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

  On that first evening together, I helped her wash the dishes after dinner. She said something about me being a real handy man to have around the house and added that her husband, a busy Santa Clara doctor, never washed or dried a dish in all the years they were married. This remark of hers about my being so helpful was the perfect opening for one of my sure-fire laugh-getters and I promptly said, “I’m not one of those men who thinks a woman’s place is in the stove. No macho male me.” She chuckled appreciatively and said something about my being a nice guy and added she was glad she ran into me at the senior center that night.

  At 10:00, Virginia suggested we watch the news. We sat on the sofa and I held her hand. After about 15 minutes, I tried to kiss her—nothing serious, but she pulled back and pleaded with me to go slowly and be patient and told me I was the first man she’d dated since her husband’s death three years ago. She followed that up with the words I was to hear over and over: “Milt, I need a little more time.”

  No problem, I assured her that first night. We watched the rest of the news holding hands. Not bad, I remembered saying to myself during the 45-minute drive home. Give it time and it will work out. Couldn’t miss. I was a lonely widower with a lot of time and a little money and she was a lonely widow, anxious for companionship. Plus. So she hinted, not very subtly.

  Several months later, after attending a lavish 40th anniversary banquet for a couple Virginia and her late husband had known for many years, we got back to her apartment about midnight. I had had more than my usual quota of drinks that night and had danced with her five or six times; that was way above my quota, too. She seemed to cling to me during those slow numbers; she had never done that before.

  I felt a little more romantic, a little hornier when we got back to the apartment. As soon as we got inside the apartment and closed the door, I grabbed for her clumsily, but she parried my thrust, saying she had to powder her nose and wanted to get out of her confining and dressy evening clothes. I read into her words a suggestion that the patience I had displayed, when she had asked early on in our relationship for more time on my part, would pay off.

  In preparation, I took off my dark jacket and draped it over the chair. The same with my black bow tie. I also took my shoes off and pushed them under the sofa, then waited like an eager schoolboy.

  Virginia came out of the bathroom, put a tape with some nice dreamy music on the stereo, and sat down beside me. I grabbed her, pushed her back on the sofa, and reached for her mouth. She pushed me away, asking me to please take it easy. Then I tried to slide my hand inside her bathrobe and fondle her ample breasts.

  And that’s when she said what she said on our very first date: “Please don’t rush me, Milt. I need time.” But that night I wasn’t buying what I was convinced was a line or patent ploy. I erupted like Vesuvius, shouting, “Exactly how much more time do you need? Your husband’s been dead for three years now, right?” And what was all this phony business about the wonderful marriage she and her husband had for the nearly 40 years they were together? I reminded her that she’d told me one night that she’d had three extramarital affairs, one of them lasting about seven years; the marriage was slightly less than idyllic. “Lady, it’s high time to get on with the rest of your life, whether it’s with me or anybody else.”

  That’s when she asked if we couldn’t be friends, and could we just forget about the sex?

  That did it. I snatched my coat and tie off the back of the chair, reached under the sofa for my shoes, and stormed toward the door, where I delivered my parting shot. I told her I’d had enough of her games and playacting. Six months of frustration, six months of an antiseptic, sexless relationship was a bit much. I told her that I needed and wanted the love and warmth of a good and fulfilled relationship and I thought that she wanted the same thing. “If I wanted a friend,” I said, “I would have bought a dog.” I don’t know where I first heard or read that line, but, make no mistake, I thought to myself, it was a barn burner. It left her with her tongue literally hanging out, poised to say something in rebuttal, but she remained speechless. We never, needless to say, saw each other again.

  Hoop Dream (viii)

  I once felt animal joy in being alive and I felt this mainly when I was playing basketball and I only occasionally feel that animal joy anymore and that’s life. I’m 51 and I feel this way; I don’t think my father started feeling this way until he was 95.

  Old Age and Death

  Decline and Fall (iii)

  Samuel Johnson wrote to a younger friend, “When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine what I am now.”

  At age 50, your ability to perceive vibrations in the lower part of your body is significantly decreased. The nerves that conduct information signals to the brain are also diminished. Every decade after age 50, your brain loses 2 percent of its weight. You have difficulty learning things and you remember less and less. Memory per se—the actual encoding of information—isn’t diminished in a healthy, older person, but retrieval can be an excruciatingly slow process and take many more attempts. Older people are more susceptible to distraction, have trouble coordinating multiple tasks, and have decreased attention spans. In simple tasks and common situations, the old do fine, but when exercise or other stress is added, they often struggle. Perhaps this is why some older people, finding it harder to cope, tend to start searching for comfort rather than excitement.

  Evelyn Waugh said, “Old people are more interesting than young. One of the particular points of interest is to observe how after fifty they revert to the habits, mannerisms, and opinions of their parents, however wild they were in youth.”

  “At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves,” said George Orwell.

  Virgil, author of The Aeneid, died at 50.

  As you age, your eye lens clouds over (cataract). The cells of the optic nerve can be damaged by glaucoma or macular degeneration. Forty-two percent of people ages 52 to 64, 73 percent of people 65 to 74, and 92 percent of people over 75 need reading glasses. My father, after having cataract surgery 20 years ago, didn’t really need glasses anymore.

  Shakespeare died at 52.

  John Wayne said, “I’m fifty-three years old and six foot four. I’ve had three wives, five children, and three grandchildren. I love good whiskey. I still don’t understand women, and I don’t think there is any man who does.”

  You gain weight until age 55, at which point you begin to shed weight (specifically, lean tissue, muscle mass, water, and bone). More fat now accumulates in your thighs and less in your abdomen. Your extremities become thinner and your trunk thicker. Middle-aged spread isn’t only the result of increased fatty tissue; it’s also caused by losing muscle tone and your skin literally thinning out as each skin cell loses its robustness.

  Dante died at 56.

  Between 50 and 60, your visual memory declines slightly; after 70, it declines substantially.

  Noel Coward, advising a middle-aged friend to stop dieting, said, “This is a foolish vanity. Youth is no longer essential or even becoming. Rapidly approaching fifty-seven, I find health and happiness more important than lissomeness. To be fat is bad and slovenly, unless it is beyond your control, but however slim you get you will still be the age you are and no one will be fooled, so banish this nonsense once and for all. Conserve your vitality by eating enough and enjoying it.”

  “The years between fifty and fifty-seven are the hardest,” said T. S. Eliot. “You are being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.”

  In late middle age, the skin in your hands becomes less sensitive to touch. Your skin cells regenerate less often. The skin weakens and dries, the number of sebaceous glands declines dramatically, and all of the tissues of the skin undergo some change: you get wrinkles and gray hair. Wrinkles don’t come from age, though. They come from sunlight, which slowly maims the face, causing wrinkles, mottling, and loose skin. Although the skin loses
elasticity and heals wounds more slowly with advancing age, it never completely wears out.

  At 59, Neil Young said, “When you’re in your twenties, you and your world are the biggest thing, and everything revolves around what you’re doing. Now I realize I’m a leaf floating along on top of some river.” My father hates this way of thinking, finds it defeatist.

  Your blood cholesterol increases. The ability of the blood to maintain a normal level of glucose declines with age. At 60, you’ve lost 25 percent of the volume of saliva you normally secrete for food; it becomes more difficult to digest heavy meats.

  When you’re 60, you’re 20 percent less strong than you were in middle age; at 70, you’re 40 percent less strong. You lose more strength in the muscles of your legs than in your hands and arms. You also tend to lose your fast-twitch abilities—a sprinter’s contractions—much more rapidly than your slow-twitch abilities—a walker’s contractions. (Some of this decline can be stalled by exercise, but by no means all. As a rule, the variability between individuals increases with age: almost all younger people will have, for instance, the same kidney function and be able to solve a problem at approximately the same speed, but with older people, some will be normal, others will be very impaired, and most will be somewhere in between.)

  Emerson said, “’Tis strange that it is not in vogue to commit hara-kiri, as the Japanese do, at sixty. Nature is so insulting in her hints and notices, does not pull you by the sleeve, but pulls out your teeth, tears off your hair in patches, steals your eyesight, twists your face into an ugly mask, in short, puts all contumelies upon you, without in the least abating your zeal to make a good appearance, and all this at the same time that she is moulding the new figures around you into wonderful beauty which of course is only making your plight worse.”

  The year Zola died, he said, at 62, “I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.”

  The PR flak Harlan Boll defends his lying about his celebrity clients’ ages by saying, “The American public doesn’t really forgive people for getting older.” Which is of course true. Jackie Kennedy said if she knew she was going to get cancer at 65, she wouldn’t have done all those sit-ups. In jail, O. J. Simpson bemoaned to his girlfriend that the once admirable, apple-like shape of his posterior had collapsed into middle-aged decrepitude. Gravity sucks.

  By the time you reach 65, you’ve lost 30 to 40 percent of your aerobic power. The walls of your heart thicken, and you’re more likely to develop coronary disease. Sixty percent of 60-year-old men, and the same percentage of 80-year-old women, have a major narrowing in at least one coronary artery. A stiffening in the walls of the major arteries results in a progressive increase in blood pressure, which imposes an increasing load on the heart. Since the heart has to work harder for each heartbeat and use more energy, the overall efficiency of the cardiovascular system drops significantly. One and a half million Americans suffer a myocardial infarction each year. Seventy percent of heart attacks occur at home. If you survive a heart attack, you’re virtually guaranteed to die eventually of a heart-related illness. My father had a heart attack at 86 (more on this later), had his heart stop beating for 30 seconds during electroconvulsive therapy at 92, and several months ago he was hugely, irrationally afraid that his upcoming colonoscopy (he’d had some bloody stools, and his doctor wanted to figure out what was triggering his ceaseless seesawing between diarrhea and constipation) would cause his heart to stop for good.

  At 65, you’ve lost one ounce of your three-pound brain and one-tenth of your brain cells. The motor area of the frontal cortex loses 50 percent of its neurons, as does the area in the back controlling vision and the area on the sides controlling physical sensation. The gyri—the twisting, raised convolutions in the cortex within which you do much of your thinking—experience the greatest atrophy. The brain of a 90-year-old is the same size as that of a 3-year-old. The details of the new Medicare drug benefits program perplex and annoy everyone, including me, but they’ve completely defeated my dad; he no longer grasps concepts he used to grasp. His mental operations do seem, on many channels, newly simple.

  Joints age owing to deterioration in cartilage, tendons, and fluid. The fluid contained within joints begins to thin. More friction is created. Nearly everyone age 65 or older shows some abnormality of the joints; one out of two people has moderate to severe abnormality. One-third of American women over 65 have collapsed vertebrae as a result of bone thinning, or osteoporosis. The more bone you have as an adult, the less likely you are to develop osteoporosis. (Generally speaking, it’s best and easiest to head off aging’s ravages when you’re young, which is exactly when you aren’t thinking about them.)

  When you’re a young adult, the reflex that tells you it’s time to urinate occurs when your bladder is half full. For people over age 65, the message isn’t received until your bladder is nearly full.

  Five percent of the U.S. population live in a nursing home. When I asked my father a dozen years ago whether he’d ever want to consider moving into a retirement home in Seattle, he replied, “I don’t know how long I’ll be working. Right now, I can get out there and cover the games (basketball, baseball, football, etc.) and turn in two or three pieces each week. I’m not down to my last two bits. Still have some money in my savings account, plus the money I get from Social Security and the annuity I bought in 1977, plus what I get each month from the paper. I’m like the man betting in Las Vegas who says, ‘I hope I can break even. I sure could use the money.’ I miss you and Laurie and Natalie and Paula and Wayne [my sister and brother-in-law, who live forty miles south of Seattle in Tacoma] more than words can say. But life at Woodlake offers me many activities. And there’s also the god-awful Seattle weather. I look on the retirement home as a terminal stop. We old-timers joke about those places, calling them ‘God’s waiting room.’ Where the average age is deceased. (Gallows humor.) So I would like to spend the rest of my days in my own apartment here in Woodlake. For one, I couldn’t afford a retirement home. I’m not ready for that type of living. Or spending. Here I quote again from my steno notebook of memorable phrases (don’t know who wrote it or where I read it): ‘Each man picks his own hill to die on.’ My ‘hill’ certainly would not be a retirement home. Ideally, it would be out on a golf course. Bing Crosby and a couple of other well-known people have died on golf courses. Nice way to go if you’ve lived a good share of years. Not fifty or even sixty.”

  There are now more people in the United States over 65 than ever before. Only 30 percent of people ages 75 to 84 report disabilities—the lowest percentage ever reported.

  Five to 8 percent of people over 65 have dementia; half of those in their 80s have it. One of many dementias and the most common, Alzheimer’s affects 1 in 10 Americans over 65, 1 in 2 people over 85. Alzheimer’s patients are more likely to have had a low-stress (i.e., mentally unstimulating) job. Zero sign, though, as yet of Alzheimer’s in my father: he’s still reading and rereading Robert Caro on Robert Moses, Philip Roth on Newark, Arnold Rampersad on Jackie Robinson, Gar Alperovitz on the decision to drop the atom bomb.

  According to Noel Coward, “The pleasures that once were heaven / Look silly at sixty-seven.”

  At 68, Edmund Wilson said, “The knowledge that death is not so far away, that my mind and emotions and vitality will soon disappear like a puff of smoke, has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one’s own efforts and achievements and passions.”

  “Tomorrow I shall be sixty-nine,” William Dean Howells wrote to Mark Twain, “but I do not seem to care. I did not start the affair, and I have not been consulted about it at any step. I was born to be afraid of dying, but not of getting old. Age has many advantages, and if old men were not so ridiculous, I should not mind being one. But they are ridiculous, and they are ugly. The young d
o not see this so clearly as we do, but some day they will.”

  Thomas Pynchon says, “When we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death—how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn’t so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted.”

  Fifteen years ago, on a gorgeous spring day, my father and I jogged down my block. A school bus of middle-school girls rounded the corner. He puffed out his chest, let out his kick, put himself on display. Rather than ooh or aah or whistle or applaud or ignore him, several girls stuck their heads out the windows in the back of the bus and did the cruelest thing possible: they laughed.

  “You’re only young,” AC/DC sing on Back in Black, “but you’re gonna die.”

  In your late 60s, you eat less. Your metabolic rate decreases slightly. Men lose 3 percent of their skeletal weight per decade (my father now weighs 150); women lose 8 percent. Throughout adult life, men lose about 15 percent of their total mineral density; women, 30 percent. The diameter of your forearm shrinks, as does the diameter of your calves.

  The density of your skin’s circulatory systems—veins, capillaries, arterioles—is reduced, which is why old people feel cold sooner. Also, your skin functions less well as a barrier because the skin is thinner—like wearing too light a coat. As you age, your facial skin temperature falls. For older people, a comfortable temperature is 10 to 15 degrees higher than it is for a younger person.

  Each day of your adult life, you lose 30,000 to 50,000 nerves and 100,000 nerve cells. Over time, your heart, lungs, and prostate enlarge. The level of potassium in your body declines. After age 70, your ability to absorb calcium is dramatically reduced.