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

by David Shields

  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 demol
ished) 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.)