the back. Her hand found mine in the dark somewhere around slide forty, which was a fan chart, and the fan was very wide at the far end, the way they always are.