by Isaac Asimov
[Isaac ended his autobiography with a chapter called "New Life." He had been told he might live another three or four years.]
It's not really a new life I have returned to, for I am doing my best to make it as much like my old life as possible. But it's new in that it is considerably modified, and for the worse, I suppose. I am a septuagenarian now, with a leaky heart valve and imperfect kidneys.
[He recounted some of the pleasant things he'd done after leaving the hospital, and mentioned the premature and sudden death of an old friend.]
My turn will come too, eventually, but I have had a good life and I have accomplished all I wanted to, and more than I had a right to expect I would.
So I am ready.
But not too ready ... I shall hope.
EPILOGI. JE
by Janet Asimov
(Revised as of 2001 )
One of the deepest desires of a human being is to be known and understood. Hamlet instructs Horatio to tell his story. A child asks to be told a story and is most thrilled when the one he hears has a character like himself in it.
In May 1990, Isaac ended the last volume of his autobiography with the word "hope." He knew, however, that he did not have long to live. He hoped for several more years, but his heart and kidney failure worsened and he died on April 6, 1992.
Within a day of Isaac's death, Arthur Ashe revealed that he had contracted HIV infection from a blood transfusion during surgery. The resulting public shock and publicity made it difficult to reveal that Isaac had also died of the consequences of HIV infection.
When Isaac had his bypass surgery on December 14, 1983, very little was known about HIV. The blood used for transfusion was not taken from him, earlier, or from known donors. Furthermore, screening tests for HIV contamination of blood were not done.
The surgery itself went well. He woke up from anesthesia with his brain functioning perfectly, and was happy because he'd been worried about the known possibility of brain damage from bypass surgery. He even tested his mental prowess by making up a ribald limerick for his internist.
The next day he had a high fever. He felt so terrible that he kept telling me he was going to die. The doctors were puzzled. They worried about some unknown postsurgical inflammation. Within a few days, he seemed well. Only years later, in hindsight, did we realize that the posttransfusion HIV infection had taken hold.
The now well-known quiescent period of HIV set in. Isaac went back to work and was his usual happy self. In the spring of 1984, however, he did have ankle edema, corrected by diuretics and attributed to the removal of the large leg vein used for the bypass. He also had blood test results (like an abnormally high sedimentation rate) that the doctors could not understand.
The water retention increased and generalized. By 1987, results on blood tests indicated that his kidneys were not functioning normally. By 1989, as he stated in the autobiography which I have recorded, he knew he was not well. In fact, he admitted that he was seriously sick.
He had developed a heart murmur. After several tests, he was told that he had a serious problem with the mitral valve of his heart. He was given intravenous antibiotics and was scheduled for heart valve surgery.
For several years I had been reading about HIV and worrying that some of Isaac's symptoms could be due to it, thanks to those blood transfusions during surgery in 1983. I wanted Isaac to be tested for HIV, but it was not done until February 1990, shortly before he was to have valve surgery.
After the test was done, the doctor told us that Isaac had tested positive for HIV, with only half the normal number of T cells. The surgery was canceled.
From February 1990 until he died in April 1992, he and I and Robyn (and a few others) lived with the knowledge that Isaac had AIDS. The doctors advised against going public on this, and Isaac went along with them.
In those days there seemed to be much fear of and prejudice against AIDS patients. I heard even well-educated people say they would be afraid to touch an AIDS patient (although you can't get AIDS that way). Some people said that they would not even want to be in the same room with an AIDS patient, or touch anything he touched (including phones).
The doctors told me that, although I tested negative several times, there would be prejudice against me. In spite of my misgivings about hiding truth, I agreed to keep the matter secret.
They were, frankly, horrible years-from 1989, when he was very seriously ill, to his hopelessly sick last years (from 1990 to 1992) when we also lived with the knowledge that he had AIDS. He received the best of care possible at the time, but only now are AIDS patients living longer and better thanks to combinations of new drugs.
Well, those years were not entirely horrible. He managed to complete first or final drafts of many important works. The third volume of his autobiography was finished after he knew his true diagnosis.
As I said in the first version of this epilogue, Isaac wanted the autobiography published right away, so that he could see the book before he died, but this was not done.
Isaac's 1990 diary records May 30 as the day he finished typing the final copy of the autobiography. He writes, "It is now all ready to hand in, 125 days after I started it. Not many can write 235,000 words in that time, while doing other things as well." I would add-and while coping with terminal illness.
He managed to do several enjoyable things, like going to Washington, D.C., for a luncheon at the Soviet Embassy. The trip made Isaac feel, for a while, that he was back from illness and part of life again. He was particularly happy about meeting Gorbachev because the ending of the Cold War gave hope to the world. Isaac strongly believed all peoples should work together for the common good of humanity.
There were other special occasions-like going to the Rensse- laerville Institute "Asimov Seminar," where he sang and explained all the verses of "The Star Spangled Banner."
And in spite of increasing weakness, he wrote every day until almost the end. Writing Asimov Laughs Again lifted his spirits, but (in April 1991) he concluded the manuscript with the words, "I'm afraid that my life has just about run its course and I don't really expect to live much longer.... In my life, I have had Janet and I have had my daughter, Robyn, and my son, David; I have had a large number of good friends; I have had my writing and the fame and fortune it has brought me; and no matter what happens to me now, it's been a good life, and I am satisfied with it.
"So please don't worry about me, or feel bad. Instead I only hope that this book has brought you a few laughs."
After he finished and turned in Asimnov Laughs Again, he became more withdrawn. The handwriting in his diary became more and more deteriorated, and there were fewer, shorter entries-until the summer of 1991. when he stopped.
When typing was difficult, he dictated to me, especially his last piece for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was a poignant "Farewell-Farewell" to all his "Gentle Readers." In it he said, "It has always been my ambition to die in harness with my head face down on a keyboard and my nose caught between two of the keys, but that's not the way it worked out."
The last months were filled with hospitalizations and physical deterioration. It is almost true-as I said in the first epilogue-that he did not suffer pain.
He probably died, not of infection due to the destruction of his immune system, but of terminal heart and kidney failure, causing a kind of merciful apathy.
He slept a great deal, but there were many unpleasant symptoms and disabilities, and in the last hospital days, he did often suffer when he was awake.
His sense of humor surfaced at times. The day before he died. Robyn, his brother Stan, and Stan's wife Ruth were in Isaac's hospital room when I said to him, "Isaac, you're the best there is."
Isaac smiled and shrugged. Then, with a mischievous lift of his eyebrows, he nodded yes, and we all laughed.
The next day he seemed to be in pain, especially when trying to breathe. Medication eased the pain and may have made it possible for him to die peacefully late that night.
Robyn and I were there when he died, holding his hands and telling him we loved him. His last complete sentence was: "I love you too."
Many years ago, Isaac wrote in a letter that he had seen the movie Liii and cried during the dream ballet:
"I know why it makes me cry. It's like life-people go one by one and you say goodbye and goodbye, until the time comes when it's your turn to go and they say goodbye. I guess the important thing is Carpe Diem-seize the day-and then let it go."
He also said, "the soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday's love is part of today's and the confidence in tomorrow's love is also part of today's. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die-I almost believe, rationalist though I am-that somewhere it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once it existed."
And he also wrote: "At various times of life, we find ourselves with a handful of blocks of different sizes and shapes, out of which we can build some aspect of life, and it behooves us to build it as beautifully as we can ..."
Writing what he wanted to write was an act of joy for him, during which he relaxed and forgot his troubles. Forward the Foundation was hard on him, because in killing Hari Seldon he was also killing himself, yet he transcended the anguish.
He told me what the end of Forward the Foundation was going to be-that as Hari Seldon dies, the equations of the future swirl around him, and he knows he is looking into the future that he himself has discovered and helped to bring about.
Knowing his own death was imminent, Isaac said, "I don't feel self-pity because I won't be around to see any of the possible futures. Like Hari Seldon, I can look at my work all around me and I'm comforted. I know that I've studied about, imagined, and written down many possible futures-it's as if I've been there."
Once when Isaac and I talked about old age, illness, and death, he said it wasn't so terrible to get sick and old and to die if you've been part of life completing itself as a pattern. Even if you don't make it to old age, it's still worthwhile; there's still pleasure in that vision of being part of the pattern of life-especially a pattern expressed in creativity and shared in love.
He also said, "I suppose there are people who are so `lucky' that they are not touched by phantoms and are not troubled by fleeting memory and know not nostalgia and care not for the ache of the past and are spared the feather-hit of the sweet, sweet pain of the lost, and I am sorry for them-for to weep over what is gone is to have had something prove worth the weeping."
When I weep-and I still do-I try to remember that Isaac was right when he said, "It's been a good life."
THE END
Appendix A.
by Janet and Isaac Asiznov
Science is much more than a hod), of knowledge. It is a vi•ar of thinking.
-Carl Sagan
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Isaac had written 399 science essays for Fantasy and Science Fiction but was too ill to write the 400th. This troubled him deeply, sobecause I was already writing one of his regular science columns-I suggested that we write the 400th essay together, recording his thoughts about science and science writing. Unfortunately, the essay was never written.
Because I still want that 400th essay, I've finally put one together from our discussions and letters.
My comments are marked by brackets, and this "essay" is not polished because the letters were not. Long ago, he wrote me about this: .'My letters to you are first drafts; straight as it comes and completely unpolished; and I leave it to you to get past the maunderings and potterings and see my meaning. In fact, it is very wonderful to be able to leave it to you to do that-in full confidence and trust."
I leave it to Isaac's readers, in full confidence and trust.
[From a commencement speech] Science with all its faults has brought education and the arts to more people-a larger percentagethan has ever existed before science. In that respect it is science that is the great humanizer. And, if we are going to solve the problems that science has brought us, it will be done by science and in no other way.
[Telling me what he said in a letter to Carl Sagan] The brotherhood of science is one of the few ideals that transcends national boundaries and points the way to possible safety amid the dangers that threaten us.
[This is the quote from a published work-I. Asimov: A Memoir (which Isaac had called "Scenes of Life") published by Doubleday in 19941 ... science can't ever explain everything and I can give you the reasons for that decision ... I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the universe.
[Helping people understand science had its difficulties. This is from a letter about an article he'd written for Playboy and which they wanted revised.] ... I wrote a letter to Playboy suggesting that in my opinion they ought to do the article I sent them as it stands because I wasn't going to rewrite it into a silly sensational piece of the kind they were asking for. I explained that I had dedicated my life to educating the public and that science must not be viewed as a mysterious black box out of which came toys and goodies, for that way laymen would view scientists as a kind of lab-coated priesthood-and, eventually, fear and hate them. I couldn't connive at that view. I had to explain science and Playboy owed a duty to its public to have science explained, and if most of their readership would rather not trouble their rusty heads, they could look at the Playmate of the Month. That's what she was there for.-Anyway, it was a very stubborn and self-righteous letter and I haven't received any answer.
[In an article] I made fun of a reviewer who wanted less of a bang of statistics ... and more of a moan of delight. I got a letter from a fan today who sympathized with me and who sent the following quotation from Alfred Noyes (you know, the Highwayman guy-which, by the way, turns out to be the favorite poem of Gene Roddenberry, and one he loves to recite thumpingly). I never came across the quotation and I think it is beautiful and I want to pass it on to you:
[About a critical letter] ... from someone who says indignantly that if s.f. [science fiction] were scientifically accurate it wouldn't be s.f. and if she wants an education she would go to school. I scowled formidably and sent back a postcard saying, "There is a difference between fiction and ignorance. If you want to be ignorant, that's your business." I work so hard to educate and here are people who would rather be stupid.
[I don't know if the following is Isaac's or something he read, but he said it with fervor] Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don't know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.
[About a talk he gave at a college] I traced the history of science and man (science and ordinary man, not science and scholars) through three stages. First there was the stage where science meant nothing to the man in the streets and he turned to his various religious leaders for help in protecting him against the universe. The turning point came (according to my thesis) with Franklin's invention of the lightning rod-the first victory of science over a menace to man which had till then seemed unavertable and which had, indeed, been considered the direct artillery of Zeus, Thor, and Yahveh.
And, I added impressively, when the average man saw lightning rods rising over the steeples of the great cathedrals of Europe, he could see with his own eyes that the priests themselves trusted in science rather than in their own holiness, and the battle was over right there. In the last two centuries, religion has retreated steadily before science. Also it led to nineteenth-century Utopianism with regard to science. Science was Good and could solve everything.
The fact that science was also Bad, I traced to 1915 and the development of gas warfare, the first time that the average man could see, with the shock of sudden recognition, that a pure development of science could be outrageously had and without mitigating good.
/> Since then we have lived in an ambivalent society where science is both Good and Bad, where it poses us insuperable problems and dangers but where only it offers us the slightest hope of solution. I then looked into the future and pictured a possible ideal society in which work and risk were abolished and in which men slowly lost interest and declined in numbers while robots, who grew to be more and more manlike in appearance and ability, took over the work of the world.
Finally the last man was gone and only the robots, self-repairing and self-perpetuating, were left. And they puzzled over their dim memories of a Golden Age, as the centuries passed. Surely there had once been a race of demigods, who never had to work, who never suffered from disease, who did not die but who just fell asleep. How had all that been lost, and left their own race forever condemned to brutal labor?
One of the robots finally got an idea. "You see," he began, "there was this snake..
And with that I ended the talk.
Would you like to know what writing problems are like to someone who never suffers from a writing block? Well, I am working on a book on physical biochemistry (of sorts) which involves chapter upon chapter upon chapter dealing with thermodynamics to begin with. Now I am using the historical approach and historically the second law of thermodynamics was discovered before the first law, but it makes much more sense to discuss the first law first. How then can I discuss the first law first and the second law second without giving the impression that I am zigzagging in time, which I am? See?
I've just written my article called "Selenize or Die," which briefly states my thesis that it is important [for scientists] to start a Moon colony, for they will show us how to realhv construct a managed economy and it will be on them that the brunt of further space exploration will fall. The peroration is "Why spend billions to place a man on the moon? If we don't, we may lose Earth. If we do, we may gain the universe. You couldn't ask for better odds."