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

by David Shields

  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:

  Man, by living on, fulfill

  As many generations
as thou may

  Eternal death shall be waiting still

  And he who died with light of yesterday

  Shall be no briefer time in death’s no-more

  Than he who perished months or years before.

  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:

  …Let me go: take back thy gift.

  Why should a man desire in any way

  To vary from the kindly race of men,

  Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance

  Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

  Release me, and restore me to the ground.

  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 eight
eenth-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.”