The Two Kinds of Decay

Corroboration

I met a woman who took steroids for eleven years — thyroid cancer — and I asked her when she felt she had recovered.

She said she spent her thirties expecting to die of thyroid cancer and then turned forty. A year later she began a weight-loss program.

When she decided her obesity was a bigger problem than her cancer, she knew the cancer was over.

Having spent my twenties expecting to die, I turned thirty and arrived in the afterlife with nothing left to do. I wrote to an older friend, asking him what I should do now that I was thirty, having spent all my twenties expecting to die.

He wrote back that I should shoot for thirty-one.