We
don't die all at once, as though we were alive one minute and dead
the next. Neither do we age and die one year at a time. It's more
like we stay on a certain plateau for a few years until some event
pushes us along the road to death. We die a little bit at a time, at
intervals. That point was driven home to me at the age of
thirty-eight when I experienced a burst appendix after six months of
what had been a mysterious malady. It was mysterious in my case
mostly because I didn't have insurance. Someone with insurance in the
same situation would have been diagnosed properly, using various
scans and maybe an MRI, and the problem would have been discovered.
But that's another story. As so often happens, I digress before I
even begin! On that occasion, I lived, so all's well that ends well,
right?
The
point is that after those months of weakness due to undiagnosed
infection, and after pillar to post abdominal exploratory surgery,
and after a period of recuperation, I had the clear impression that I
had aged at least five years, when really only a bit under a year had
passed. I don't think that I had changed at all for the five years
previous to the onset of the infection. Afterwards, however, the
weight that I had lost came back in a different shape, my resistance
to things like viruses and infections was lower, and immediately
thereafter I began to put on weight without having changed my eating
or exercise habits at all. If anything, I was eating better and less.
Aging is like a French New Wave movie: it comes in jump-cuts.
The
Build Up To Death
For
me, as I am sure it is for many other people, I hardly seemed to age
at all between the ages of twenty-five and forty, except for losing a
bit of hair around the “male pattern baldness” spot and that
episode with the appendix. After that, every little health challenge
seemed to knock a bit more of the wind out of me.
That's
another important phenomenon, the shift in the tide of our lives that
happens more or less around our fortieth year, give or take five or
six years, depending on the individual. For one friend of mine, it
happened around the age of thirty-two, and he was dead way before he
turned sixty. It happened to Clint Eastwood much later than forty,
but the tide finally changed on him as well. For the first forty or
so years of our lives, the tide is rushing in. We are full of life,
immune to viruses, bacteria, and the effects of drinking and
cigarettes. After forty, and from then on, we become increasingly
susceptible to all of those things. We have begun, in fact, the
process of dying, a little bit at a time, and most of it happens in
those jump-cuts.
I
was very lucky, myself. I wasn't very careful about my health, other
than some fortuitous accidents. My diet as a child was just terrible,
consisting mostly of sugar, pan-fried meats, and buttered bread. When
I got to high school, I supplemented this meager fare with some pizza
every chance I got. The only vegetables visible in my house were
potatoes and cans of peas. The canned peas could remain in the
cabinets for years. My mother rarely cooked even the potatoes. There
was never any fruit. Then I married a woman who was raised in a
family where they actually ate nutritious food. Thanks to her efforts
in our family's kitchen, my sons and I had a rather good diet.
Regarding
exercise, I got an awful lot of exercise before I got married. The
atmosphere in my house was so poisonous that I remained outside as
much as possible, and when there were no games going on I simply
walked around looking for friends or something to do. After I got
married, I had jobs that included a lot of exercise for twenty years.
I carried the mail; I worked in warehouses for ten years; my wife and
I were child-care providers. I was on my feet for almost all of every
working day, walking and lifting things. But you die anyway. You
cannot eat or exercise your way out of it.
After
forty, I was at law school or working as a lawyer. That's a more
sedentary lifestyle. Either way, though, no one gets out of these
blues alive. I was still luckier than most. My weight went up and
down a bit, but at sixty-eight years old I weighed only 160 pounds
and got a fair amount of exercise, eating a pretty good diet of
mostly Thai food and sandwiches. Then I came to a major jump-cut.
The
jump cut of all time, as it turns out. It was brought on by that
soap-operaish moment when I was forced to confront the fact that I
had never been more to my parents than a source of embarrassment and
disappointment. The was the moment shortly after the death of my
father, the second of them to die, when I discovered that he thought
so little of me that he declined to trust me with even a nickel of
his money, nor even with the care of one book or other item of
property. Nothing in the will about me but the usual threats aimed at
obvious potential heirs who are zeroed out. To add insult to injury,
he left what would have been my share to my ex-wife. That would be
the woman who kicked me out after forty years of marriage and told me
never to come back, and then had the nerve to complain when I filed
for divorce after five years of forced exile. Not having that money
reduced my medical security considerably, and will almost certainly
shorten my life. And whatever my father thought, you may believe me
that I would not have squandered any of it on fancy cars or
vacations. To me, bank money is sacred. Bank money is for matters of
life and death, like doctor bills.
This
happened almost three years ago, and it has added no less than
ten years to my actual age. That means that my internal organs are
acting like I'm eighty years old. That makes it “Bucket List”
time.
I
am just beginning to relax about those family matters. It's terrible
to be so outmaneuvered by a dead man, by what the law calls, “the
bony hand from the grave.” This was a man who effectively abandoned
us when I was ten and my sister was six. These people are clever,
though. They set up the play so that they appear blameless. My father
stopped coming home from work. He would come home evenings for one or
two days at a time, and on those days he would arrive home late from
work, or the airport, make his own dinner, and sit by himself,
reading and listening to music on the radio, generally opera. He made
sure to present his charming person at every family gathering, on
every holiday. All of my cousins think that he was the best dad of
all time. At all other times he left my sister and me at home alone
with my mother, a bitter, violent, resentful all-day drinker who
seems to have blamed her failed marriage on me. (It was a little
better for my sister, I am happy to report.) Between them, they left me with an
ACE score of five out out of six. (The only one that I missed out on
was sexual abuse, thank God for little favors.) I have since deduced from evidence that my mother was blaming me for the large monthly household budget
overrun caused by her bottle-per-day drinking habit. She covered it
by telling my father that my allowance was thirty dollars per week.
Bear in mind that this was when either a piece of pizza or a ride on
the subway cost fifteen cents. $125 per month was a mortgage payment!
No wonder my father always saw me as a wasteful spendthrift. I had to
laugh at that one, but he believed it, and she got away with it.
The
will thing was a blow that I almost did not recover from. There were
immediate physical repercussions. Orthopedic, dental, cardiac, and
psychological. At odd points during the day I would mumble, “but I
was a good boy!” And I was. Not to mention that I was very good to
them as an adult. I chose to accept their shortcomings and be a
loving son to them. We must set a good example for our own children.
I called my mother often, and we spoke for a long time. We visited
every year, taking turns making the coast to coast trip. For the last
nine years of my father's life, I visited him every year around his
birthday. Flying from Thailand, no less! I'm bitter about it, I'll
admit. (Incidentally, I now get the cold shoulder from my sons, too.)
The
Actual Dying
My
own belief about death has not changed since I first formulated it in
my late teens. I expect being dead to be the single easiest thing
that I have ever done. In many ways, I am looking forward to it. I've
been over this ground on the blog before, so I'll keep it short.
Before we were born, we had no existence of any kind. After we die,
we revert to that state of nothingness. When I came to this
conclusion, over fifty years ago, the belief made me an outlier, but
now I encounter more and more people who have come to the identical,
obvious conclusion. The being dead part is unthreatening and
unchallenging. It's the dying part that give us all pause.
But
hey, it's been done by every human being that has ever lived on the
earth. Done successfully and with no particular effort required. Even
suicide, where indicated, is dead easy. (Get it?) Death may be
painful; it may be disgusting; it may be embarrassing; but it has
been done by everyone who ever lived. And having accomplished the
actual dying part, you won't be around to worry about it.
So
how hard can it be?
