I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  To me, however, death is merely death, and a person who was alive is gone, and although sorrow and loneliness may devour you as a result, it should not be put on public display, any more than it must. I realize this is not a popular view and will not prevail.

  In any case, I had more than philosophic reasons for not wanting to attend Henry’s funeral. I had just returned from New York and I did not feel like making the round trip again. Furthermore, February 19 was Robyn’s thirteenth birthday, and I felt attending a funeral was a poor way of celebrating it. However, the necessity of going through the ritual could not be overborne.

  I did delay matters a day, though, for Robyn’s sake. On the morning of the nineteenth, I drove Gertrude and David to the airport, where they took the plane to New York. Robyn and I then had a birthday dinner at a fancy restaurant and I did my best to make it a pleasant occasion. (Life is for the living.) On the twentieth, she and I drove to New York, and the next day, having attended the funeral, we all drove back.

  It was a miserable time for me, not the least because Mary Blugerman, the widow, was at her self-pitying best. She had wallowed in self-pity all her life, and taught poor Gertrude to do the same, but she had never before had quite as good an excuse.

  Other members of the family, of course, showed up. (Even my father and mother came.) Mary seized on Henry’s younger sister, Sophie, and favored her with a long, long discourse on the miseries of widowhood and on the misfortunes that now faced her.

  I pulled Gertrude to one side, and said to her softly, “Can you stop your mother? Sophie has been a widow for twenty years and it must be hard for her to take your mother’s talk of misery and unhappiness.”

  “What do you mean?” said Gertrude indignantly, for she never allowed any criticism of her mother. “Sophie’s husband died when Sophie was still a young woman and could take care of herself.”

  I stared at Gertrude in disbelief. “Are you trying to tell me that your mother would have been better off if Henry had died twenty years ago, instead of being so selfish as to wait till your mother was old?”

  Gertrude said nothing but stalked away. I don’t believe she got the point at all. When a true self-pitier is absorbed in that function there seems no way at all of allowing reason to intrude. I remembered then that I had gone through this with Gertrude once before.

  Twenty years earlier, when Henry had made his ill-fated business venture after World War II, one of the disasters that struck him was that Jack, his salesman, quit on him.

  I asked Gertrude why Jack had quit, and she said, “Because his father-in-law died and left him a lot of money. What a lucky fellow.”

  I said, “You mean Jack is lucky because his father-in-law died?”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s so unfair. Why should he get it?”

  I said, “Would you prefer it if my father-in-law had died and left me money?”

  She didn’t answer that time either. I suppose that was the hardest thing to take about Gertrude—her insistence on allowing self-pity to take precedence over all else.

  I suppose everyone goes through periods of self-pity. I know I do and I have described some of them. It is, however, an unpleasant and undignified emotion, and I do my best to fight it. I always remember the woman who told me, when I was in the army and waiting to go to Bikini, “What makes you think your troubles are so special?”

  I have rarely lectured Robyn or tried to impose my views on her, but I did in this one respect, always fearing she would pick up the trick of self-pity from her mother.

  I said, “Robyn, in my opinion everybody has a certain share of pity coming to him and no more. If you are sorry for yourself, there is that much less pity available for others to have for you. If you are very sorry for yourself, no one else will pity you. If, however, you face your troubles with courage, then you will get all the pity and help you need.”

  I’m so glad she listened to me, because she has grown up as a merry person who has taken her share of disappointment and misery and has always borne up bravely under them.

  b) Judah Asimov— My father, as I mentioned earlier, lived for thirty years with anginal pain and on nitroglycerine tablets.

  In 1968, the family had a big dinner to celebrate my parents’ golden wedding, and it was not long after that that they were to retire to Florida. When we parted, I wondered, with a sad resignation, if I would ever see them again. After all, I was not going to go to Florida and I did not think they would ever come back to New York. My father, at least, I did not, in fact, ever see again.

  On August 3, 1969, a feature article about me appeared in the Sunday New Tork Times Book Review, an excellent one which quoted me correctly and said nothing that was silly or wrong. In it, I praised my father most lovingly. I phoned him to make sure he had seen the article and he had. He was a very undemonstrative person but he was clearly touched and pleased. He complained of chest pains, in passing, as he often did, and I expressed my worries and urged him to see a doctor.

  He said impatiendy, “Why are you worried? If I die, I die.”

  The next day, August 4, 1969, the pains were worse. My mother had him taken to a hospital and there he died quiedy at the age of seventy-two.

  My father had had a hard life but it was full of accomplishments. Coming to the United States as a penniless immigrant at the age of twenty-six, he nevertheless managed to educate three children, see his daughter happily married, have a younger son in a high position on a large newspaper and an older son who was a professor and a prolific writer.

  My brother, Stan, went to Florida, collected my mother, together with my father’s body, and brought them to Long Island. My father did not have a formal funeral (Stan disapproved of them as heartily as I). We merely accompanied the rabbi to the burial site in a Long Island cemetery and watched him buried. I had looked at his face before the coffin was closed, but Stan could not bear to.

  c) Anna Asimov— My brother placed my mother in a well-heeled nursing home within a few miles of his own home so that he could visit her regularly and frequendy. I visited her less frequentiy, but called her without fail on set days. My father had left enough money to take care of her for the rest of her life, though, of course, my brother and I stood ready to do the job if my father’s money failed.

  Occasionally, I made it possible for her to bask in my fame. I spoke at a book-and-author luncheon in Long Island that was sponsored by Newsday, my brother’s newspaper. Stan had my mother brought in by limousine, and she was at a front table during the festivities. I’m afraid that in my talk I made fun of Stan, whereupon my mother stood up and shook her fist at me. (I remember the days when her arm was indeed formidable.) After the talk, when people flocked about, buying my book and those of the other writers present and getting them signed, one brought my book to my mother, who signed it also with the greatest aplomb.

  Still later, I gave a talk at the Long Beach library, which was located very near my mother’s nursing home, and did it only so that she might attend and play the role of “speaker’s mother.”

  She was, however, declining rapidly. I phoned her on August 5, 1973, it being the regular time for the call. She was quite weepy and spoke about my father, for whom she was always lonely. That night she died and they found her dead in her bed on the morning of the sixth. She had been a widow for exactly four years and two days and she was one month short of her seventy-eighth birthday.

  Some relative was needed to identify her officially. They could not reach my brother, and my sister did not have a car, so they got hold of me and I drove out to Long Island with Janet. It was a bad day for it, because it happened to be Janet’s birthday, and since she had been in the hospital on her previous birthday, I had wanted this one to be a special one—but not in the way it turned out to be special.

  I arrived at the nursing home and identified my mother, who was then covered and taken away, eventually to be put into the prepared plot immediately next to that of my father. I was told that my brother and sis
ter were coming, so we waited, and before long Stan and Ruth were there, and Marcia and Nick.

  We looked over my mother’s meager possessions to decide what was to go to the Salvation Army and what we wanted to keep ourselves for use or for a memento. I took a ballpoint pen, but nothing else, and I left it to Stan and Marcia to divide what was left.

  I did, however, manage to get off one of my gallows-humor specials. Looking about at the family, I said, “If Mama had known we would all be here today, she would have waited.” Oddly enough, there was a general laugh and the tension was broken. We all went out for dinner.

  I was somewhat concerned at the time that I hadn’t felt more grief and sorrow at my parents’ death. I seemed to myself to be callous and stonyhearted about it. But there were reasons.

  For one thing, as I’ve already stated, I don’t like vast outward shows of sorrow and I don’t like to indulge in loud lamentations. Second, both parents had had bad heart conditions in their last years and one would have had to be very foolish not to expect death at any time. We might even view it as a release from growing feebleness. After all, both my parents were in full possession of their minds to the last day of their lives and that is great. I would not have wanted them to live long enough to grow senile.

  But I think that the greatest reason for my lack of hair-tearing was that I knew that in life I had gratified them in every way, and on their departure from me I had not one scrap of the guilt I would have experienced if I were conscious of having failed them. And I suspect that a loud and ostentatious sorrow has at its core a feeling of guilt.

  To my surprise, my mother left a substantial sum of money behind, and in her will she directed that it be divided equally among the three of us. Naturally, I wouldn’t take any of it, feeling that Stan and Marcia (particularly Marcia) needed it a lot more than I did, so I insisted that it be divided into two parts only.

  Stan hired a lawyer to supervise this modification to make sure we did nothing illegal, and the lawyer said to me, “You had better get a lawyer of your own.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To protect your interests.”

  I laughed, and said, “It is inconceivable that my brother and I could possibly be at odds with each other over anything as trivial as money. I don’t need a lawyer.” And I didn’t.

  d) Mary Blugerman— Mary had been in declining health when I first met her and had been failing rapidly ever since. At least that was her estimate of the situation, one that was freely offered to anyone who would listen.

  She, however, had been left enough money by Henry to have her old age taken care of and she outlasted the generation. She survived her husband by nineteen years, living in the old apartment in which I had courted Gertrude so many years before until nearly the end, when increasing blindness and debility forced her removal to a nursing home in Brooklyn.

  There she died at last on February 12, 1987, at the age of ninety-two. Gertrude was by now approaching her seventieth birthday and was not in good health, so she could not come to New York this time. Nor could John, her brother, who lived in California. Robyn, however, took care of all arrangements and saw Mary buried.

  I took the opportunity to call Gertrude, from whom I had been long divorced, and assured her that she was not to worry about the financial end of it. If Mary’s own money was not enough to cover matters, I would supply the missing amount. (After all, she was Robyn’s grandmother, so I couldn’t forsake her, no matter what.) It was one of the few occasions Gertrude said, “Thank you,” to me.

  Life After Death

  The coming of death, at last, to my parents, might have given rise in myself to a renewed consideration of the possibility of life after death. How comfortable it would be not only to expect one’s own death not to be death but instead to be an opening to (possibly) a more glorious life, and to feel, in addition, that you would also be able to see your

  parents and other loved ones again, perhaps in the full vigor of their youth.

  It is entirely because such thoughts are so comforting and so exhilarating, and so remove us from the otherwise dreadful thought of death, that the afterlife is accepted by the vast majority, even in the absolute absence of any evidence for its existence.

  How did it all start? we might wonder. My own feeling, purely speculation, is this—

  As far as we know, the human species is the only one that understands that death is inevitable, not only in general but in every individual’s case. No matter how we protect ourselves against predation, accident, and infection, each of us will eventually die through the sheer erosion of our body—and we know it.

  There must have come a time when this knowledge first began to permeate a human community, and it must have been a terrible shock. It amounted to the “discovery of death.” All that could make the thought of death bearable was to suppose that it didn’t really exist; that it was an illusion. After one apparently died, one continued to live in some other fashion and in some other place. This was undoubtedly encouraged by the fact that dead people often appeared in the dreams of their friends and relatives and the dream appearances could be interpreted as representing a shade or ghost of the still-living “dead” person.

  So speculations about the afterworld grew more and more elaborate. The Greeks and the Hebrews thought that much of the afterworld (Hades or Sheol) was a mere place of dimness and all but nonexistence. However, there were special places of torment for evildoers (Tartarus) and places of delight for men who were approved of by the gods (Elysian Fields or Paradise.) These extremes were seized on by people who wished to see themselves blessed and their enemies punished, if not in this world, then at least in the next.

  Imagination was stretched to conceive of the final resting place of evil people or of anyone, however good, who didn’t subscribe to quite the same mumbo jumbo that the imaginer did. This gave us our modern notion of Hell as a place of eternal punishment of the most vicious kind. This is the drooling dream of a sadist grafted onto a God who is proclaimed as all-merciful and all-good.

  Imagination has never managed to build up a serviceable Heaven, however. The Islamic Heaven has its houris, ever available and ever virginal, so that it becomes an eternal sex house. The Norse Heaven has its heroes feasting at Valhalla and fighting each other between feasts, so that it becomes an eternal restaurant and battlefield. And our own Heaven is usually pictured as a place where everyone has wings and plunks a harp in order to sing unending hymns of praise to God.

  What human being with a modicum of intelligence could stand any of such Heavens, or the others that people have invented, for very long? Where is there a Heaven with an opportunity for reading, for writing, for exploring, for interesting conversation, for scientific investigation? I never heard of one.

  If you read John Milton’s Paradise Lost you will find that his Heaven is described as an eternal sing-along of praise to God. It is no wonder that one-third of the angels rebelled. When they were cast down into Hell, they then engaged in intellectual exercises (read the poem if you don’t believe me) and I believe that, Hell or not, they were better off. When I read it, I sympathized strongly with Milton’s Satan and considered him the hero of the epic, whether Milton intended that or not.

  But what is my belief? Since I am an atheist and do not believe that either God or Satan, Heaven or Hell, exists, I can only suppose that when I die, there will only be an eternity of nothingness to follow. After all, the Universe existed for 15 billion years before I was born and I (whatever “I “ may be) survived it all in nothingness.

  People may well ask if this isn’t a bleak and hopeless belief. How can I live with the specter of nothingness hanging over my head?

  I don’t find it a specter. There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell or eternal boredom in Heaven.

  And what if I’m mistaken? The question was asked of Bertrand Russell, the famous mathematician, philosopher, and outspoken atheist. “What if
you died,” he was asked, “and found yourself face to face with God? What then?”

  And the doughty old champion said, “I would say, ‘Lord, you should have given us more evidence.’ “ A couple of months ago I had a dream, which I remember with the utmost clarity. (I don’t usually remember my dreams.)

  I dreamed I had died and gone to Heaven. I looked about and knew where I was—green fields, fleecy clouds, perfumed air, and the distant, ravishing sound of the heavenly choir. And there was the recording angel smiling broadly at me in greeting.

  I said, in wonder, “Is this Heaven?”

  The recording angel said, “It is.”

  I said (and on waking and remembering, I was proud of my integrity), “But there must be a mistake. I don’t belong here. I’m an atheist.”

  “No mistake,” said the recording angel.

  “But as an atheist how can I qualify?”

  The recording angel said sternly, “We decide who qualifies. Not you.”

  “I see,” I said. I looked about, pondered for a moment, then turned to the recording angel and asked, “Is there a typewriter here that I can use?”

  The significance of the dream was clear to me. I felt Heaven to be the act of writing, and I have been in Heaven for over half a century and I have always known this.

  A second point of significance is the recording angel’s remark that Heaven, not human beings, decides who qualifies. I take that to mean that if I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

  I would also want a God who would not allow a Hell. Infinite torture can only be a punishment for infinite evil, and I don’t believe that infinite evil can be said to exist even in the case of a Hitler. Besides, if most human governments are civilized enough to try to eliminate torture and outlaw cruel and unusual punishments, can we expect anything less of an all-merciful God?