I had a friend who was a nurse for End-of-Life care for awhile, and they had a sheet to recognize when a person’s body was more or less shutting down before death. They didn’t have anything wrong per se - where you could do anything about it. (e.g. anti-biotics or medication, etc) It was, as you said, a gradual decline.
I remember them saying it was important to recognize what was going on, or you would stress yourself and the patient out trying “save” them, when there really wasn’t anything one could do. (I don’t remember the specifics of what to look out for, sorry.)
Since the jubilee, she has been avoiding public appearances. I suppose this is because she had a bad case of old age that only got worse and worse as the days passed.
If I were 96 and the two most recent PMs I had to invite to form government were BoJo and Truss, I think I’d probably be heard to mutter, “I’m getting too old for this sh!t…”
Likewise. I aspire to have my occupation listed as “Professional Man of Leisure”… either that or something along the lines of “[REDACTED] pursuant to Article Three of the Official Secrets Act”
Wow. “Exposure to animate mechanical forces” is definitely how I’m gonna go. I don’t know which of these machines around me is gonna get me, but it will be one of them. I’m excited to find out. Is that weird? I’ve said too much.
Edit: ah, I see I have misinterpreted what they mean by “animate”. I like my definition better, because I swear these machines have agency with how hard they keep trying to hurt me.
" No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church. door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow,. and you shall find me a grave man."
Please ask them what they would put in the ‘cause of death’ box. Others have objected, but I think ‘old age’ is a non-scientific but perfectly understandable term when the exact cause or causes cannot be identified. Sometimes, it is just time to go…
I wonder if it’s a US vs UK thing. In the US, my understanding is you can’t have “old age” as a cause. My grad school cadaver died of “failure to thrive” from dementia- her decline was because she couldn’t take care of herself even well enough to drink water, even under nursing home care. She was 95 when she passed. I think failure to thrive is as close as we would get to the vague “old age” designation.
Cardiac arrest is another completely vague one.
I’ve been to autopsies where I learned that if they truly can’t find a cause of death, even after all the lab tests, they’ll assume there was vascular spasm that cut off blood flow to the heart, and that will be cause of death.
My Grandfather died at 98 after 97.5 years of what could only be described as thriving. The last 6 months brought a sort of total systemic collapse as one thing seemed to go south after another in a sort of domino effect. 5 months-ish of that, mostly bedridden and in need of constant support, he (never having had a hint of age-related cognitive troubles) placed himself in hospice, discontinuing all medications, and a couple weeks later he was gone.
I don’t know what the death cert said but we all say he died of “old age” and it sounds fine to us.
I won’t have a headstone, but a memorial with a monitor and custom BSOD sounds like a plan. 
