The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Decline and Fall (iii)

Samuel Johnson wrote to a younger friend, “When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine what I am now.”

At age 50, your ability to perceive vibrations in the lower part of your body is significantly decreased. The nerves that conduct information signals to the brain are also diminished. Every decade after age 50, your brain loses 2 percent of its weight. You have difficulty learning things and you remember less and less. Memory per se—the actual encoding of information—isn’t diminished in a healthy, older person, but retrieval can be an excruciatingly slow process and take many more attempts. Older people are more susceptible to distraction, have trouble coordinating multiple tasks, and have decreased attention spans. In simple tasks and common situations, the old do fine, but when exercise or other stress is added, they often struggle. Perhaps this is why some older people, finding it harder to cope, tend to start searching for comfort rather than excitement.

Evelyn Waugh said, “Old people are more interesting than young. One of the particular points of interest is to observe how after fifty they revert to the habits, mannerisms, and opinions of their parents, however wild they were in youth.”

“At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves,” said George Orwell.

Virgil, author of The Aeneid, died at 50.

As you age, your eye lens clouds over (cataract). The cells of the optic nerve can be damaged by glaucoma or macular degeneration. Forty-two percent of people ages 52 to 64, 73 percent of people 65 to 74, and 92 percent of people over 75 need reading glasses. My father, after having cataract surgery 20 years ago, didn’t really need glasses anymore.

Shakespeare died at 52.

John Wayne said, “I’m fifty-three years old and six foot four. I’ve had three wives, five children, and three grandchildren. I love good whiskey. I still don’t understand women, and I don’t think there is any man who does.”

You gain weight until age 55, at which point you begin to shed weight (specifically, lean tissue, muscle mass, water, and bone). More fat now accumulates in your thighs and less in your abdomen. Your extremities become thinner and your trunk thicker. Middle-aged spread isn’t only the result of increased fatty tissue; it’s also caused by losing muscle tone and your skin literally thinning out as each skin cell loses its robustness.

Dante died at 56.

Between 50 and 60, your visual memory declines slightly; after 70, it declines substantially.

Noel Coward, advising a middle-aged friend to stop dieting, said, “This is a foolish vanity. Youth is no longer essential or even becoming. Rapidly approaching fifty-seven, I find health and happiness more important than lissomeness. To be fat is bad and slovenly, unless it is beyond your control, but however slim you get you will still be the age you are and no one will be fooled, so banish this nonsense once and for all. Conserve your vitality by eating enough and enjoying it.”

“The years between fifty and fifty-seven are the hardest,” said T. S. Eliot. “You are being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.”

In late middle age, the skin in your hands becomes less sensitive to touch. Your skin cells regenerate less often. The skin weakens and dries, the number of sebaceous glands declines dramatically, and all of the tissues of the skin undergo some change: you get wrinkles and gray hair. Wrinkles don’t come from age, though. They come from sunlight, which slowly maims the face, causing wrinkles, mottling, and loose skin. Although the skin loses elasticity and heals wounds more slowly with advancing age, it never completely wears out.

At 59, Neil Young said, “When you’re in your twenties, you and your world are the biggest thing, and everything revolves around what you’re doing. Now I realize I’m a leaf floating along on top of some river.” My father hates this way of thinking, finds it defeatist.

Your blood cholesterol increases. The ability of the blood to maintain a normal level of glucose declines with age. At 60, you’ve lost 25 percent of the volume of saliva you normally secrete for food; it becomes more difficult to digest heavy meats.

When you’re 60, you’re 20 percent less strong than you were in middle age; at 70, you’re 40 percent less strong. You lose more strength in the muscles of your legs than in your hands and arms. You also tend to lose your fast-twitch abilities—a sprinter’s contractions—much more rapidly than your slow-twitch abilities—a walker’s contractions. (Some of this decline can be stalled by exercise, but by no means all. As a rule, the variability between individuals increases with age: almost all younger people will have, for instance, the same kidney function and be able to solve a problem at approximately the same speed, but with older people, some will be normal, others will be very impaired, and most will be somewhere in between.)

Emerson said, “’Tis strange that it is not in vogue to commit hara-kiri, as the Japanese do, at sixty. Nature is so insulting in her hints and notices, does not pull you by the sleeve, but pulls out your teeth, tears off your hair in patches, steals your eyesight, twists your face into an ugly mask, in short, puts all contumelies upon you, without in the least abating your zeal to make a good appearance, and all this at the same time that she is moulding the new figures around you into wonderful beauty which of course is only making your plight worse.”

The year Zola died, he said, at 62, “I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.”

The PR flak Harlan Boll defends his lying about his celebrity clients’ ages by saying, “The American public doesn’t really forgive people for getting older.” Which is of course true. Jackie Kennedy said if she knew she was going to get cancer at 65, she wouldn’t have done all those sit-ups. In jail, O. J. Simpson bemoaned to his girlfriend that the once admirable, apple-like shape of his posterior had collapsed into middle-aged decrepitude. Gravity sucks.

By the time you reach 65, you’ve lost 30 to 40 percent of your aerobic power. The walls of your heart thicken, and you’re more likely to develop coronary disease. Sixty percent of 60-year-old men, and the same percentage of 80-year-old women, have a major narrowing in at least one coronary artery. A stiffening in the walls of the major arteries results in a progressive increase in blood pressure, which imposes an increasing load on the heart. Since the heart has to work harder for each heartbeat and use more energy, the overall efficiency of the cardiovascular system drops significantly. One and a half million Americans suffer a myocardial infarction each year. Seventy percent of heart attacks occur at home. If you survive a heart attack, you’re virtually guaranteed to die eventually of a heart-related illness. My father had a heart attack at 86 (more on this later), had his heart stop beating for 30 seconds during electroconvulsive therapy at 92, and several months ago he was hugely, irrationally afraid that his upcoming colonoscopy (he’d had some bloody stools, and his doctor wanted to figure out what was triggering his ceaseless seesawing between diarrhea and constipation) would cause his heart to stop for good.

At 65, you’ve lost one ounce of your three-pound brain and one-tenth of your brain cells. The motor area of the frontal cortex loses 50 percent of its neurons, as does the area in the back controlling vision and the area on the sides controlling physical sensation. The gyri—the twisting, raised convolutions in the cortex within which you do much of your thinking—experience the greatest atrophy. The brain of a 90-year-old is the same size as that of a 3-year-old. The details of the new Medicare drug benefits program perplex and annoy everyone, including me, but they’ve completely defeated my dad; he no longer grasps concepts he used to grasp. His mental operations do seem, on many channels, newly simple.

Joints age owing to deterioration in cartilage, tendons, and fluid. The fluid contained within joints begins to thin. More friction is created. Nearly everyone age 65 or older shows some abnormality of the joints; one out of two people has moderate to severe abnormality. One-third of American women over 65 have collapsed vertebrae as a result of bone thinning, or osteoporosis. The more bone you have as an adult, the less likely you are to develop osteoporosis. (Generally speaking, it’s best and easiest to head off aging’s ravages when you’re young, which is exactly when you aren’t thinking about them.)

When you’re a young adult, the reflex that tells you it’s time to urinate occurs when your bladder is half full. For people over age 65, the message isn’t received until your bladder is nearly full.

Five percent of the U.S. population live in a nursing home. When I asked my father a dozen years ago whether he’d ever want to consider moving into a retirement home in Seattle, he replied, “I don’t know how long I’ll be working. Right now, I can get out there and cover the games (basketball, baseball, football, etc.) and turn in two or three pieces each week. I’m not down to my last two bits. Still have some money in my savings account, plus the money I get from Social Security and the annuity I bought in 1977, plus what I get each month from the paper. I’m like the man betting in Las Vegas who says, ‘I hope I can break even. I sure could use the money.’ I miss you and Laurie and Natalie and Paula and Wayne [my sister and brother-in-law, who live forty miles south of Seattle in Tacoma] more than words can say. But life at Woodlake offers me many activities. And there’s also the god-awful Seattle weather. I look on the retirement home as a terminal stop. We old-timers joke about those places, calling them ‘God’s waiting room.’ Where the average age is deceased. (Gallows humor.) So I would like to spend the rest of my days in my own apartment here in Woodlake. For one, I couldn’t afford a retirement home. I’m not ready for that type of living. Or spending. Here I quote again from my steno notebook of memorable phrases (don’t know who wrote it or where I read it): ‘Each man picks his own hill to die on.’ My ‘hill’ certainly would not be a retirement home. Ideally, it would be out on a golf course. Bing Crosby and a couple of other well-known people have died on golf courses. Nice way to go if you’ve lived a good share of years. Not fifty or even sixty.”

There are now more people in the United States over 65 than ever before. Only 30 percent of people ages 75 to 84 report disabilities—the lowest percentage ever reported.

Five to 8 percent of people over 65 have dementia; half of those in their 80s have it. One of many dementias and the most common, Alzheimer’s affects 1 in 10 Americans over 65, 1 in 2 people over 85. Alzheimer’s patients are more likely to have had a low-stress (i.e., mentally unstimulating) job. Zero sign, though, as yet of Alzheimer’s in my father: he’s still reading and rereading Robert Caro on Robert Moses, Philip Roth on Newark, Arnold Rampersad on Jackie Robinson, Gar Alperovitz on the decision to drop the atom bomb.

According to Noel Coward, “The pleasures that once were heaven / Look silly at sixty-seven.”

At 68, Edmund Wilson said, “The knowledge that death is not so far away, that my mind and emotions and vitality will soon disappear like a puff of smoke, has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one’s own efforts and achievements and passions.”

“Tomorrow I shall be sixty-nine,” William Dean Howells wrote to Mark Twain, “but I do not seem to care. I did not start the affair, and I have not been consulted about it at any step. I was born to be afraid of dying, but not of getting old. Age has many advantages, and if old men were not so ridiculous, I should not mind being one. But they are ridiculous, and they are ugly. The young do not see this so clearly as we do, but some day they will.”

Thomas Pynchon says, “When we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death—how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn’t so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted.”

Fifteen years ago, on a gorgeous spring day, my father and I jogged down my block. A school bus of middle-school girls rounded the corner. He puffed out his chest, let out his kick, put himself on display. Rather than ooh or aah or whistle or applaud or ignore him, several girls stuck their heads out the windows in the back of the bus and did the cruelest thing possible: they laughed.

“You’re only young,” AC/DC sing on Back in Black, “but you’re gonna die.”

In your late 60s, you eat less. Your metabolic rate decreases slightly. Men lose 3 percent of their skeletal weight per decade (my father now weighs 150); women lose 8 percent. Throughout adult life, men lose about 15 percent of their total mineral density; women, 30 percent. The diameter of your forearm shrinks, as does the diameter of your calves.

The density of your skin’s circulatory systems—veins, capillaries, arterioles—is reduced, which is why old people feel cold sooner. Also, your skin functions less well as a barrier because the skin is thinner—like wearing too light a coat. As you age, your facial skin temperature falls. For older people, a comfortable temperature is 10 to 15 degrees higher than it is for a younger person.

Each day of your adult life, you lose 30,000 to 50,000 nerves and 100,000 nerve cells. Over time, your heart, lungs, and prostate enlarge. The level of potassium in your body declines. After age 70, your ability to absorb calcium is dramatically reduced.

Tolstoy wrote to his wife, Sonia, who was 16 years younger than he was, “The main thing is that just as the Hindus, when they are getting on toward sixty, retire to the forests, and every religious man wants to dedicate the last years of his life to God and not to jokes, puns, gossip, and tennis [jokes, puns, gossip, and tennis: paging Milton Shildcrout…], so I, who am entering my seventieth year, long with all my heart and soul for this tranquility and solitude.” He died at 82 when he collapsed in a train station, in flight from Sonia, with whom he’d been quarreling.

At age 70, the mass of your corneal lens is three times larger than it was when you were 20, which causes you to be more farsighted; after age 70, you become more nearsighted. The lens becomes thicker and heavier with age, reducing your ability to focus on close-up objects. Your sensitivity to contrast declines, as does your ability to adapt to changes in light. As you get older, the corneal hue takes on a yellow tint, reducing your ability to discriminate among green, blue, and violet. Blues will get darker for you and yellows will get less bright. You’ll see less violet. As painters age, they use less dark blue and violet.

Sir Francis Chichester, after sailing around the world at age 66, said, “If your try fails, what does that matter? All life is a failure in the end. The thing to do is to get sport out of trying.”

Men and women over age 75 suffer ten times the incidence of strokes as do those between 55 and 59.

The professionally world-weary Gore Vidal said, apropos of having to sell his house on a hill in Ravello, Italy, because he was no longer able to climb the steps, “Everything has its time in life, and in a year, I’ll be 80. I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.”

When you’re very young, your ability to smell is so intense as to be nearly overwhelming, but by the time you’re in your 80s, not only has your ability to smell declined significantly but you yourself no longer even have a distinctive odor. You can stop using deodorants. You’re vanishing.

“I think the old need touching,” says the social historian Ronald Blythe. “They have reached a stage of life when they need kissing, hugging. And nobody touches them except the doctor.” At 82, E. M. Forster said, “I am rather prone to senile lechery just now—want to touch the right person in the right place, in order to shake off bodily loneliness.” The last few years, whenever I hug my father hello or good-bye, he cries and cries, shuddering.

Voltaire wrote to a friend, “I beg you not to say that I am only eighty-two; it is a cruel calumny. Even if it be true, according to an accursed baptismal record, that I was born in November 1694, you must always agree with me that I am in my eighty-third year.” When you’re very old, you want to be thought even older than you actually are: it’s an accomplishment. At 67, my father purchased an annuity that he would have broken even on if he’d died at 76; having outlived the actuarial projections by 21 years so far, he tells everyone he meets how much he’s made on it. He buttonholes strangers and informs them that he’s only 3 years from the century mark.

At 83, Sibelius said, “For the first time I have lately become aware of the fact that the period of our earthly existence is limited. During the whole of my life this idea has never actually come into my mind. It occurred to me very distinctly when I was looking at an old tree there in the garden. When we came it was very small, and I looked at it from above. Now it waves high above my head and seems to say ‘You will soon depart, but I shall stay here for hundreds more years.’”

At 85, Bernard Baruch said, “To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”

At age 90, you’ve lost half of your kidneys’ blood-filtering capacity.

You grow increasingly less likely to develop cancer; the tissues of an old person don’t serve the needs of aggressive, energy-hungry tumors.

By 90, one in three women and one in six men suffer a hip fracture, which often triggers a downward spiral leading to death. Half will be unable to walk again without assistance. My father, on the other hand, walked a mile to and from the library—carrying books in each direction—until he was 95.

At that age, his moles were disappearing—a mole typically lasts 50 years—and in their place, a couple of “cherry moles,” which look like cherries and the technical name for which is “hemangiomas,” appeared on his chest. His doctor said he thought my dad’s hemangiomas (benign tumors composed of large blood vessels) were beautiful. Easy for him to say; he’s a whippersnapper of 67. My father found the cherry moles as distressing as if he were a teenage girl with an array of pimples on her chin.

At 97, a month before dying, Bertrand Russell said to his wife, “I do so hate to leave this world.”

Bernard de Fontanelle, a French scholar, who died at 100, said, “I feel nothing except a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.”

Aristotle described childhood as hot and moist, youth as hot and dry, and adulthood as cold and dry. He believed aging and death were caused by the body being transformed from one that was hot and moist to one that was cold and dry—a change which he viewed as not only inevitable but desirable.

In As You Like It, Jaques says, “And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, / And then from hour to hour, we rot and rot.” The Sullivan County (NY) Yellow Pages informs its readers that “the process of living means that we are all temporarily able-bodied persons.” The 34-year-old American poet Matthea Harvey writes, “Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human form.” Time, to paraphrase Grace Paley, makes a monkey of us all—even my father, fight it fiercely as he does.

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead

John Donne said, in a sermon, “We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, of death. Nor was there any man seen to sleep in the cart between Newgate and Tyburn—between the prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep? But we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.”

Charles Lamb said, “The young man till thirty never feels practically that he is mortal.”

John Ruskin said, “Am I not in a curiously unnatural state of mind in this way—that at forty-three, instead of being able to settle to my middle-aged life like a middle-aged creature, I have more instincts of youth about me than when I was young, and am miserable because I cannot climb, run, or wrestle, sing, or flirt—as I was when a youngster because I couldn’t sit writing metaphysics all day long. Wrong at both ends of life…”

The eponymous hero of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya says, “I’m forty-seven now. Up to a year ago I tried deliberately to pull the wool over my eyes so that I shouldn’t see the realities of life, and I thought I was doing the right thing. But now—if you only knew! I lie awake, night after night, in sheer vexation and anger that I let time slip by so stupidly during the years when I could have had all the things from which my age now cuts me off.”

Edward Young wrote, “At thirty man suspects himself a fool; / Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan / At fifty chides his infamous delay, / Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve; / In all the magnanimity of Thought / Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.”

Picasso said, “One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.”

At 62, Jonathan Swift said, “I never wake without finding life more insignificant than it was the day before.”

Leonardo da Vinci, who died at 67, said, “Here I thought that I was learning how to live, while I have in reality been learning how to die.”

Barry Hannah says, “The calamity is that we get only seventy-five years to know everything and that we knew more by our guts when we were young than we do with all these books and years and children behind us.”

At 78, Lord Reith, the first general director of the BBC, said, “I’ve never really learned how to live, and I’ve discovered too late that life is for living.”

The seventeenth-century moralist Jean de la Bruyère said, “There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.”

Regrets only:

My father came up from the Bay Area to visit for the weekend and my Father’s Day present, six days late, was box seats to a Mariners game. I was new to Seattle and this was the first time I’d been inside the Kingdome which, with its navy blues and fern greens, looked to me like an aquarium for tropical fish. The Kingdome reminded my father of “dinner theater,” and he wanted to know where John Barrymore was. My dad was turning 79 the following month; he wanted—at 80—to quit his part-time job and drive a Winnebago cross-country, then fly to Wimbledon to eat strawberries and cream.

The sixth-place Mariners were playing the last-place Tigers on Barbecue Apron Night. Watching batting practice, we folded and unfolded our plastic Mariners barbecue aprons, which smelled disconcertingly like formaldehyde, and we ran through all the baseball anecdotes he’d told me all my life, only this time—because I pressed him—he told each story without embellishment. He’d always said that he played semi-pro baseball and I had images of him sliding across glass-strewn sandlots to earn food money; it was only guys from another neighborhood occasionally paying him 10 bucks to play on their pickup team and throw his “dinky curve.” He used to say that he was team captain for an Army all-star baseball team that toured overseas, and as a kid I convinced myself that he spent 1943 in Okinawa, hitting fungoes to Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. He was only traveling secretary, the most prominent player on the team was a Detroit Tiger named Pat Mullins, and it was fast-pitch softball Stateside.

My father used to look almost exactly like Dodgers coach Leo Durocher (“Nice guys finish last.”). When we were living in Los Angeles, the garbageman supposedly shook my father’s hand and said, “Sorry to hear about your marriage, Mr. Durocher.” Durocher had been recently divorced from the actress Laraine Day; the garbageman was being sympathetic in the male manner—so went the story. And for some reason I always thought my father stood atop the trash in the back of the truck, hefted garbage cans with one hand, and cursed The Fishbowl Which Is Hollywood, whereas in actuality he immediately told my mother about impersonating Leo Durocher, she cautioned him against stringing along the innocent garbage collector, and he chased down the truck to explain and make amends.

Before the game, there was a “Peace Run” around the field—some sort of marathon-for-a-cause which I didn’t quite catch because the PA system sounded like it was being filtered through a car wash—then the umpires strolled onto the Astroturf. This is Seattle, so they weren’t booed even a little, though, which disappointed my father. In 1940, he was the star student at a Florida umpire school run by Bill McGowan, who said my father could become “another Dolly Stark” (i.e., a Jewish umpire), but before reporting to Class D ball my father begged off, citing his poor night vision. He wound up umping Brooklyn College–Seton Hall games and once got whacked over the head with a walking stick when he called someone’s favorite son out at home with two on, two out, the score tied, and the light, I guess, failing. My father’s favorite Bill McGowan story concerned the time McGowan, a former amateur boxer, grew weary of Babe Ruth’s grousing and, during the intermission of a doubleheader, challenged the Babe to a fight. The Babe backed down. The hero of my father’s stories is usually someone else. It’s rarely him.

The Mariners scored three in the first. Keith Moreland looked painfully uncomfortable at third for the Tigers. Ken Griffey Jr. made a nice catch in the fifth. The game was devoid of much interest, though, for either of us (longtime Dodger fans)—as my father said, “like watching a movie when you don’t care what happens to the characters.”

Assigned to write an essay on his favorite sports team, he wrote, “I swore undying loyalty to the Brooklyn Dodgers when I was 8 or 9, maybe even younger. Looking back over the bridge of many years, it seems to me I took up my allegiance for the Dodgers with my mother’s milk. My feelings for the team ranked one emotional peg below what I felt for my family.” Just as the walls of my childhood bedroom were covered with pictures of the Los Angeles Dodgers, his were covered with pictures of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Zack Wheat. Dazzy Vance. Wilbert Robinson. His essay continued:

Ebbets Field, where they played, was the temple, and baseball—which they played at times with heartbreaking inefficiency—was a secular religion for me.

I learned the Dodgers’ lineup before I mastered the ABCs. And I became skilled at keeping an intricate scorecard before I could handle numbers in the classroom. Just a matter of priorities.

To give you an idea of the kind of fan—make that nut—I was: During the season, I would rush to the door of our apartment at 6 in the morning to grab the

New York World

to find out how the Dodgers had made out the day before. If they won, I’d be all smiles, sing a little song quietly so as not to wake the rest of the family, but if they lost, I’d sit at the kitchen table and sob. My sobs would be heard by my father, who would get up and try to comfort me.

“Milt,” he’d say, putting his arm around me, “who are these Dodger people you’re carrying on about? Why do you take it so hard? What happened—did somebody die?”

“You don’t understand, Pop,” I’d say through my tears. “They’re my team.”

“Whaddya mean, your team? They’re not related to us, right? No, they’re a bunch of strangers. You’ve only seen them once when your brother Abe took you to a game. Like I said, nobody died, the rent is paid, and everybody is in good health, thank God.”

Usually by this time my mother would get up to begin preparations for breakfast for the family. “Leave him alone, Sam,” she’d say. “He’ll get over it. Today it’s the Dodgers,” which my mom pronounced to sound like “Deitches”—which, freely translated, is “Dutch,” or “German,” in Yiddish. “Tomorrow it’ll be something else.”

I didn’t get over it, as my mom predicted, until I was 21 and other things claimed my loyalty and passion: girls, the trade union movement, journalism.

But before I gained some perspective and finally realized “it was only a game,” I suffered; oh how I suffered: my beloved Brooklyn Bums, as they were affectionately called, lost more of them than they won. In the middle of a Dodger losing streak, I’d ask myself why God, in His infinite wisdom, didn’t make me a Yankee fan.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1946, and apparently while my mother was suffering blackout spells during a late summer heat wave in 1955, he flew back to New York, ostensibly to attend his father’s 85th birthday party but, more particularly, to attend the World Series and, even more particularly, watch the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees and, more particularly still, watch Jackie Robinson steal home under Yogi Berra’s tag. I have my father’s pictures of press row at Yankee Stadium. Look at the snap-brim hats.

In our family mythology, this flight of my father’s was always painted in the darkest of colors, and yet when I was a child I, too, would look first thing each morning at the box scores, then cry ickily into my cereal if the Dodgers had lost. I remember defacing my Ron Perranoski baseball card when he failed to hold a huge lead going into the ninth, pushing over my grandfather’s television set when it broadcast Dodger right fielder Ron Fairly’s misplay of an easy flyball into a home run over the low right-field wall at Dodger Stadium, engaging in a weird sort of mock-Ophelia thing at the beach after the fiasco of the 1966 Series against the Orioles. What was this obsession we had with the Dodgers? “For me, it comes out this way,” my father wrote me the week after this Father’s Day visit. “I wanted the Dodgers to compensate for some of the unrealized goals in my career. If I wasn’t winning my battle to succeed in newspapering, union organizing, or whatever I turned to in my wholly unplanned, anarchic life, then my surrogates—the nine boys in blue—could win against the Giants, Pirates, et al. Farfetched? Maybe so. But I think it has some validity. In my case. Not in yours.”

Oh, no; not in mine; never in mine.

Although the Kingdome (since demolished) had, even by ballpark standards, notoriously bad food, we decided to stand in line at the concession anyway, not because we were so hungry but because we needed something to do while a wave was going around the stadium. My father and I both got a hot dog and a beer, and we shared a bag of peanuts—which came to an amazing amount of money, for a meal my father said had the nutritional quotient of a resin bag. To my father’s astonishment, I topped off this indigestible dinner with a chocolate malt, which looked almost purple and tasted as bitter as coffee. We returned to our seats. The wave was still rising and falling, or maybe it was a new wave.

Sixty years before, he was a sports stringer for the New York Journal-American; now he was covering the Little League, Pony League, Colt League, men’s fast-pitch softball, and women’s softball for a suburban weekly. Three days before he came up to visit, he was trying to take a photograph of a Little Leaguer stealing third base and the catcher’s throw hit my father in the ankle, breaking three blood vessels. He was proud of his bruised ankle and he kept showing it to me, repeatedly reenacting the scene, saying with a sportswriter’s mix of hyperbole and mixed metaphor, “It blew up like an egg.”

He always used to send me the column he wrote for his tennis club newsletter. This was by far my favorite lead: “A hundred members and guests attended the annual Tennis Club meeting and, to coin a forgettable phrase, a helluva time was had by all and sundry. (Especially Sundry, who seemed to be having the time of his life.)” When I’m in certain moods, this Borscht Belt humor can completely convulse me.

Just as in order to express some sort of vague rebellion we didn’t stand up during the National Anthem, during the seventh-inning stretch we didn’t stretch, either, although I couldn’t help but watch the “full-matrix scoreboard,” which was flashing images of fans stretching. All 15,000 fans in the Kingdome were watching the scoreboard, waiting to find out whether they were beautiful enough to be broadcast, since virtually without exception the images were Pacific Northwest–perfect: sleepy babies wearing Mariners caps, energetic grandparents, couples kissing. The moment people were shown, they pointed at the screen, then they pointed at themselves pointing at themselves on the screen, then everyone pointed at them pointing at themselves pointing at themselves on the screen. I continued looking at the scoreboard, wanting my chance to point at myself pointing at myself on the screen, and then I looked over at my father, who hadn’t been watching the screen at all. He was tidying up his scorecard. He was no longer looking to be lifted onto an empyrean matrix; he just wanted to eat strawberries and cream at Wimbledon the summer of his 80th birthday. (He never went.)

“Presley, Martinez, and Vizquel coming up for the Mariners,” he said, and we went to the bottom of the seventh.

Boys vs. Girls (iv)

Between the ages of 55 and 64, men are twice as likely as women to die in car accidents and four times as likely to commit suicide. Losing a job, separating from my mother, battling manic depression, my father would sometimes threaten that he was going to drive to the Golden Gate Bridge and jump off, but the threat never seemed real: he’s a survival machine.

Between ages 35 and 54, the ratio of men to women is even, then it increasingly favors women. In 1990, less than half of people in their 30s were female, but 80 percent of centenarians were women. Now, 90 percent of centenarians are women. Will my dad become a centenarian? He dearly wants to (see above; see below).

Men have much higher testosterone levels than women, which makes them more susceptible to cardiovascular disease—the main reason they don’t live as long. Testosterone also suppresses the immune system and makes it more difficult for males to resist infection. Premenopausal women have 20 percent less blood in their bodies than men and a correspondingly lower iron load. Iron ions are a source for the formation of “free radicals,” molecules formed during food metabolism that can harm the body; a lower iron load leads to a lower rate of aging, cardiovascular disease, and other age-related diseases in which free radicals play a role. Testosterone is the cause of the spike in the sex-mortality ratio at puberty (the trigger for boys’ destructive and self-destructive acts) and then increases blood levels of LDL (“bad” cholesterol) and decreases levels of HDL (“good” cholesterol), putting men at greater risk for heart disease and stroke. Estrogen has exactly the opposite effect, in addition to acting as an antioxidant, which neutralizes radicals.

Throughout the animal kingdom, species show the same sex difference in life span: females nearly always live longer than males, with a few exceptions (for instance, hamsters, guinea pigs, and wolves). Female longevity is more essential, from an evolutionary perspective, than the prolonged survival of males. In a mammal, the male’s contribution to child raising is often much less than the female’s (my father’s role wasn’t to be a caretaker but to be cared for); without her, the child will probably die. Female sperm whales’ life span is 30 years longer than male sperm whales’. For orcas, there’s a 20-year difference. If a male calf survives to its first birthday, it can expect an average life span of 30 years, while a female can expect an average life span of 50. The maximum estimated life span for female orcas in the wild is 70 to 80; for males, 50 to 60.

A species’ life span is correlated with the length of time its young remain dependent on adults. The necessity for female longevity in the human reproductive cycle has determined the length of the human span. The longer a woman lives and the more slowly she ages, the more offspring she can produce and rear to adulthood. For men, on the other hand, reproductive capacity is mostly limited by their restricted access to women. Men are stronger, taller, faster, and less likely to be overweight than women—older men have 20 percent higher maximum oxygen capacity than older women do—but women, as a group, live longer than men. In the United States, newborn girls have a life expectancy of 7.7 more years than newborn boys. At 65, it’s 4.4 years’ difference in life expectancy; at 75, 2.9; at 85, 1.4. The more vulnerable males are eliminated from the aging population faster than females are. Who else but my dad would have survived the third rail?

In Latin America and the Caribbean, life expectancy for women is 72; for men, 65. In Europe, life expectancy for women is 76; for men, 67. In the Middle East, the figures are 71 and 67; in Africa, 52 and 50; in Asia, 66 and 63. Male life expectancy continues to exceed female life expectancy only in such countries as Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, where female infanticide and bride-burning are common practices.

Women have more chronic nonfatal conditions (arthritis, osteoporosis, and autoimmune disorders), but men have more fatal conditions such as heart disease and cancer. At all ages, women detect odors better than men (when a friend asked many of her women friends what they remembered most when they thought of their mothers, nearly all of them associated Mom with a smell); the ability to identify odors declines earlier and more rapidly in men than in women. Epilepsy attacks males and females in approximately equal numbers, but the death rate from it is 30 percent higher in males. Females suffering from the same infectious diseases as males die at a much lower rate. Among women and men who smoke equally large numbers of cigarettes, women are more resistant than males to lung cancer and heart disease. Men’s higher metabolic rate, compared to that of women, reduces their longevity (according to his doctor, my father has the heart of a 70-year-old man). Women have a higher ratio of brain weight to body weight than men do; women’s higher brain weight to body weight increases their longevity. British geneticist Steve Jones believes that the male of the species—given his shorter life span, declining sperm counts, and the decrepit nature of the Y chromosome—may be doomed to oblivion in 10 million years. Jones’s theory isn’t widely held, but still, as Jack Nicholson has said, “They’re smarter than us, they’re stronger than us, and they don’t play fair.”

Women have lived longer than men since at least the 1500s. Between 1751 and 1790, in Sweden, the average life expectancy at birth was 36 for women and 33 for men. However, only in the last 100 years has it become clear that women’s life expectancy exceeds that of men; until then, so many women died in childbirth that their life expectancy, as a group, was nearly the same as that of men. In West Africa, more women still die in pregnancy than from all violent causes. In the developing world, the lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy is 1 in 32; in the developed world, the risk is 1 in 7,000. Every year, more than half a million women die during pregnancy or childbirth; 10 million suffer injuries, infection, or disability. Since 1900, life expectancy for women worldwide has increased 71 percent (compared to 66 percent for men), but mortality from lung cancer has tripled in women in the past two decades. Because more women now smoke, drink, and work outside the home, there’s been a striking deceleration in the extension of female life expectancy. In America, life expectancy for women is now 80 years, for men it’s 75 years, and the gap is steadily closing. As women behave more like men, they live less long.

Chronicle of Death Foretold

When you’re dying, your blood often becomes extremely acidic, causing muscles to spasm. The protoplasm is too compromised to sustain life any longer. You may emit a short series of heaving gasps; sometimes your larynx muscles tighten, causing you to bark. Your chest and shoulders may heave once or twice in a brief convulsion. Your eyeballs flatten out because their round plumpness depends on the blood that’s no longer there. When you die, you don’t—contrary to legend—lose 21 grams in weight; if human beings have a soul, it doesn’t weigh anything.

In extreme cases such as severe trauma, exactly when someone is pronounced dead depends on where he or she dies. In the United States, some states say that brain activity is the only criterion; in other states, it’s respiratory and cardiac activity. In France, the brain has to be silent for 48 hours. In the former Soviet Union, patients needed to flatline for five minutes. According to Dr. Henry Beecher, “Whatever level of electrical brain activity we choose, it’s an arbitrary decision.” Doctors have more personal anxieties about dying than people in any other profession.

For people in the 50-to-59 age group, the death rate is 56 percent less than it is for the general population; 50-to-59-year-olds are just too busy to die.

In a study of 1,000 Major League Baseball players who played between 1876 and 1973, the players had a death rate 25 percent lower than that of men overall. A 1986 study of 17,000 Harvard graduates, ages 34 to 74, found that death rates declined as energy expenditures increased, up to 3,500 calories a week; above that, and death rates increased slightly. (Swimming vigorously for an hour burns approximately 500 calories.)

Cardiovascular disease kills 40 to 50 percent of people in developed countries. Cancer kills 30 to 40 percent; car accidents kill 2 percent; other kinds of accidents kill another 2 percent. When my father and mother separated and he was mixing antidepressants with alcohol, he drove smack into a garbage truck (accidentally? intentionally? never really explained), totaling his car but leaving him without a scratch—the Energizer bunny. In the United States, heart disease kills 1 in 40 65-to-69-year-olds, 1 in 27 70-to-74-year-olds, 1 in 11 80-to-84-year-olds, and 1 in 7 people 85 years old and over. In 1949, 50 percent of American deaths occurred in the hospital; in 1958, 61 percent; in 1977, 70 percent; now, 80 percent. Septic shock (extremely low blood pressure due to extensive infection in a vital organ) is the leading cause of death in intensive care units in the U.S.: 100,000 to 200,000 deaths a year. Only 36 percent of Americans have living wills. In the U.S., elderly white men commit suicide at a rate five times the national average. One in five doctors receives a request for physician-assisted suicide, and 10 percent of those respond by agreeing to assist.

In the Paleolithic age, half of all babies died before reaching their first birthday; mothers often died giving birth. For most of the last 130,000 years, life expectancy for human beings was 20 years or less. The huge majority of people ever born died early in life from an infectious or parasitic disease. In the second century a.d., the average life span was 25; at least one-third of babies died before reaching their first birthday. Two hundred years ago, the average life span for an American woman was 35; a hundred years ago, it was 48; it’s now 80—the largest, most rapid rise ever.

In 1900, 75 percent of people in the United States died before they reached age 65; now, 70 percent of people die after age 65. From 1900 to 1960, life expectancy for a 65-year-old American increased by 2.4 years; from 1960 to 1990, it increased 3 years. In England in 1815, life expectancy at birth was 39 years. In Europe during the Middle Ages, life expectancy at birth was 33 years, which is approximately the life expectancy now for people in the least developed countries.

Very old age in antiquity would still be very old age now. In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras lived to be 91. Heraclitus of Ephesus died at 96. The Athenian orator Isocrates died at 98. The average life span has increased since the industrial revolution, but primarily because of declining rates of childhood mortality. In Sweden during the 1860s, the oldest age at death was usually around 106. In the 1990s, it was around 108.

In developed countries, 1 in 10,000 people lives beyond the age of 100. In the U.S., there were 37,000 centenarians in 1990; there are now around 70,000. The majority of American centenarians are female, white, widowed, and institutionalized, were born in the U.S. of Western European ancestry, and have less than a ninth-grade education. Ninety percent of current American centenarians have an annual income of less than $5,000 (excluding food stamps, federal payments to nursing homes, and support from family and friends); they often say they were never able to afford to indulge in bad habits. In many ways, this is true of my father: he grew up relatively poor, our family was always barely making ends meet, and he now lives a spartan life on a fixed income.

On his 100th birthday—five days after which he died—Eubie Blake said, “These docs, they always ask you how you live so long. I tell ’em, ‘If I’d known I was gonna live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.’”

“Who wants to be a hundred?” asked Henry Miller, who died at 89. (That’s my dad waving wildly in the third row.) “What’s the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long one sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance.”

Woody Allen, on the other hand, has said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I would rather live on in my apartment.”

Another joke courtesy of Dr. Herring:

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi are discussing what they’d like people to say after they die and their bodies are on display in open caskets.

The priest says, “I’d like someone to say, ‘He was righteous, honest, and generous.’”

The minister says, “I’d like someone to say, ‘He was kind and fair, and he was good to his parishioners.’”

The rabbi says, “I’d want someone to say, ‘Look, he’s moving.’”

Eighty-eight percent of Americans say that religion is important to them; 82 percent of Americans believe that prayer can heal. Ninety-six percent of Americans say they believe in God or some form of universal consciousness; 72 percent believe in angels; 65 percent believe in the devil. In one study of 3,000 American men and women over age 65, people who attended church were half as likely to have strokes as those who never or almost never attended services. In another study, of nearly a thousand American men and women admitted to a coronary care unit, those who received remote, intercessory prayer fared better than those who did not. Those on the receiving end of prayers were less likely to require antibiotics. In a survey of 92,000 American men and women, people who attended church more than once a week were far less likely to get certain diseases than those who attended infrequently. Over a five-year period, the death rate from heart disease was twice as high among those who didn’t go to church very often as it was for those who frequently attended. During a three-year period, infrequent attendees were twice as likely to die of emphysema and four times as likely to die of cirrhosis of the liver as were frequent attendees. In a study of 230 older American men and women who had just had cardiac surgery, people who said they received strength and comfort from practicing their faith were three times more likely to survive than those who didn’t.

When my father was a boy, he studied the Four Kashas—the Four Questions—in Hebrew School and so had no problem reading the Hebrew text and translating it when his father called on him, during Passover Seder, to recite the Four Questions: Why is this night different from all other nights of the year? On all other nights we eat leavened bread or unleavened bread; why on this night do we eat only unleavened bread? On all other nights, we eat bitter herbs and other bitter food; why on this night do we eat only bitter herbs? On all other nights we eat either reclining or straight up in our chairs; why on this night do we eat only reclining? My father, the youngest of four brothers, was the most adept at Hebrew and, as he says, “basked in the sun of my father’s approbation. I, the kosher ham, squeezed every ounce of personal satisfaction out of it.” He had a Bar Mitzvah at the Pennsylvania Avenue Synagogue, where he delivered a brief sermon, expressing gratitude on reaching religious adulthood, but his mother had recently died, at age 49, leaving his father and six children, so the ceremony was more somber than festive. (At her funeral, her casket was pulled through the street on a horse-drawn cart, and my father remembers being deeply embarrassed by his father’s open display of grief—weeping and pounding the casket.)

My father’s father introduced him to Socialism a couple of years later; my father lost God and has been, as he would say, a “devout atheist” the rest of his life. Of late, though, he prefers to call himself an agnostic—“It’s all very mysterious, Dave.” He also can’t say, “When I die…” Instead, he says, “If and when the time might come…” After that, it’s all mumbled, euphemistic evasion.

Cormac McCarthy: “Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.”

Charles de Gaulle said, “The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men”—one of my father’s very favorite quotations, and mine as well. It’s consolation, of a sort: everybody tries, no one wins, everybody dies.

Propertius said, “Among the dead are thousands of beautiful women.”

Juvenal: “Weigh the dust of Alexander the Great and the village drunkard, and they’ll weigh the same.”

Schopenhauer: “We are all lambs led to slaughter.”

At 51, Tchaikovsky said, “I am aging fast, I am tired of life, I thirst for quietness and a rest from all these vanities, emotions, disappointments, etc. etc. It is natural for an old man to think of a prospective dirty hole called a grave.”

Freud said, “What lives, wants to die again. Originating in dust, it wants to be dust again. Not only the life-drive is in them, but the death-drive as well.”

In 44 B.C., Cicero said, “No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year” he died in 43 B.C. On his deathbed, William Saroyan said, “Everybody has got to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Edward Young wrote, “All men think all men mortal but themselves.” The ancient Indian epic Maha-bha-rata asks, “Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.”

My father’s column for the condo tennis club newsletter about his heart attack, at 86:

I was doing what I had done on Memorial Day since memory runneth not to the contrary: playing tennis. It was a picture-postcard perfect day. The temperature was a comfortable 75, with a light breeze. I felt like a tiger. Just another lousy day in paradise.

My partner, George Tripodes, and I were playing a match against old friends and rivals Jim Black and Harry Langdon. We won the first set—barely squeaked through at 10–8 and were leading in the second set, 4–3. It was my turn to serve. I quickly jumped into a 40–love lead. I walked from the deuce court to the add court, where I hoped to make it 5–3, when I suddenly felt like an elephant had placed a huge foot on my chest (a standard description, I know, but that’s exactly how it felt to me). I paused for a few seconds, saying to myself, “Now what was that?” It was like nothing I had experienced in my 86 years on planet Earth. It was, as I was about to learn about an hour later, a heart attack—a relatively mild one, true, but still a full-fledged heart attack.

I wasn’t going to let a little old heart attack prevent me from winning my serve or finishing the set. George walked over to me as I was getting ready to serve and asked if I felt okay. “You look a little pale, Milt,” he said.

“No problem,” I assured him, adding that I wanted him to cover the right hand alley because I was planning—heart attack notwithstanding—to serve the ball into the extreme right corner of my opponent’s court.

And that’s exactly what I did, drawing a feeble response in return, and sending us into a 5–3 lead, one game away from winning the set and match. Our opponents made it 5–4 and now it was George’s serve. We had a tough time winning the sixth and final game; we finally managed it after a couple of long rallies. I wasn’t much help to my partner in that final game but never let on for a moment that I was feeling “a little strange.”

When the set ended, I didn’t bother to shake hands with Jim and Harry. I grabbed my tennis bag and windbreaker and walked back to my building, about 100 yards from the courts. I walked back slowly but somehow managed to make it to my apartment, throwing some cold water on my face, then knocking on the door of my neighbor, Mary Steiner, a retired registered nurse. Mary took my pulse, checked my heartbeat, and immediately called 911.

“You’ve had a heart attack, Milt,” she said very professionally, leaving no room for doubt.

Twenty minutes later I was in an ambulance en route to Peninsula Hospital, where doctors quickly confirmed Mary’s diagnosis. I was immediately anesthetized and given an angioplasty—the “balloon” treatment—opening up one of my arteries, which had clogged.

I awoke about two hours later, feeling—believe it or not—absolutely wonderful: a huge load had been lifted from the side of my chest.

The cardiologist, Dr. George Cohen, came by later that afternoon to explain what I had been through and what he had done—the angioplasty—to relieve the pressure. Dr. Cohen asked me, “Is it true that you continued to play another ten minutes after that first big bump? How in hell did you ever manage to do that?”

“I don’t know, Doc,” I said. “I just had to finish the set and match. Those two guys we were playing had beaten us too many times before and I had to try to balance the books when I had the chance.”

“You’re something else,” said Dr. Cohen.

Two days later I was sent home and three weeks later I was back on the courts, just a little worse for my Memorial Day ordeal.

Tennis, anyone?

Death Is the Mother of Beauty

Neither my father nor I could sleep. We finally figured out how to work the remote for his new TV—a present from my sister and me on his 95th birthday. At 2:00 A.M.:

On channel 2, a movie detective revisited the murder scene.

On channel 4, Retin-A entrapped tretinoin in Microsponge systems.

On channel 7, college girls on vacation in Cancun removed their T-shirts.

On channel 8, the Civil War was reenacted.

On channel 10, Bobby Abreu won the Home Run Derby.

On channel 11, Double D Dolls mud-wrestled.

On channel 12, a university lecturer explained gravity.

On channel 13, the Faith, Health & Prosperity bracelet glittered in the light.

On channel 17, a woman did leg raises.

On channel 20, taffy and ice cream production facilities were profiled.

On channel 22, fat-free desserts tasted as good as regular desserts.

On channel 24, 79 people died in a plane crash; an infant was the lone survivor.

On channel 29, Hercules tossed an enormous boulder.

On channel 30, Miss Teen USA was crowned.

On channel 33, you developed smart abs in just two minutes a day.

On channel 36, Dr. Ellen’s Light His Fire and Light Her Fire programs helped your marriage by increasing your energy.

On channel 38, a woman whose teenage daughter died in a car crash found solace in God’s love.

On channel 41, a murder victim’s body was autopsied.

On channel 42, the CrossBow system offered compound resistance.

On channel 47, Aquafresh toothpaste removed stains.

On channel 49, the Cancer Treatment Centers of America helped you harness your power to fight cancer and win.

On channel 55, two buxom blonde women explained to a thin, balding man why size matters.

On channel 59, the Slim in 6 fitness program helped you lose 20 pounds in 6 weeks.

On channel 63, the Ultimate Chopper was the ultimate time saver.

On channel 64, the Esteem by Naomi Judd System reduced wrinkles, lines, and blotchiness.

On channel 72, the Arthur Ashe Award was given to a terminally ill coach who advised the audience to never give up.

On channel 77, a woman was penetrated from behind by one man while she performed fellatio on another man.

On channel 80, the Youth Cocktail gave you sharper, clearer memory and more flexible joints.

On channel 84, two behemoths competed to pull an enormous ball-and-chain across the finish line.

On channel 85, a suicide bomber killed himself, two civilians, and two U.S. soldiers in Ramadi.

On channel 87, Hair Color for Men got the gray out.

On channel 89, with long life you will satisfy Him and show Him your salvation.

On channel 90, you could have the makeover of a lifetime.

On channel 95, Hollywood celebrities paid $24,000 for Mari Winsor’s body-sculpting program.

On channel 99, a horror movie ended with a white curtain blowing in the breeze against a black night.

On channels 2 through 99, we sought but couldn’t find a cure for the fact that one day we would die.

Life Is That Which Gives Meaning to Life

André Gide wrote in his journal, “Every day and all day long, I ask myself this question—or rather this question asks itself of me: shall I find it hard to die? I do not think that death is particularly hard for those who most love life. On the contrary.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, “Knowledge by suffering entereth, / And life is perfected by death.”

In the journal my mother kept the last year of her life, she wrote, “Of one thing I’m sure: I don’t want to live if I can’t function, make decisions for myself, and take care of myself. I hope that if I reach that point I’ll have the courage to take my life. I feel very strongly that life is a very precious gift and that one should always choose life, but to me life is being able to function. Maybe I’ll be able to express this better and more clearly as time goes on.” My father frequently alludes to this journal entry and shakes his head in wonder and bafflement and, in a way, pity.

In Lament for the Makers, William Dunbar wrote, “Timor mortis conturbat me”: the fear of death distresses me.

As a 9-year-old, I would awake, shivering, and spend the entire night sitting cross-legged on the landing of the stairs to my basement bedroom, unable to fathom that one day I’d cease to be. I remember being mesmerized by a neighbor’s tattoo of a death’s head, underneath which were the words, “As I am, you shall someday be.”

Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “From the time I knew I was mortal, I found the idea of death terrifying. Even when the world was at peace and my happiness seemed secure, my 15-year-old self would often turn at the thought of that utter non-being—my utter non-being—that would descend on its appointed day, for ever and ever. This annihilation filled me with such horror that I could not conceive the possibility of facing it coolly. What people called ‘courage’ I could only regard as blind foolishness.”

Rousseau said, “He who pretends to look on death without fear lies.”

The narrator of Donald Barthelme’s story “The School,” an elementary-school teacher, says:

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—

I said, yes, maybe.

They said, we don’t like it.

My father has asked me to research the affordability and plausibility of “cryonic suspension.” He’s willing to die, but he doesn’t want to be dead forever.

Hoop dream (ix):

My grandfather, my father’s father, Samuel, was a business agent for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union of the CIO, in Westchester. He’d awake at 5:30, have a cup of tea and piece of toast, glance at the newspaper, and leave for the subway at 6:00. He handled workers’ grievances and contract negotiations with manufacturers. He’d eat his dinner hurriedly, then be off to his second job—investigator for the neighborhood Eastern Star Credit Union, which he had helped found. At first, the credit union made small loans of $50 and $100 to its members, almost all of whom were recently arrived Russian and Polish immigrants (as was my grandfather, who fled to England in the 1880s rather than face induction into the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian army, which often exiled Jews to Siberia). Several years later, after it was credentialed by the New York State Banking Commission, it was lending $10,000. My grandfather’s signature would guarantee the loan if the original borrower failed to make the payment; he’d walk for miles to some homes, and my father would sometimes accompany him. Samuel would return at midnight, sleep five hours, and be up the next morning to take the long subway ride to the factory. He also purchased shirts at wholesale and sold them to his friends for a small profit. As a teenager, my father would help my grandfather lug the boxes of shirts through the streets of their neighborhood. When he was older and had a car, my father would drive him around Brooklyn to collect signatures on loans. My father says, “I never knew where he found the energy to keep up the pace he did.” My father says this.

Sam spent Sunday mornings reading the three Yiddish newspapers: Forward, Der Tog (The Day), and Freiheit (Freedom). A Socialist, he introduced my father to notions of “dialectical materialism,” “left-wing infantilism,” “alienation of the proletariat,” and “means of production.” He would say, “Milteleh, don’t ever forget this: under Communism, man exploits man, while under capitalism, the reverse is true. No matter what fancy words presidents or commissars or kings use, it’s money—economics, the cash nexus—that rules the world. Money is the world.” For emphasis he would repeat this last formulation in Yiddish: “Geld ist der veldt.”

My grandfather gave my father Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed’s account of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which my father read over and over. In high school history classes, my father would sometimes challenge what the teacher said or the textbooks omitted. When questioned where he got a particular fact or point of view, he would say, as instructed, “My father, who knows whereof he speaks.”

“You can tell, Dave, can’t you, how his life touched me?” my father likes to say about his father. “There was the sense of doing things for his fellow men; there was the kindly, mediating approach. Ess vett soch oy spressen, he liked to say. It will press itself out. It will take care of itself. He couldn’t cope with problems. He let them drift, grow, fester, or fly away. Recognize some of your dad’s penchants and peccadilloes in that?”

The night before my grandfather’s funeral, my father and I wandered around his apartment. I was 7 and had never met him. My grandfather’s skinny belts and wide ties hung from hooks in a closet. Badly warped classical record albums were stacked against a wall. His wallet and a Nikon sat atop the stripped bed. His favorite coffee mug was carefully wrapped in plastic, as was, of all things, a brand-new basketball: undelivered present for me, my father figured, and then he fell to pieces.

How to Live Forever (i)

In 1600 B.C., the Egyptian papyrus Book for Transformation of an Old Man into a Youth of Twenty recommended a potion involving herbs and animal parts. In ancient Greece, old men were advised to lie down with beautiful virgins. When my father visited me at college, he virtually ignored my girlfriend and focused on her roommate, whom he kept calling “a very attractive young woman.” Castration—believed to extend the life span a few years—was popular in the Middle Ages. Eunuchs do live longer than uncastrated men. A sterilized dog or cat, male or female, will live, on average, two years longer than unsterilized dogs and cats. In the early sixteenth century, Ponce de León, age 55, searched for the Fountain of Youth because he was unable to satisfy his much younger wife. Later in the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon thought that if the body’s repair processes—that is, our capacity for tissue regeneration and healing and our ability to recover from disease—were perfected, aging could be overcome.

In the nineteenth century, the French physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard removed and crushed the testicles of domesticated animals, extracted vital substances from them, then used this concoction to inoculate older people, who reported improved alertness and vitality. When Brown-Séquard, at age 72, injected himself with the extract, he claimed to have better control over his bladder and bowels. He died four years later. Eugen Steinach, a professor of physiology in Vienna in the 1920s, convinced older men that they would be rejuvenated by a vasectomy or by having the testicles of younger men grafted onto their own. Rejuvenation clinics sprang up around the world: surgeons devised a number of anti-aging therapies, including the application of electricity to the testicles and doses of X-rays and radium to the sex organs.

According to Michael Jazwinski, a molecular biologist at Louisiana State University: “Possibly in 30 years we will have in hand the major genes that determine longevity, and will be in a position to double, triple, even quadruple our current maximum life span of 120 years. It’s conceivable that some people alive now will still be alive in 400 years.”

William Regelson, professor of medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, says, “As we learn to control the genes involved in aging, the possibilities of lengthening life appear practically unlimited.”

Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at University of California-Irvine, permitted only those fruit flies that produced eggs later in their life span to contribute eggs to the next generation. (This is equivalent to selecting women age 25 and older to be mothers and then only permitting the daughters who were fertile after age 26 to reproduce, and so on, for many generations.) Each generation of fruit flies lived a little longer than the previous one. The fruit flies from this ongoing program of selective breeding continue to live progressively longer than their ancestors. Rose believes that if a similar experiment could be performed on humans, a measurable increase in life expectancy would be observed within 10 generations.

Fruit flies given resveratol, an antioxidant found in red wine, live significantly longer than other flies. Molecules in resveratol called sirtuins mimic the life-extending effects of caloric restriction, which slows aging in mammals. Living creatures are hardwired to reproduce; a low-calorie diet sends a message throughout the body that conditions aren’t optimal for reproduction. Cellular defense systems arise and aging slows, preserving the body for better, more reproduction-friendly times. Caloric restriction triggers a release of stored fat, which tells the body it’s time to hunker down for survival.

Two thousand people belong to the Calorie Restriction Society, and 10 percent of them have cut their consumption by at least 30 percent. The greatest life extension, as much as 50 percent, comes from starting a severely restricted diet in young adulthood and continuing it throughout life. Starting in midlife and cutting calories 10 to 20 percent yields a smaller benefit. Fasting every other day (while otherwise eating normally in between) also increases average life span. My father, with his lifelong and much trumpeted and unrelievedly austere diet, should have been the founding member of the Calorie Restriction Society. Interviewed by his own paper on his 95th birthday, he focused almost entirely on the importance of nutritional discipline, with special attention to bran muffins.

A near-starvation diet dramatically reduces the incidence of most age-related disease: tumor and kidney problems, brain-deficit problems such as Alzheimer’s, and degenerative problems such as Parkinson’s. Rats on a 40 percent reduced-calorie diet have a 30 percent longer life span. Monkeys on a reduced-calorie diet—30 percent less for 15 years—live longer and avoid many age-related diseases. In humans, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are closely correlated with increased caloric intake. I ask my father: Is cutting calories 40 to 50 percent worth the extra years and protection from disease? He treats it as a rhetorical question. Someone might abstain from cheesecake for 20 years, I point out, then get hit by a bus at 57. “Life,” I say, quoting Damon Runyon (one of my father’s heroes), “is 6 to 5 against.” “I do what I can,” he replies, and he isn’t joking, “to even those odds.”

On the other hand, a major new study of body weight and health risks by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute concluded that the very thin (a person with a body mass index below 18.5—for instance, a man who is 6' and weighs 136 pounds or a woman who is 5'6" and weighs 114) run the same risk of early death as the very fat. Very thin people have no reserves to tap if they fall ill. My dad’s thin, but he’s not that thin.

Vegetarians tend to live longer, healthier lives than meat eaters. The Japanese diet is high in vegetables and soy products. A Japanese person lives 3 years longer, on average, than an American or Briton. (One-quarter of vegetables eaten in America are french fries.) Okinawans consume 80 percent as many calories as the average Japanese does. Okinawa has the highest proportion of centenarians in the world (600 of its 1.3 million people), four times as high as the rest of the world. The Okinawan diet contains large amounts of foods good for longevity, such as tofu, seaweed, and fish. Fish oils, for instance, are rich in omega-3 fatty acids that, compared with the saturated fats found in meats, don’t harden as easily and stick less to artery walls—which has a protective effect against heart disease and stroke. My father likes to quote Satchel Paige—whom he once saw pitch—“Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood.”

Early humans apparently had diets containing vegetables, fruits, nuts, and berries, and large quantities of meat that was naturally low in fat. Isolated tribes in remote parts of the world still eat a Paleolithic diet. A 2002 study of diet, fitness, and disease compared 58 traditional societies with industrialized populations: hunter-gatherers suffer less cardiovascular disease and cancer than people living in “developed” nations; the more your diet diverges from that of hunter-gatherers, the worse your health is likely to be. The contemporary American diet contains twice the fat and one-third the protein of diets maintained by indigenous populations. When you eat animal fats and processed sugar, you increase your risk of disease. When you eat soybeans, cooked tomatoes, and fiber, you reduce your risk of, respectively, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. The major diseases in the industrialized world are caused by departures from the diet to which our early ancestors were adapted.

There’s a direct relationship between the percentage of fat in your diet and your risk of cancer. The average Chinese diet contains less than 15 percent fat. The average American diet contains 39 percent fat. The average Chinese has a cholesterol level of 127, compared to 212 for the average American. China has very low rates of heart disease, colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, or ovarian cancer. What little heart disease and cancer that do exist in China are found overwhelmingly in those regions where people eat the highest amount of fat and cholesterol.

Taoists developed diets that would starve “evil beings”—the Three Worms—which were thought to inhabit the body and hasten its demise by causing disease. Battling the evil beings took the form of denying them the grains, such as wheat and rice, thought to be responsible for their existence, and eating magical foods such as licorice, cinnamon, and ginseng that would kill them. Other approved medicines included herbs, roots, minerals, and animal and plant products such as eggs, turtles, peaches, and parts of trees.

If you want to live longer, you should—in addition to the obvious: eating less and losing weight—move to the country, not take work home, do what you enjoy and feel good about yourself, get a pet, learn to relax, live in the moment, laugh, listen to music, sleep 6 to 7 hours a night; be blessed with long-lived parents and grandparents (35 percent of your longevity is due to genetic factors); be married, hug, hold hands, have sex regularly, have a lot of children, get along with your mother, accept your children, nurture your grandchildren; be well-educated, stimulate your brain, learn new things; be optimistic, channel your anger in a positive way, not always have to be right; not smoke; use less salt, have chocolate occasionally, eat a Mediterranean diet of fruits, vegetables, olive oil, fish, and poultry, drink green tea and moderate amounts of red wine; exercise; have goals, take risks; confide in a friend, not be afraid to seek psychological counseling; be a volunteer, have a role in the community; attend church, find God. (My dad’s scorecard: 38 of 42.)

Researchers studied a group of people, ages 66 to 101, who had outlived their siblings by an average of 7 years. One personality characteristic stood out: the longer-lived sibling had a “better sense of humor.” My father can, or at least used to be able to (over the last few years, he’s almost entirely lost his sense of humor), put hilarious spin on language, hold a room rapt with a story, and tell jokes better than anybody; in the ’40s and ’50s, he supposedly got invited to the most exclusive Industry parties in Beverly Hills for the solitary purpose of telling Yiddish jokes. On average, married people outlive single people (here’s a shocker: the benefit for married men is greater); older siblings outlive younger ones; mothers outlive childless women (by a slight margin); people with higher education live 6 years longer than high school dropouts; Oscar winners outlive unsuccessful nominees by 4 years; CEOs outlive corporate vice presidents; religious people outlive atheists; tall people (men over 6'; women over 5'7") outlive short people by 3 years; nonsmokers live 10 years longer than smokers; thin people live 7 years longer than obese people; American immigrants live 3 years longer than natives; Japanese have the longest life expectancy (82) and Zambians have the briefest (33). Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical. Natalie’s former day-care teacher, now a manager for the outpatient clinic of a cancer-care center, says, “It’s the assholes who always get better.” My father isn’t an asshole, but he is mightily self-involved (more self-involved than anyone else?—maybe he simply masks it less well), which seems to have had no ill effects whatsoever on his health or longevity.

Gavin Polone, a 44-year-old television and movie producer/agent, works 6-day weeks and 18-hour days and has rejected marriage and children as antiquated nuisances. Polone views kids as unpredictable clutter that lead to “personal drama.” His girlfriend, Elizabeth Oreck, who’s 43, says, “People often have children to fulfill some kind of twisted, egocentric reflection of themselves. The truth is, we both prefer animals to people.” Polone and Oreck have three dogs and five cats, all rescued from animal shelters or the neighborhood (the mean streets of Beverly Hills). Polone arises at 4:45 A.M., has a waking pulse of 48, eats 8 ounces of dry cereal and drinks 32 ounces of cold green tea for breakfast, and subsists on 1,800 calories a day, primarily protein powder and egg whites. He’s 6'1" and weighs 160 pounds. One of his clients, Conan O’Brien, says, “When I met Gavin, he was an assistant to an agent. In time, he became an agent, then a manager. Now he’s a producer/bodybuilder/race-car driver. In nine weeks I think he’ll be in the space program. I really do. He’s evolving into some kind of superbeing. Or a great Bond villain. Whenever I talk to him, I picture him making demands on a big video screen to the United Nations.” By consuming less food, Polone hopes to reduce the physical stress that causes aging, extending his life indefinitely. Another client, the director Jon Turteltaub, says about Polone, “He believes that by being really skinny he’ll live long enough for stem-cell research to catch up and create new organs for him, and then he can live for eternity.”

The Gerontology Research Group—a loose organization of demographers, gerontologists, and epidemiologists who study very old age—believes there’s an invisible barrier at age 115. There are only 12 undisputed cases of people ever reaching 115. Very few people who reach age 114 reach 115; since 2001, a dozen 114-year-olds have died before turning 115. Right now there are, according to the GRG, 55 women and 6 men over age 110 worldwide. The oldest age ever reached was 122, in 1997, by a French woman. No matter how little you eat, how much you exercise, and how healthily you live, you apparently can’t live longer than 125 years. In 5,000 years of recorded history, there’s been no change in the maximum life span. Lucretius, who died in 55 B.C., wrote:

How to Live Forever (ii)

There are now thousands of people worldwide in the “longevity movement” who believe it’s possible to live for hundreds of years, perhaps forever. Very nearly everyone in the longevity movement is male (my father often has some of their literature lying around). Because they give birth, women seem to feel far less craving for personal immortality.

Ray Kurzweil, who has won a National Medal of Technology award, been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, is the author of Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, and has been working on the problem of artificial intelligence since he was a teenager in the ’60s, believes that human immortality is no more than 20 years away. (Even my father acknowledges he’s probably not going to be around for that event.) To make sure he lives long enough in order to be around, first, for the biotech revolution, when we’ll be able to control how our genes express themselves and ultimately change the genes; and, second, for nanotechnology and the artificial-intelligence revolution, Kurzweil takes 250 supplements a day, drinks 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea a day, and periodically tracks 40 to 50 fitness indicators, including “tactile sensitivity.” Kurzweil makes my dad seem like—as he would say—“a piker.”

Millions of robots—“nanobots” the size of blood cells—will keep people forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries, and brain cells. These nanobots will work like repaving crews in our bloodstreams and brains, destroying diseases, rebuilding organs, and obliterating known limits on the human intellect. Improvements to genetic coding will be downloaded from the internet. You won’t need a heart.

Kurzweil says, “No more than a hundred genes are involved in the aging process. By manipulating these genes, radical life extension has already been achieved in simpler animals. We are not another animal, subject to nature’s whim. Biological evolution passed the baton of progress to human cultural and technological development.” He also says that all 30,000 of our genes “are little software programs.” We’ll be able to block disease-causing genes and introduce new ones that would slow or stop the aging process.

“Life is chemistry,” says Brian Wowk, a physicist with 21st Century Medicine. “When the chemistry of life is preserved, so is life.”

Aubrey de Grey, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, says, “In principle, a copy of a living person’s brain—all trillion cells of it—could be constructed from scratch, purely by in vitro manipulation of neurons into a synaptic network previously scanned from that brain.”

João Pedro de Magalhães, a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School, says, “Aging is a sexually transmitted disease that can be defined as a number of time-dependent changes in the body that lead to discomfort, pain, and eventually death. Maybe our grandchildren will be born without aging.”

Robert Freitas Jr., a senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, says, “Using annual checkups and cleanouts, and some occasional major repairs, your biological age could be restored once a year to the more or less constant physiological age that you select. I see little reason not to go for optimal youth, though trying to maintain your body at the ideal physiological age of ten years old might be difficult and undesirable for other reasons. A rollback to the robust physiology of your late teens or early twenties would be easier to maintain and much more fun.” Tee-hee. “That would push your expected age of death up to around 700 to 900 calendar years. You might still eventually die of accidental causes, but you’ll live ten times longer than we do now.

“How far can we go with this? If we can eliminate 99 percent of all medically preventable conditions that lead to natural death, your healthy life span, or health span, should increase to about 1,100 years. It may be that you’ll find it hard to coax more than a millennium or two out of your original biological body, because deaths from suicides and accidents have remained stubbornly high for the last 100 years, falling by only one third during that time. But our final victory over the scourge of natural death, which we shall achieve later in this century, should extend the health spans of normal human beings by at least tenfold beyond its current maximum length.”

Would life get intolerably boring if you lived for a couple of millennia? In the first century B.C., Pliny the Elder, the Roman encyclopedist, wrote of people in previous times who, exhausted by life at age 800, leaped into the sea.

My father now, at 97, seems bored beyond belief—virtually without a single interest or enthusiasm other than continued existence, day after day after day. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry says, “As the body breaks down, it becomes increasingly the object of attention, usurping the place of all other objects, so that finally, in very, very old and sick people, the world may exist only in a circle two feet out from themselves; the exclusive content of perception and speech may become what was eaten, the problems of excreting, the progress of pains, the comfort or discomfort of a particular chair or bed.” This is what is suddenly happening to my dad, who until the past few months had still been exercising as if in preparation for a geezers’ Ironman competition.

Marc Geddes, a New Zealand writer on artificial intelligence and mathematics, suggests the possibility of “brain refresher drugs,” which will prevent “brains from becoming too inflexible. The people living in the far future might be able to alter their bodies and personalities as easily as the people of today change their clothes. The fact that some people living today get tired of life is more likely to be a practical, biological problem than a philosophical one.”

Sherwin Nuland, the author of How We Die, says about Kurzweil and his fellow fantasists, “They’ve forgotten that they’re acting on the basic biological fear of death and extinction, and it distorts their rational approach to the human condition.”

Exhibit A: Leonard Hayflick, professor of anatomy at University of California–San Francisco, a couple of whose public lectures my father has attended, explains that every chromosome has tails at its end that get shorter as a cell divides. Over time, these tails, called telomeres, become so short that their function is disrupted, and this, in turn, leads the cell to stop proliferating. Average telomere length, therefore, gives some indication of how many divisions the cell has already undergone and how many remain before it can no longer replicate. I.e., there’s an intrinsic limit to how long humans can live.

In Tennyson’s Tithonus, the eponymous protagonist, who is granted his wish of immortality without realizing he’d be aging forever, decides he wants to die:

My father doesn’t see it like that. Good for him.

Last Words

Leonard Bernstein said, “What’s this?”

Babe Ruth said, “I’m going over the valley.”

Cotton Mather said, “Is this all? Is this what I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this. I can bear it!”

The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus, pounded to death with pestles in the fourth century B.C., said, “Pound, pound the pouch containing Anaxarchus. You pound not Anaxarchus.”

Air Force Major Norman Basell, flying bandleader Glenn Miller to France on a flight that vanished over the English Channel, said, “What’s the matter, Miller—do you want to live forever?”

The philologist Barthold George Niebuhr, noticing that his medicine was intended only for terminal cases, asked, “What essential substance is this? Am I so far gone?”

Angelica Kauffmann, an eighteenth-century artist, stopped her cousin—who had begun to read her a hymn for the dying—and said, “No, Johann, I will not hear that. Read me the ‘Hymn for the Sick’ on page 128.”

William H. Vanderbilt, president of the New York Central Railroad, said, in 1885, “I have no real gratification or enjoyment of any sort more than my neighbor down the block who is worth only half a million.”

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, said, “I am tired of ruling over slaves.”

Louise, Queen of Prussia, said, “I am a queen, but I have no power to move my arms.”

Queen Elizabeth I said, “All my possessions for one moment of time.”

Phillip III, king of Spain, said, “Oh would to God I had never reigned. Oh that those years in my kingdom I had lived a solitary life in the wilderness. Oh that I had lived alone with God. How much more secure should I have died. With how much more confidence should I have gone to the throne of God. What doth all my glory profit but that I have so much the more torment in my death?”

Cardinal Henry Beaufort said, “Will not all my riches save me? What, is there no bribing death?”

Henry James said, “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.”

Anne Boleyn said, “The executioner is, I believe, an expert, and my neck is very slender.”

Marie Antoinette, tripping over her executioner’s foot, said, “Monsieur, I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.”

Charles II said, “I have been a most unconscionable time dying, but I beg you to excuse it.”

Sir William Davenant, seventeenth-century British Poet Laureate, unable to complete a final poem, said, “I shall have to ask leave to desist, when I am interrupted by so great an experiment as dying.”

Rabelais said, “I am going in search of a great perhaps.”

James Thurber said, “God bless. God damn.”

H. G. Wells said, “God damn you all; I told you so.”

Francis Buckland, an inspector of fisheries, said, “God is so good to the little fishes, I do not believe He would let their inspector suffer shipwreck at last.”

Eugène Ysaÿe, a Belgian violinist and composer, said, after his Fourth Sonata was played for him, “Splendid. The finale just a little too fast.”

James Quin, an eighteenth-century British actor, said, “I could wish this tragic scene were over, but I hope to go through it with becoming modesty.”

Replying to the observation that dying must be very hard, the actor Edmund Gwenn said, “It is. But not as hard as farce.”

Flo Ziegfeld said, “Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the finale! Great! The show looks good! The show looks good!”

James Croll, a lifelong teetotaler, said, “I’ll take a wee drop of that. I don’t think there’s much fear of me learning to drink now.”

The eighteenth-century sociologist Auguste Comte said, “What an irreparable loss!”

Da Vinci said, “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”

The British newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook said, “This is my final word. It is time for me to become an apprentice once more. I have not settled in which direction.”

Machiavelli said, “I desire to go to hell and not heaven. In the former place I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings, and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks, and apostles.”

Looking at a lamp that flared at his bedside, Voltaire said, “The flames already?”

Kansas City Chiefs running back Stone Johnson, killed in a football game, said, “Oh my God, oh my God! Where’s my head? Where’s my head?”

The American Civil War commander General John Sedgwick, who was killed at the battle of Spotsylvania in 1864, looked over a parapet at the Confederate troops and said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—”

Vicomte de Turenne, a French soldier killed at the battle of Sasbach in 1675, said, “I did not mean to be killed today.”

Initially, the rope broke when the Russian revolutionary Bestoujeff was hanged; “Nothing succeeds with me,” he said. “Even here I meet with disappointment.”

Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, said, “Let my epitaph be, ‘Here lies Joseph, who was unsuccessful in all his undertakings.’”

Nicholas Boileau, a French critic, responding to a playwright who asked Boileau to read his new play, said, “Do you wish to hasten my last hour?”

Oscar Wilde, dying in a tacky Paris hotel, said, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

Charles d’Evereruard, a gourmet, was asked by his confessor if he would be reconciled with Christ; d’Evereruard replied, “With all my heart I would fain be reconciled with my stomach, which no longer performs its usual functions.”

Frédéric Moyse, guillotined for killing his own son, said, “What, would you execute the father of a family?”

Longfellow said to his sister, “Now I know I must be very ill, since you have been sent for.”

George Fordyce, a physician, told his daughter, who had been reading to him, “Stop. Go out of the room. I am about to die.”

Baron Georges Cuvier, a zoologist, said to his daughter, who was drinking a glass of lemonade he had refused, “It is delightful to see those whom I love still able to swallow.”

O. O. McIntyre, an American newspaper columnist, said to his wife, “Snooks, will you please turn this way? I like to look at your face.”

Lady Astor, the first woman member of British Parliament, surrounded by her entire family on her deathbed, said, “Am I dying, or is this my birthday?”

Goethe said, “More light.”

The Indian chief Crowfoot said, “A little while and I will be gone from you. Whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

Buddha said, “Decay is inherent in all things.”

Gertrude Stein asked Alice B. Toklas, “What is the answer?” When Toklas didn’t respond, Stein laughed and said, “In that case, what is the question?”

After finishing a poem on New Year’s Eve about New Year’s Day, Johann Georg Jacobi said, “I shall not in fact see the New Year which I have just commemorated.”

Andrew Bradford, the publisher of Philadelphia’s first newspaper, said, “Oh Lord, forgive the errata!”

Dominique Bouhours, a seventeenth-century French Jesuit who was the leading grammarian of his day, said, “I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is used.”

Replying to a question about whether he was in pain, Henry Prince of Wales, son of James I, said, “I would say ‘somewhat,’ but I cannot utter it.”

Karl Marx, asked by his housekeeper if he had a last message for the world, said, “Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.”

Pancho Villa said, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

“In the event of my death,” my mother’s will said, “I would like to have my body cremated and the ashes disposed of in the simplest way possible. My first choice would have been to donate my heart, kidneys, and cornea for transplants. However, it is not possible to donate the organs of someone with cancer. I realize that cremation is not in accordance with Jewish law, but I think it is the most sensible method of disposing of a lifeless body. Although I do not want a religious memorial service, I hope it is helpful to family and friends to have an informal gathering of people, so that each may draw strength from one another. I leave this world without regrets or bitterness of any kind. I have had a good life. May the future be kind to each of you. Shalom.” Her equanimity in the face of mortality.

What will be my father’s last words?

What will be mine?

Bloodline to Star Power (iii)

In the early 1970s, my half sister, Emily, was working as a maid at a motel in Oregon. “Don’t know how it happened,” my father explained, “but Pepi and his wife were guests at this posh place.” Emily introduced herself, told him who she was, and Schildkraut gave her one of his “stylish Borsalino felt hats, which he wore in rakish over-one-eye European style—always the matinee idol—as a souvenir.” She gave the hat to my father, who “had it in the closet for years, but it must have got thrown out when I moved after your mother’s death.”

I tell this story to Emily, who writes back, “Concerning the story about Joseph Schildkraut giving me a hat: that’s a total mystery to me! I did work for a short time in a hotel in Cannon Beach, Oregon. I have no memory of this mysterious visitor—or even seeing him—except in the movie The Diary of Anne Frank. Either I was that spaced-out in those days and have blocked out this significant event, or once again our Pop has fabricated another yarn for you from his rich imagination. Sorry.”

I relay what Emily has said back to my father, who wants to know: “Then where did the Borsalino hat come from? I distinctly remember Emily telling us that when she learned Joseph was a guest at the Oregon resort she was working at, she went over to him, told him her father’s original name, they talked for a few minutes, and then Pepi gave her the hat. He wore hats like a Borsalino in his stage and screen roles back in the days when all male actors wore hats. And Borsalino, an expensive Italian-made hat, would be his style.”

Then, shortly afterward, in a truly weird coincidence, an old friend of our family’s calls my father and asks him to pick up two boxes of odds and ends that my father had left with them many years ago. “The lid flipped open on one of the boxes, and on top there was the hat Schildkraut gave to Emily at that Oregon coast resort back in the early ’70s. Thought you’d be interested to learn about my (accidental) archaeological finding.”

I am, I am, but the hat proves nothing. Only very recently I happened to discover that Schildkraut died in 1964, which means that Emily—sweetly seeking my father’s appreciation—must have invented the entire story, my father invented the story, I’ve got the details wrong, or being in a family is indistinguishable from playing telephone. And yet the photograph in My Father and I of Schildkraut kissing Susan Strasberg on the forehead in The Diary of Anne Frank mimics exactly the melodramatic bad acting in two photographs of my father kissing Emily when she was very little. In so many photographs of “Pepi” or my father or me is this certain quality of mugging hungrily, of pretty-boyness (me till I was 12, my father into late middle age, Schildkraut until he was dead), of stilted posedness, of on-your-knees-before-the-camera obsequiousness, of needing to be liked by the lens, of peasant smilingness, of over-reliance upon previous modes of appearing in pictures…

Schildkraut also has what is to me a disturbing-because-familiar detachment toward his own feelings. “Maybe there was no such thing as love in real life,” he writes. “These all-consuming agonies and ecstasies of love existed only on the stage.” I once wrote about stuttering that “it prevents you from ever entirely losing self-consciousness when expressing such traditional and truly important emotions as love, hate, joy, and deep pain. Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, you come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s happy property and not yours—not really yours except by way of disingenuous circumlocution.”

The tightest warp and woof I can weave comes from the sound of the syntax. Joseph says of Rudolph, “He was passionately in love with the sound of words. They intoxicated him.” Joseph says of his mother, “She had an acute business sense, a talent for making every kreuzer count.” My father says, “You can bet all the borscht in Brownsville on that.” My father writes, “It’s been at least a year since that coffee-klatch-cum-current-events-discussion-group held its final meeting, but many people at Woodlake still talk about the explosive events of that fateful day.” I write, “The tightest warp and woof I can weave comes from the sound of the syntax.” Do you hear the keynote—the incessant buzz and hum of alliteration? I point out to my father what I see as the link between Schildkraut’s alliteration-dependent writing style, my father’s style, and my own (as well as my stutter), and he writes back, “About Joseph Schildkraut’s style: I believe the book he wrote in collaboration [My Father and I, “as told to Leo Lania”] is the only thing he’s ever written. Solo, or with somebody’s help. Don’t know how much his collaborator did and what Pepi contributed. My style? Strictly journalese. Marked—riddled?—by too much, far too much, alliteration. The O. Henry influence: as a young boy of 7 or 8, I read his stories over and over. My brother Phil had won a complete set of O. Henry in a writing contest and there they were for me to devour—and (sadly) to incorporate, lock, stock, and barrel, into my own writing.”

A decade ago I told my father that I hoped to travel someday to Eastern Europe to trace the Schildkraut ancestry, and he responded, “That would be a dream trip—the two of us investigating the Schildkraut strain in Austria, Germany, and the Ukraine. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be ready. It would be a great adventure.” (We’ve never gone.) I explained that what I’m most interested in is my need to get him to tell the stories over and over and over again and his ceaseless capacity to reinvent and extend the material. He replied (and this is what I’ve come to recognize as my father’s signature and see projected forward in myself and backward in Schildkraut: an unshakable self-consciousness), “Writing about it, you’ll probably use and exploit how I arrogated to myself the ‘cousins, yeah, they’re probably second cousins’ relationship. And how I told and retold—dined out a lot on it, as the saying goes—the story of my one actual involvement, in person, with Pepi: the Einstein memorial night, etc.”

Well, so, as my father likes to say, what? What is this correlation-seeking but a ghoulish attempt to backform a bloodline to star power? What proof is it, in any case, to find common traits in a putative relative’s memoir? Is he or isn’t he? Was he or wasn’t he? I don’t know, I can’t know, and I’ll never know; why, then, is it important for me to believe there’s a link? Why do I care about being related to someone who—on the basis of my father’s stories and The Diary of Anne Frank—appears to be a singularly unpleasant human being and painfully ham-fisted actor? Star-fucker: name-dropper: strain-strainer. My father now informs me that he believes—although he can’t be absolutely certain—that we’re related to Robert Shields (né Schildkraut), of the former San Francisco mime duo Shields and Yarnell, and I can’t help it: I think, well, then, maybe I’m also related to Brooke Shields; toward the end of Endless Love, when she’s crying in that dark New York hotel room, trying to say good-bye to David, and her hair is braided and rolled up in a bun, she does, it seems to me, especially in the mouth and chin area, look at least a little the way I sometimes looked as a teenager.

Sex and Death (iv)

In 1986, Denys Arcand released his movie The Decline of the American Empire, an obsessive talkathon on the subject of sex. Seventeen years later, the sequel appeared—The Barbarian Invasions, an obsessive talkathon on the subject of death. The film about sex is called Decline. The film about death is called Invasions. A point is being made here:

When groups of verve monkeys feed, several males sit with their backs to the group and brandish their genitals to ward off potential scavengers. If an unknown animal approaches, male verves get an erection and make a threatening face. Fighter pilots, when escaping dangerous situations, release extremely high levels of epinephrine (the hormone released by stress) and sometimes ejaculate.

Louis Réard, a French auto engineer who also ran his mother’s lingerie business, designed a two-piece swimsuit. Four days before he presented the swimsuit to the public, the U.S. military exploded a nuclear device near a group of small islands in the Pacific known as the Bikini atoll. On July 5, 1946, Réard unveiled the swimsuit and claimed the bikini was named for the beauty of the islands rather than for the atomic blast.

Men who are hanged sometimes have erections and orgasms, which are caused by the snapping of the spinal cord; when the nerves beneath the neck are severed from the spine, the spasm can create a mechanical, reflexive ejaculation. An engraving by Daumier shows a torture chamber filled with skeletons in chains and a hanged man ejaculating. In Marquis de Sade’s Justine, Thérèse helps Roland achieve orgasm by briefly hanging him; afterward, he exclaims, “Oh, Thérèse! Oh, those feelings are indescribable. They exceed everything!” In Ulysses, the Croppy Boy “gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his dead clothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs. Bellingham, Mrs. Yelverton Barry, and the Honourable Mrs. Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.” Pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s handwritten autopsy note of an early twentieth-century hanging states that there was no “seminal effusion” on this occasion, which implies that it often occurred on other occasions. Spilsbury. The photograph of the execution of the Lincoln conspirators in 1865 shows one of the men, Lewis Powell, with an erection after he was hanged.

James Boswell frequently attended public hangings in eighteenth-century London. Afterward, he liked to look at the faces of the dead bodies. Once, while the bodies were still dangling, he went directly to a prostitute. “I have got a shocking sight in my head,” he said he told her. “Take it out.”

Easier said than done, because, as Michel Houellebecq writes in Elementary Particles, “The chromosomal separation at the moment of meiosis which creates haploid gametes is in itself a source of structural instability. In other words, all species dependent on sexual reproduction are by definition mortal.”

In The Merchant and the Friar, the nineteenth-century poet and critic Sir Francis Palgrave wrote, “Coeval with the first pulsation, when the fibers quiver, and the organs quicken into vitality, is the germ of death. Before our members are fashioned is the narrow grave dug, in which they are to be entombed.”

Jules Bordet, a Belgian scientist, wrote, in a famous formulation 100 years ago, “Life is the maintenance of an equilibrium that is perpetually threatened.”

“Boys are like Pez dispensers,” says a teenage girl. “Show ’em a nipple and they get an erection.”

In The Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel de Unamuno wrote, “To live is to give oneself, perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself, to give oneself, is to die. Perhaps the supreme delight of procreation is nothing other than a foretasting or savoring of death, the spilling of one’s own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is to divide ourselves: that most intimate embrace is naught but a most intimate uprooting. In essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of resuscitation in another, for only in others can we resuscitate and perpetuate ourselves.”

A male American college student says, “I picture Death as being millions of years old but only looking about forty.”

“Life,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary when she was 44, “is, as I’ve said since I was 10, awfully interesting—if anything, quicker, keener at 44 than 24, more desperate, I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara—my new vision of death; active, positive, like all the rest, exciting; & of great importance—as an experience.”

Giacomo Leopardi wrote, “Death is not an evil, for it liberates from all evils, and if it deprives man of any good thing, it also takes away his desire for it. Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures, while leaving his appetite for them, and brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, men fear death and desire old age.”

Tom Stoppard: “Age is a high price to pay for maturity.”

Antony says to Cleopatra, “I am dying, Egypt, dying.”

According to Thomas Browne, the physician and author of Religio Medici, “The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.”

When Confucius realized he was about to die, he wept.

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.

In World War II, my father was assigned to Army Information and Education; his job was to lecture to the troops about America’s allies and enemies and send news releases to the hometown newspapers of the men in the outfit. If a private was promoted to Private First Class, my father would send a press release to the private’s hometown paper announcing that he’d been promoted for his “courage under fire” and “military bearing.” But when the radio battalion headquarters in the middle of the compound on Okinawa announced, on August 8, 1945, that the Japanese had surrendered unconditionally and would be signing the peace treaty later that day aboard ship in Tokyo Bay, my father went berserk and raced down to the mess hall, where he told the mess sergeant, Coleman Peterson, that he was taking over and would be serving breakfast to the 120 men in the unit.

Sergeant Peterson told my father he’d lost his mind and would want to quit after the first six grunts went through the chow line complaining that the scrambled eggs were too hard and the pancakes were too thin. My dad told Peterson nobody, including Douglas MacArthur, was going to stop him.

Peterson insisted on at least preparing the egg and pancake mixes. My father agreed, tied an apron around his waist, and when the first man came through the line, asking what was on the menu this morning, my father sang out, “Horseshit on French toast. No, actually, the V-J Day special: scrambled eggs, bacon, all the pancakes you can eat, and the strongest coffee on the island!”

Apparently, though, my father is not immortal:

On my most recent visit, he evaluated, as he always does, what kind of physical shape I seemed to be in and contemplated, as he always did, the potential safety hazards of my one-handed driving. He asked me, as he always did, whether Natalie had enrolled in swimming lessons yet—he was concerned that she’d wander into Lake Washington and drown—and when we went to a department store so he could buy a birthday present for Natalie, he made sure, as he always did, that I paid for it. He apparently wants to take his not very vast fortune with him.

The next morning, when I arrived 15 minutes late to take him out to brunch, he was sobbing. Fearful that I’d perished in an auto accident, he’d called my hotel, 911, and even Laurie back in Seattle to see if she’d heard anything about my whereabouts. At the restaurant, he vehemently criticized the spiciness of the soup, which couldn’t have been more bland; he wanted nothing sharp to throw him off stride.

Having not seen my father for several months, I was startled by his swift decline: he shuffled around his tiny apartment, which was almost empty, because of his new fixation with getting rid of nearly everything he owned; his breathing was loud and labored; his eyes were glassy and flat; a pouch of skin sagged beneath his left eye; a portion of his left ear had been excised in surgery to remove skin cancer; he ping-ponged back and forth between diarrhea and constipation; he often neglected to zip his zipper.

Waiting for Sicko to start, he asked me when and where I learned the facts of life. The people in the row behind us convulsed into giggles, and though it seemed a little late to be discussing the birds ’n’ the bees, I had to answer quite loudly—his hearing aid wasn’t working well—that I consulted a variety of sources on the subject. Thanks to his malfunctioning hearing aid, he found the movie utterly unintelligible. Leaving the theater before the lights had come up, he took a bad tumble down the stairs, to the collective gasp of the audience.

“I’m perpetually tired,” he wrote me when I returned home. “Used to be—until a year ago—I could swim a dozen laps. Can just about make 3 to 4 now. I crave sleep a lot. With the aid of sleeping tablets—Tylenol PM—I sleep in two sessions, from 9:30 to 4:30, then breakfast, then back to bed for a couple of hours, plus an occasional nap of one-hour duration. I used to go to the 18-hole putting green at Woodlake often, now indifferent to its lure. Haven’t gone in a couple of months. On the positive side, I still work out in the gym for 30 minutes. Usually on the stationary bike. Do that after lunch. Like a forced march. But I still do it and am glad I’ve still got the willpower. To sum it up, some of my most vexing problems are traceable, I’m sure—and so are you and you’re correct—to the passages of the years. Ninety-seven ain’t 79.” For my father, this very partial and begrudging acknowledgment constitutes a major declension.

The Story Told One Last Time, from Beginning to End

As soon as your reproductive role has been accomplished, you’re disposable.

After sexual maturation, deterioration in peak efficiency occurs because, as Harold Morowitz, a professor of biology at George Mason University, says, “perfect order requires infinite work.” Also, deterioration builds on itself.

In the late nineteenth century, August Weismann, a German biologist, made a distinction between “the immortality of reproductive cells, the cells in the body that carry genes forward to the next generation, and the mortality of the rest, which will age and die.” Death takes place, he said, “because a worn-out tissue cannot forever renew itself, and because a capacity for increase by means of cell-division is not everlasting but finite.”

Once a body’s mission is accomplished, nature has little interest in what happens next. Reproductive life spans of members of a species work as perfectly as possible to match the time an individual of that species might expect to survive before dying. In other words, physiological resources go into reproduction, not into prolonging life thereafter.

The force of natural selection declines with age. Natural selection has shaped human biology in such a way that aging and death become increasingly likely by the time you reach your 40s. If a disaster strikes a person who has passed the age of reproductive fitness, the consequences are by and large unimportant to the survival of the rest of the species.

Nature favors the accumulation of genes that do beneficial things early in life, even though they might do harmful things late in life, since—under normal conditions—most animals do not live long enough for the harmful effects to cause a problem. The same general mechanism that protects against cancer protects against aging. Long-lived species, with their better cellular protection, get cancer later than short-lived species.

The pineal gland is your internal clock. It knows how old you are, and it knows when you’re past your reproductive prime. As soon as it senses that you’re too old to reproduce effectively—around age 45—it begins to produce far lower levels of melatonin, which signals all of your other systems to break down and the aging process to begin. (Women’s larger pineal gland is another reason why women age more slowly than men, and it may be why they live longer.)

These low levels of melatonin cause, for instance, your immune system to shut down and your endocrine system to produce fewer sex hormones. Lower levels of sex hormones in turn lead to the atrophy of sexual organs in both men and women, to a decrease as well in sexual interest and the ability to perform. At 90, my father’s equipment finally quit.

In the late stages of adulthood, moths mimic the movements of juvenile moths, leading predators away from young moths and sacrificing their own lives, in order to benefit the species. What I’ve been trying to get to all along, in a way, is this: The individual doesn’t matter. You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don’t matter. I, Dad, don’t matter. We’re vectors on the grids of cellular life. We carry 10 to 12 genes with mutations that are potentially lethal. These mutations are passed on to our children—you to me, me to Natalie. Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and eerily beautiful.

Exit Interviews

Asked what the meaning of life is, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, “We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because comets struck the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not otherwise available; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer, but none exists.” (Darwin on Darwinism: “There is grandeur in this view of life.” Stoppard on evolution: “I’ve always thought the idea of God is absolutely preposterous, but slightly more plausible than the alternative proposition that, given enough time, some green slime could write Shakespeare’s sonnets.”)

Robert Wilkoske, who owns a wrecking company in Cheyenne, Wyoming, said, “Animals will fight to the death to try to survive. Even if it’s a rattlesnake swallowing a gopher. The gopher tries to get away, but after the snake gets ahold of him, he’s going down. That’s the way it is with a human, too. I’ve seen animals fight, I’ve seen animals fight when the odds were against them. They know they’re going to get whipped, but they’ll fight to the death to try to stay alive. It isn’t any particular thing we’re living for, just the instinct to stay alive. But I’m no authority.”

José Martinez, a taxi driver, said, “We’re here to die, just live and die. I do some fishing, take my girl out, pay taxes, do a little reading, then get ready to drop dead. You’re here or you’re gone. You’re like the wind. After you’re gone, other people will come. We’re gonna destroy ourselves, nothing we can do about it. It’s too late to make it better. You’ve got to be strong about it. The only cure for the world’s illness is nuclear war. Wipe everything out and start over.”

Woody Allen: “We are adrift, alone in the cosmos, wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain.” No punch line.

Wilfred Beckerman, a British economist, said, “The chances of mankind turning out to be more than just a blip in the process of evolution are very small.”

The rapper Ice-T said, “We’re here to stick our heads above the water for just a minute, look around, and go back under. A human being is just another animal in the big jungle. We have a lot of different instincts, and they’re all animal. We kill because we’re angry or need food. We have babies because it feels good and we want to care for other people. Once you have a kid, you look at the kid and see yourself again. You realize, ‘Oh, that’s why we’re here.’ Life is really short and you’re going to die, so you should leave someone else to keep his head above the water. Everything else is just passing time until the next generation, setting up shop. Just chill out and reproduce. Keep the species alive.”

Nicholas Vislocky, the assistant superintendent of a cemetery, said, “In the beginning, being a gravedigger bothered me. All you see is the grieving family. You carry the casket. You imagine the person who’s in there. And the thing that touches you most is the kids when they pass away. Their caskets are white, for purity, and they’re smaller, only like three feet long. They didn’t have a chance to experience anything. It’s like they were robbed of something. When you see the small white caskets, you appreciate the short, split-second lifetime you have.”

Shortly before his 97th birthday, when I asked my father what he’s learned over such a long life, he said, “The secret of a long, healthy life is to exercise every day even if it’s only for thirty minutes, and don’t let anything deter you from it.” When I explained that I meant not just how to live a long life but what it all amounted to, if anything, he shrugged and trotted out hoary “truths”: “There’s one comforting thing about the aging process: I’ll never have to do it again.” “Dying is easy. The least of us manage that. Living is the trick.” “On balance, the world is a much better place than it was in Brooklyn, New York, in 1910.” Which—the last—led him to consider what he might have achieved had he stayed in school and gotten his bachelor’s degree from CCNY, then a master’s in journalism from Columbia; perhaps he would have realized his fantasy: sports columnist for the New York Times (à la his hero Red Smith). This led to tears, though, so he cut short the discussion and said, “Let’s go for a walk,” which we did. He no longer plays tennis or golfs or jogs. He used to say that he could never imagine not being able to do at least five laps around Woodlake, totaling a little over a mile. Now he could barely shuffle his way around once, interspersed with frequent rests on benches.

As he’d be the first to point out, this could partly be explained by the fact that, after rescheduling his colonoscopy several times, he’d finally had it done a few days before. Complaining all the way home about the “disrespectful” way he felt the nurses had treated him, he was mortified by how thoroughly he’d pissed and shat his gown during the procedure. The results: no cancer, no nothing, only a minor case of diver-ticulitis, relatively easily remedied, but now he’s obsessed and depressed about that (obsession and depression being indistinguishable for him—I’ve come to realize—from the life force).

Notes for Eulogy for My Father

In the early 1930s, my father worked as a minor-league umpire on the East Coast, teaming up occasionally with Emmett Ashford, who was something of a showman and who thirty years later became the first black umpire in the major leagues. Some people thought all of my father’s behind-the-plate antics amounted to little more than “white Ashford.” We’d go to Giants games not when Koufax was the competition or bats were being given away but when Ashford was calling balls and strikes. All game long, my dad would keep his binoculars on Ashford and say to me, “Emmett’s calling a low strike” or “Emmett was out of position on that one” or “If that guy gives Emmett any more guff, Emmett’s going to give him the old heave-ho.” Then I’d look up and Emmett would be giving the guy the old heave-ho.

It wasn’t the major leagues that played at Golden Gate Park. It wasn’t even the minor leagues. It was something called the industrial league. The Machinists would play the Accountants; Pacific Gas and Electric would play Western Airlines. But they played with a hardball, they played for blood, their wives cheered like enraged schoolgirls, and my father was the umpire. He’d leave on Sunday morning, carrying his spikes and metal mask, with his chest protector underneath his blue uniform and a little whisk broom, with which to dust off home plate, sticking out of his pocket. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him umpire.

It wasn’t a stadium at all but an immense field without fences. There was a diamond, though, and dugouts and a half-circle of stands. I stood behind the screen, watching Denny’s Restaurant play Safeway Market. Neither team meant a thing to me, and after a few innings I looked around for my father, whom I figured must be working the next game. Then I realized the big man in blue, squatting behind the catcher with every pitch, was my dad. In certain sections of the country, in certain leagues and stadiums, the spectators are expected to focus all of their economic and sexual frustrations upon the lonely figure of the umpire, but in San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park, on at least one Sunday in the summer of 1966, they didn’t do that.

Denny’s Restaurant and Safeway Market weren’t playing up to par; my father soon emerged as the main attraction. When a batter took a called third strike, my father would parody the victim’s indignation. When a batter drew a walk, my father would run halfway to first base with him to speed things along. He was the only umpire working the game, so on balls hit to the outfield he’d run down the foul line to make sure the ball had been caught, and on balls hit to the infield he’d run to first base to be in position to decide. He signaled safe by spreading his arms and flapping them, as if readying for flight. He signaled out by jerking his thumb, and the entire right side of his body, down. Between innings he juggled three baseballs.

He worked all day, four long games, 10 in the morning until 6 at night, and at the last out of the last game the fans applauded. It was only light, polite, scattered applause, and maybe they were clapping for the winning team, but to me it was a thunderous ovation and they were thanking the umpire. I stood up behind the screen and joined them. I cheered for my father.

Two of the things I love the most in the world—language and sports—my father taught me to love. I’m no longer much of an athlete at all. I have a bad back, tendonitis in my shoulder, a trick knee, I wear orthotics in my shoes to balance the unevenness of my legs, and I have a little pinch in my neck that’s been bothering me lately, whereas at 97 my father’s major ailment appears to be tennis elbow. He gets upset when it rains because that means he can only work out in the gym rather than walk around the track and then work out in the gym. He still swims most days. Until very recently he played golf and, occasionally, tennis. He’s the most vigorous person I’ve ever known. From his essay about a raft trip our family took down the Salmon River: “I was up at 6 the next morning and volunteered to gather the kindling and other firewood. The other members of my family snuggled in their sleeping bags and made it just in time for the 7:30 breakfast.”

Since I was 6 years old, the first thing he and I have done every morning is read the sports page. One of my fondest memories is from about 20 years ago—the two of us sitting on his couch in the dark, listening to the radio broadcast of a Giants-Dodgers game; when Mike Marshall hit a three-run home run in the 10th inning to win it for the Dodgers, he and I looked at each other and we were both, a little weirdly, crying.

Games have held us together, but also words. I’ve always loved his love of puns, bad puns and worse puns; admired his ability to tell a joke and a story. The day before my college commencement, he and I went on a tour of John Brown House at the Rhode Island Historical Society. On and on the docent droned, giving us the official version of American history. My father and I tried not to laugh, but as we went from room to room, we were in an ecstasy of impudent giggles. “Subvert the dominant paradigm”: so goes the bumper sticker, which has passed now into cultural cliché. In so many ways, though, he has showed me how to do exactly that: to question received wisdom, to insist on my own angle, to view language as a playground, and a playground as bliss. He showed me how to love the words that emerged from my mouth and from my typewriter, how to love being in my own body, how to love being in my own skin and not some other skin.

On an Army transport ship taking my father and 5,000 other soldiers from Seattle to Okinawa in May 1945, my father played in a poker game that continued for three days and nights; players left only to use the bathroom or get food or sleep. They’d all read about the bloody Marine invasion on Okinawa a month before, so there was, according to my father, a fatalistic feeling about the game of “Tomorrow we die” and “Hell, it’s only money.”

On the third day, my father was ahead $1,000. They were playing Seven-Card Stud. The first two cards he drew were kings. He immediately bet the $2 limit, trying to drive out as many of the other players as he could—a poker strategy his father had taught him. My dad drew a third king on the fourth card, giving him what was now an extremely hard-to-beat hand.

By the fifth card there were only two people left—my dad and a young private from Georgia, “Rebel.”

When my father bet $2, Rebel said, “Ah raise you, Sarge. It’s two dollars and two dollars better.”

My father, figuring that Rebel had maybe a pair or a possible straight, threw in $2 to see him. Another poker lesson learned by my father from his father: never let anybody bluff you, especially when you and the other player are the last two in the game. “You’ve got to keep them honest,” he told him, “even if you have to put in your last dime to ‘see’ them. Remember that.”

On the sixth card, my father began with a bet and Rebel again raised him $2. My dad now had four kings and, looking at the cards Rebel was showing, he couldn’t imagine what he might have that would beat four kings. My father “saw” Rebel’s raise.

When the seventh card was dealt “down and dirty,” my father said, “It’s up to the raiser. Up to you, Rebel.”

“It’ll cost you four dollars to see me, Sarge,” he said, which got a laugh from some of his buddies.

My father saw Rebel again and asked him what he had.

“I got me a little old straight,” he said and started to rake in the $75 pot.

“Not good enough, Rebel,” my father said, showing his four kings.

Rebel slammed his cards down on the table and said, “You play like a Gahdamned Jew!”—stretching the word “Jew” out, according to my father, as if it had several syllables, making it sound like “Jooo-ooo.”

The chow whistle sounded, the game broke up, and my father asked Rebel, “Why did you use that expression, ‘play like a Goddamned Jew’?”

Rebel said that his father told him that all Jews were sharp poker players. My dad said that some of his friends back in Brooklyn were poor players, almost as bad as Rebel and his friends. (Whenever my grandfather got good cards, his entire manner would change. He’d pull his chair up closer to the table and say in Yiddish, “Ubber Yetz,” which, loosely translated, means “But, now…”: the battle was joined and my grandfather was ready for action. The other players would laugh and say, “Well, it looks like Sam has one of his ‘Ubber Yetz’ hands. Who’s going to see him?” “Enough with the jokes,” he’d say. “Are you here to play poker? I bet a quarter for openers. Is anybody in?” One or two would stay in and my grandfather would usually win the pots, which were never very big.) Then my father told Rebel he was Jewish. Rebel didn’t believe him; my father had blue eyes, blond hair, and a deep tan. My dad said that he’d provide proof if he’d just step into the latrine, where he’d show him that he was circumcised. Rebel said he believed him.

The comedian Danny Kaye and my father were classmates at P.S. 149. In the mid-1950s, shortly before I was born, Kaye gave a one-man performance at the Hollywood Bowl, which my father and mother and half a dozen of their friends attended. At intermission, Kaye walked to the front of the stage and asked how many in the audience were from Brooklyn. Quite a few hands went up. He asked how many had gone to P.S. 149. About 10 people raised their hands. Then he asked if anyone remembered the P.S. 149 fight song. My dad’s was the only hand still up. Kaye said, “Great, let’s do it,” and gave the band the beat. My mother tugged at my father’s coat, saying, “Milt, you’re embarrassing me. Please sit down.” My parents’ friends urged my mother to relax. Danny Kaye and my father sang their alma mater’s fight song:

My new dream goes like this: In the middle of the desert, my father takes off his boots and shakes out pebbles, dirt, dead leaves. Lizards crawl around, looking for shade under rocks and short shrubs. When he untwists the top of the canteen, he finds nothing inside.

You drank all the water, he says.

Yes, I say, I was thirsty.

That’s all we had left, he says. We won’t be able to survive.

A quarter mile away stands a giant cactus plant.

I’ll race you for the water in the cactus, I say.

He unstraps the canteen from his belt, takes the backpack off his shoulders, and gives both the canteen and the backpack to me. After stretching his legs by touching his toes and doing deep knee bends, he builds up sand to serve as a starting block and crouches down in a sprinter’s position. With his feet buried in the sand, his shoulders hunched over and shaking, and his head pointed straight ahead as if he’s a bird dog, he rocks until he’s set. He’s serious.

Who’s going to start us? I ask.

Runners, he says, spitting into the dirt, take your marks.

Are you sure—

Get set.

I’d hate for you—

Go, he says. He gets off to such a good start that I think maybe he’s jumped the gun. I chase after him, calling out that in order to be absolutely fair to both parties involved we should at least think about starting over again, but he ignores me, clenches his fists, and lengthens his stride, kicking up pebbles. Bounding over the desert, avoiding rocks and brush, we approach the cactus plant, which is huge: four stems curve up from the base and one major stem sticks straight up into the air thirty feet like a thick green finger.

I can hear him gasping for breath when I edge up on him, but I have nothing in reserve: my head’s bobbing up and down; my neck muscles are straining. He brings his knees up higher, all the way to his chest. He sprints away from me, shouting, racing for the cactus, really hitting his stride, his arms and legs working together smoothly and powerfully.

My knees buckle and I tumble into the dirt headfirst, arms stretched out flat to break my fall. I scrape my hands on rocks. My dad takes the knife out of his pocket, cuts a low stem of the cactus, cups water in his hands, drinks. He wins. He wins again. He always wins—except in the sense that in the end he’ll lose, as we all do.