The literature I've seen - notably Finch, Senescence and the Genome - plot the Gompertz curve as a pure exponential that falls off at the end. It gives a really nice fit to the exponential almost up to the end. Then - sorry, this is the opposite of what is claimed in the post - it falls off! That is, if you live to be about 100, the chance of your dying stops increasing exponentially.

(As George Burns said, "The secret to living forever is to live to be 100. Very few people die after the age of 100.")

This suggests (doesn't prove, just suggests) that our mortality rate is adaptive. The Gompertz curve falls off at the high end because it doesn't get enough data points to evolve a proper fit there.