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

by David Shields

  Maybe it’s all just the pure dumb rush of selective serotonin reuptake, but now, rather than endlessly rehearsing how my life might have been different, I tell myself how grateful I am for my life—with Laurie and Natalie and our relative health and happiness together. (Knock on lumber.) I’m newly in love with Laurie—aware of her weaknesses and accepting of them, because I’m so blisteringly aware of my own. I go to sleep with a night guard jammed between my teeth, a Breathe Right strip stretched across my nose (to mitigate snoring), and a pillow tucked between my legs. I walk around with an ice pack stuck in one coat pocket and a baggie of ibuprofen in the other. I’m not exactly the king of the jungle.

  I like the humility and gravity and nakedness of this need, for—and this is apparently a lesson I can’t relearn too many times—we’re just animals walking the earth for a brief time, a bare body housed in a mortal cage. For his 50th birthday party, a friend rented a gym around the corner from his house, and I played basketball for most of the night as if I’d somehow been transported back to my 20s—“Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, / Make me a child again just for tonight!” I was, according to Laurie, “running around like a colt,” although, of course, a couple of weeks later I aggravated my back and was out of action for a few days. At least I’m now in action. My back will always hurt a bit, or rather the pain will always come and go. “Pain is inevitable,” Dr. Herring likes to say. “Suffering is optional.” When I quoted the line to Laurie, she said, “Thank you, Dr. Herring.” A while ago, I asked Wolf why I have a bad back. He explained that the ability to walk upright was a key evolutionary adaptation for mankind, but vertebrae that are aligned in the same direction as the force of gravity often become compressed, leading to pinched nerves and ruptured disks. Then he said, “In your case, though: bad attitude.” He was joking, but I think I got it.

  Notes on the Local Swimming Hole

  Swimming is by far the best tonic I’ve found yet for my back. I’m not a good swimmer—I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane—but when I took a two-week break from swimming, I was surprised how much I missed it. When I returned to the pool, I realized it’s where I get, as Evelyn Ames says in Postcards from the Edge, “my endolphins.” I can hardly bear Sunday, when the pool is closed.

  Outside the Green Lake Community Center are the healthy people—the gorgeous rollerbladers and runners and power walkers doing laps around a large lake in the middle of the city, the buff basketball players, the junior high baseball players, the yuppie Ultimate Frisbee players, the latte drinkers checking one another out, the Euro-cool soccer players, the volleyballers, the softball players. The indoor pool is the wetland of the maimed—home to those bearing canes, knee braces, neck braces—for who else would be free or motivated to be here at, say, 1:00 P.M. on Wednesday? I’m joined by people recovering from knee surgery, spinal surgery, car accidents; obese people who weigh themselves daily but never seem to lose a pound; a man in a wheelchair with his faithful dog barking at any potential interference; another wheelchair-bound man whose assistant is an almost cruelly cheerful Nordstrom shoe salesman; the Walrus Splasher (a huge guy with a handlebar moustache whom we’re all trying to build up the courage to approach about the tidal waves he sends our way as he pounds the water); and a pre-op transsexual from New Jersey who, day by day, is wearing more and more feminine attire and is sticking out his butt and chest with greater self-confidence. He’s the one who told me the locker room was closed one day owing to an outbreak of leprosy; it turned out to be just a homeless guy who had shat his pants. Nearly everyone here is trying to come back from something; you can feel it in the men’s locker room, where we don’t talk that much.

  The good swimmers while away too much time talking; they’re not desperate, as the rest of us are, to claw their way back into shape by doing their assigned 36 laps (one mile). The good swimmers have an uncanny ability to skid across the top of the water, while the rest of us plunge down, down, down. The falling apart of our bodies; the perfection of youthful bodies; the pool is, for me, about one thing: the tug of time.

  Every swimmer seems lost in his or her own water space (accidentally touching someone’s toe or shoulder always feels thrillingly, wrongly intimate). I’m never so aware of the human perplexity as when I’m at Green Lake with my fellow bodies. We’re all just trying to stay alive; we have no greater purpose than glimpsing a shadow of ourselves on the surface as we glide underwater. What is the point of floating? To keep floating. I feel the weightless, gorgeous quality of existence.

  Until very recently, my father would swim at least 15 laps every day, diving headfirst rather than sashaying his way in, as I do. Now, though, he can hardly manage a stroke or two across the width of his condo’s pool without his arthritis forcing him to stop and clutch his leg. He’s always been addicted to terrible puns; now, he keeps playing with variations on the word “arthritis.” Arthur, write us. Author, write us. Author, right us. There’s no author, we both know, and there’s no way he can right us. Earlier this year, it was just the two of us alone in the pool. I was doing laps and flip turns—my back was feeling weirdly trouble-free for the moment—while he was tottering in the shallow end. After just a few minutes, he got out, toweled off, and headed over to the sauna, carrying the sports page.

  Sex and Death (iii)

  As soon as animals, including humans, reach sexual maturity, many of their functions weaken. These weaknesses appear in humans beginning at age 25.

  With the salmon and octopus and many other plants and animals, reproduction is, in effect, willful suicide. After reproduction, the body is a useless shell, so it’s discarded. The body is, for all intents and purposes, the host, and the reproductive system is the parasite that brings the body to its death.

  As the biologist E. O. Wilson says, “In a Darwinian sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier. Samuel Butler’s famous aphorism, that the chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg, has been modernized: the organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA.”

  Bats live longer than rats, but they reproduce more slowly. Birds live longer than ground-dwelling mammals, but flightless birds have short lives. Some turtles and tortoises live longer than humans. Organisms exposed to high risk invest little in maintenance and a lot in reproduction, whereas organisms exposed to low risk do the opposite.

  Virgin male and female fruit flies live longer than fruit flies that reproduce. According to Luc Bussière, a zoologist at the University of Zurich, the best predictor of male crickets’ mating success is the quantity of time spent calling females. “We heightened this behavior by manipulating dietary intake,” he says. “For males on high-protein diets, it had the effect of promoting their promiscuity and reducing their longevity. They literally knocked themselves out trying to impress female crickets. For humans, this might seem counterproductive because we don’t want to die young. We want to live long lives. But for animals the goal isn’t living longer; it’s to reproduce.” The survival instinct and the reproductive instinct are opposed.

  Women who live longer have, on average, lower levels of fertility. Childless men and women, though, don’t live longer than those who are mothers and fathers. You can’t choose not to have children and thereby gain extra years of life by redirecting your resources for reproduction into efforts at self-maintenance. Your genes make you disposable but have not left you the flexibility to choose to live a longer life by not propagating them. My father has frequently complained to me—without the least self-consciousness or irony—about what a toll it took on him to have to earn a living. “Let’s put it this way,” he once said. “I wanted a good life available on terms that did not offend. It hasn’t always worked out that way. There were jobs I wasn’t exactly crazy about, worked at them because there were bills to pay, a lot of financial obligations and responsibilities.”

  In an
experiment on white mice gender-segregated by an electric fence, the males backed off at the first severe shock whereas the females continued to charge the fence until each in turn was electrocuted.

  A woman’s shapely hips are a sign of childbearing potential; fat deposits serve as an energy source during pregnancy. A few weeks after Natalie was born, I was walking home from the market, carrying diapers, baby food, etc. Noticing a young, attractive, glammed-up woman wearing a halter top and driving a red convertible, I viewed her in terms I would never have considered before: something approaching awed appreciation that she was doing all she could to perpetuate the species.

  So many Hollywood movies are barely disguised procreation myths—getting the most fertile couple to come together. To take one among thousands of examples, in Otto Preminger’s film Laura, gossip columnist Waldo Lydecker lives in language and can’t engage life. Shelby Carpenter, a gigolo, is too dumb to have any grasp on life, expressing himself only through clichés. Homicide detective Mark McPherson knows what life’s about and so is able to maneuver through it successfully, despite its dangers and the inevitable conclusion (death). Lydecker winds up killing the wrong woman, then getting shot. Carpenter childishly submits to an older woman’s maternal embrace. McPherson and Laura, at movie’s end, are ready to breed.

  Which is all our obsession with human beauty is, anyway: an evolutionary adaptation for evaluating others as potential producers of our child. Male college students, shown photos of more and less attractive women, are far more likely to volunteer for altruistic and risky acts for a beautiful woman. Attractive women are 10 times more likely than plain women to “marry up.” Not news. But mothers with attractive babies spend more time holding their baby close, staring into their baby’s eyes, than mothers with babies judged less attractive; the latter spend more time tending to their baby’s needs and are distracted much more easily. Babies born prematurely—who often have falsely mature faces—are imagined to be difficult and irritable, and people are less willing to volunteer to take care of them. So, too, a study of abused children under court protection in California and Massachusetts found that a disproportionate number of them were “unattractive.” When people are asked to approach a stranger and stop when they no longer feel comfortable, they stop nearly two feet away from attractive people, as opposed to less than a foot from less attractive people: beauty is privileged territory. In youth, my father was extremely handsome, a Jewish prince, and he’s never gotten over that fact. When my first novel was published and I had a little book party to celebrate, he didn’t attend because he wasn’t looking his best. This was in 1984; he was 74.

  People will say about an especially pretty little girl, “She’s going to be a heartbreaker”—which is, to me, an odd and revealing phrase. What does it mean, exactly? It means that when she grows up, she will use her beauty as a weapon, and she is expected to do so.

  In Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff describes American coots: gray birds whose chicks have orange plumes and bald heads that turn bright red during feeding. The chicks beg for food by flashing their red and orange signs for their mother. When researchers trimmed the orange plumes, the drabber chicks got less attention and food from the mother, who fed the more colorful chicks first. When human mothers give birth to high-risk, low-weight twins, they invariably favor the healthier twin, soothing, holding, playing, and vocalizing more with the twin more likely to survive. A mother has limited resources; she needs to know how much to invest in her new baby without endangering herself and the lives of her other children.

  A mortal animal is a germ cell’s way of making more germ cells, thereby optimizing the likelihood that they’ll fuse with germ cells of the opposite sex. The continuation of the germ line is the driving force of natural selection; longevity of individual animals is of secondary importance. Animals are selected through evolution for having physiological reserves greater than the minimum necessary to reach sexual maturation and rear progeny to independence, but once this goal has been accomplished, they have sufficient excess reserve capacity to coast for a period of time, the remainder of which is called your life span. You’re a salmon without portfolio.

  In 1930, one in five cancer patients survived; in 1940, one in four; in 1960, one in three; in 1990, 40 percent survived. Now, 50 percent survive. One out of every eight American women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime, and the risk increases with age. Three of the risk factors are early menstruation, childbirth after 30 or no childbirth, and menopause after 50; you’re urged, in other words, to get on stage when expected, hit your lines at the right time, and then exit on cue. Any deviation, and evolution punishes you. There’s really only one immutable biological law, it has only two imperatives, and it gets stated in dozens of ways: spawn and die.

  I was patiently waiting my turn at the pharmacy when a 20-something, accompanied by his pretty, punky girlfriend, tried to cut in line. I told him to go to the back. He said, “What is this, junior high?” I said, “No, this is the line for the pharmacy, but the way you’re acting—” He asked why I couldn’t grow hair on my head. I wondered why he hadn’t grown any taller. It was a very high-level exchange. He pushed me; I pushed him. He raised his fists and said, “Let’s go.” Forty years receded, and it was as if I’d returned to 6th grade, the last time I was in a fight: I got a huge adrenaline surge, I could hear my heart thumping, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath. I declined the drugstore fisticuffs, but I replied—with the emphatic approval of my middle-aged comrades in line—“Life has rules.” It does? I was appalled; it never occurred to me that I would ever say anything remotely resembling this. If life has rules, what are they? At a party recently, I overheard a woman, attempting to seduce a young man half her age, say, “I’m forty-five, but I’m tight.” That’s pretty much it: sex and death. Reproduction and oblivion.

  In Rabbit, Run, published when John Updike was 28, he wrote, “The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us and we become, first inside, then outside, junk. Flower stalks.”

  Steve Nash, 34, who has been the Most Valuable Player of the National Basketball Association two of the last three years and who is the father of 3-year-old twin girls, says, “I guess I’m learning more how insignificant my life is. I still enjoy my work. I still enjoy my friends and family and relationships, but you realize the girls are so innocent and dependent. You realize your life, in some ways, is over.”

  Thackeray said, “When one is twenty, yes, but at forty-seven Venus may rise from the sea, and I for one should hardly put on my spectacles to have a look.”

  A few years ago, I told Laurie that it seemed to me as if so many people our age—48 or a bit older—had started taking “nice pills” everyone seemed so much more mellow. She said, “It’s not them. It’s you: you’re nicer. And so people seem to you—”

  “No,” I protested. “No I’m not. I’m a walking blade.”

  In a short story, Barry Hannah writes about his protagonist, who’s in his late 40s, “He still did not know precisely what accounted for it, but some big quiet thing had fallen down and locked into place, like a whisper of some weight. Ned Maxy had been granted contact with paradise, and he could hardly believe the lack of noise.”

  Joke courtesy of Dr. Herring: There are three kinds of married sex. When you’re first married, you’re so lusty you have sex in every room in the house. After several years, the passion dies down a little, and you confine sex to the bedroom. After many years, you pass each other in the hallway and say, “Fuck you.” One in five married couples has sex less than once a month; I recently heard a woman on the radio suggest that couples should have sex no more often than they do their taxes (quarterly? annually?).

  The weak links of the human body are exposed when people survive beyond the reproductive period. For instance, the thymus gland degenerates after your sexual maturation. At age 50, you retain only 5 to 10 percent of the original mass of the thymus, which produce
s hormones whose levels decline at age 25 and are undetectable after 60.

  The weight and size of the uterus decrease after menopause until age 65, when it’s half the weight it was at 30. After age 60, men have fewer and fewer erections during sleep. Sexual daydreams decline in frequency and intensity until age 65, when they largely disappear.

  Sophocles, in old age, said finally being free of sexual desire was “like escaping from bondage to a raving maniac.”

  In opposition, again, to all this decline and fall, this piece my father wrote, in his late 80s, for his class:

  It’s funny how easily you can misjudge people or, more specifically, women. How easy it is to be deceived about what happens or what’s said at a first meeting. After our first date, I felt that we would become lovers in a month. In a worst-case scenario, six weeks or two months. I met Virginia for the first time at a Palo Alto senior center where I’d gone to a lecture on the future of the novel. I got there late and the only seat was in the back row, which turned out to be next to her. When the lecture and question-and-answer and coffee-and-cookies periods were over, I said I’d escort her to her car in the parking lot, since it was late. When we got to her car, I mumbled the ritualistic “Glad to have met you” and was prepared to leave, when she reached into her purse and pulled out a card with her name and phone number on it. She asked me to call her.

  Two weeks later I did. It was on a Friday night and I asked her about seeing her the next night and quickly apologized about calling on such short notice. She said there was no need to apologize, invited me to her place for dinner, and said I’d be as welcome as the flowers in May. Damn if she didn’t repeat that silly “flowers in May” line every single time I called to arrange the time and place of our next meeting.