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

  My partner, George Tripodes, and I were playing a match against old friends and rivals Jim Black and Harry Langdon. We won the first set—barely squeaked through at 10–8 and were leading in the second set, 4–3. It was my turn to serve. I quickly jumped into a 40–love lead. I walked from the deuce court to the add court, where I hoped to make it 5–3, when I suddenly felt like an elephant had placed a huge foot on my chest (a standard description, I know, but that’s exactly how it felt to me). I paused for a few seconds, saying to myself, “Now what was that?” It was like nothing I had experienced in my 86 years on planet Earth. It was, as I was about to learn about an hour later, a heart attack—a relatively mild one, true, but still a full-fledged heart attack.

  I wasn’t going to let a little old heart attack prevent me from winning my serve or finishing the set. George walked over to me as I was getting ready to serve and asked if I felt okay. “You look a little pale, Milt,” he said.

  “No problem,” I assured him, adding that I wanted him to cover the right hand alley because I was planning—heart attack notwithstanding—to serve the ball into the extreme right corner of my opponent’s court.

  And that’s exactly what I did, drawing a feeble response in return, and sending us into a 5–3 lead, one game away from winning the set and match. Our opponents made it 5–4 and now it was George’s serve. We had a tough time winning the sixth and final game; we finally managed it after a couple of long rallies. I wasn’t much help to my partner in that final game but never let on for a moment that I was feeling “a little strange.”

  When the set ended, I didn’t bother to shake hands with Jim and Harry. I grabbed my tennis bag and windbreaker and walked back to my building, about 100 yards from the courts. I walked back slowly but somehow managed to make it to my apartment, throwing some cold water on my face, then knocking on the door of my neighbor, Mary Steiner, a retired registered nurse. Mary took my pulse, checked my heartbeat, and immediately called 911.

  “You’ve had a heart attack, Milt,” she said very professionally, leaving no room for doubt.

  Twenty minutes later I was in an ambulance en route to Peninsula Hospital, where doctors quickly confirmed Mary’s diagnosis. I was immediately anesthetized and given an angioplasty—the “balloon” treatment—opening up one of my arteries, which had clogged.

  I awoke about two hours later, feeling—believe it or not—absolutely wonderful: a huge load had been lifted from the side of my chest.

  The cardiologist, Dr. George Cohen, came by later that afternoon to explain what I had been through and what he had done—the angioplasty—to relieve the pressure. Dr. Cohen asked me, “Is it true that you continued to play another ten minutes after that first big bump? How in hell did you ever manage to do that?”

  “I don’t know, Doc,” I said. “I just had to finish the set and match. Those two guys we were playing had beaten us too many times before and I had to try to balance the books when I had the chance.”

  “You’re something else,” said Dr. Cohen.

  Two days later I was sent home and three weeks later I was back on the courts, just a little worse for my Memorial Day ordeal.

  Tennis, anyone?

  Death Is the Mother of Beauty

  Neither my father nor I could sleep. We finally figured out how to work the remote for his new TV—a present from my sister and me on his 95th birthday. At 2:00 A.M.:

  On channel 2, a movie detective revisited the murder scene.

  On channel 4, Retin-A entrapped tretinoin in Microsponge systems.

  On channel 7, college girls on vacation in Cancun removed their T-shirts.

  On channel 8, the Civil War was reenacted.

  On channel 10, Bobby Abreu won the Home Run Derby.

  On channel 11, Double D Dolls mud-wrestled.

  On channel 12, a university lecturer explained gravity.

  On channel 13, the Faith, Health & Prosperity bracelet glittered in the light.

  On channel 17, a woman did leg raises.

  On channel 20, taffy and ice cream production facilities were profiled.

  On channel 22, fat-free desserts tasted as good as regular desserts.

  On channel 24, 79 people died in a plane crash; an infant was the lone survivor.

  On channel 29, Hercules tossed an enormous boulder.

  On channel 30, Miss Teen USA was crowned.

  On channel 33, you developed smart abs in just two minutes a day.

  On channel 36, Dr. Ellen’s Light His Fire and Light Her Fire programs helped your marriage by increasing your energy.

  On channel 38, a woman whose teenage daughter died in a car crash found solace in God’s love.

  On channel 41, a murder victim’s body was autopsied.

  On channel 42, the CrossBow system offered compound resistance.

  On channel 47, Aquafresh toothpaste removed stains.

  On channel 49, the Cancer Treatment Centers of America helped you harness your power to fight cancer and win.

  On channel 55, two buxom blonde women explained to a thin, balding man why size matters.

  On channel 59, the Slim in 6 fitness program helped you lose 20 pounds in 6 weeks.

  On channel 63, the Ultimate Chopper was the ultimate time saver.

  On channel 64, the Esteem by Naomi Judd System reduced wrinkles, lines, and blotchiness.

  On channel 72, the Arthur Ashe Award was given to a terminally ill coach who advised the audience to never give up.

  On channel 77, a woman was penetrated from behind by one man while she performed fellatio on another man.

  On channel 80, the Youth Cocktail gave you sharper, clearer memory and more flexible joints.

  On channel 84, two behemoths competed to pull an enormous ball-and-chain across the finish line.

  On channel 85, a suicide bomber killed himself, two civilians, and two U.S. soldiers in Ramadi.

  On channel 87, Hair Color for Men got the gray out.

  On channel 89, with long life you will satisfy Him and show Him your salvation.

  On channel 90, you could have the makeover of a lifetime.

  On channel 95, Hollywood celebrities paid $24,000 for Mari Winsor’s body-sculpting program.

  On channel 99, a horror movie ended with a white curtain blowing in the breeze against a black night.

  On channels 2 through 99, we sought but couldn’t find a cure for the fact that one day we would die.

  Life Is That Which Gives Meaning to Life

  André Gide wrote in his journal, “Every day and all day long, I ask myself this question—or rather this question asks itself of me: shall I find it hard to die? I do not think that death is particularly hard for those who most love life. On the contrary.”

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, “Knowledge by suffering entereth, / And life is perfected by death.”

  In the journal my mother kept the last year of her life, she wrote, “Of one thing I’m sure: I don’t want to live if I can’t function, make decisions for myself, and take care of myself. I hope that if I reach that point I’ll have the courage to take my life. I feel very strongly that life is a very precious gift and that one should always choose life, but to me life is being able to function. Maybe I’ll be able to express this better and more clearly as time goes on.” My father frequently alludes to this journal entry and shakes his head in wonder and bafflement and, in a way, pity.

  In Lament for the Makers, William Dunbar wrote, “Timor mortis conturbat me”: the fear of death distresses me.

  As a 9-year-old, I would awake, shivering, and spend the entire night sitting cross-legged on the landing of the stairs to my basement bedroom, unable to fathom that one day I’d cease to be. I remember being mesmerized by a neighbor’s tattoo of a death’s head, underneath which were the words, “As I am, you shall someday be.”

  Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “From the time I knew I was mortal, I found the idea of death terrifying. Even when the world was at peace and my happiness seemed secure, my 15-year
-old self would often turn at the thought of that utter non-being—my utter non-being—that would descend on its appointed day, for ever and ever. This annihilation filled me with such horror that I could not conceive the possibility of facing it coolly. What people called ‘courage’ I could only regard as blind foolishness.”

  Rousseau said, “He who pretends to look on death without fear lies.”

  The narrator of Donald Barthelme’s story “The School,” an elementary-school teacher, says:

  One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—

  I said, yes, maybe.

  They said, we don’t like it.

  My father has asked me to research the affordability and plausibility of “cryonic suspension.” He’s willing to die, but he doesn’t want to be dead forever.

  Hoop dream (ix):

  My grandfather, my father’s father, Samuel, was a business agent for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union of the CIO, in Westchester. He’d awake at 5:30, have a cup of tea and piece of toast, glance at the newspaper, and leave for the subway at 6:00. He handled workers’ grievances and contract negotiations with manufacturers. He’d eat his dinner hurriedly, then be off to his second job—investigator for the neighborhood Eastern Star Credit Union, which he had helped found. At first, the credit union made small loans of $50 and $100 to its members, almost all of whom were recently arrived Russian and Polish immigrants (as was my grandfather, who fled to England in the 1880s rather than face induction into the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian army, which often exiled Jews to Siberia). Several years later, after it was credentialed by the New York State Banking Commission, it was lending $10,000. My grandfather’s signature would guarantee the loan if the original borrower failed to make the payment; he’d walk for miles to some homes, and my father would sometimes accompany him. Samuel would return at midnight, sleep five hours, and be up the next morning to take the long subway ride to the factory. He also purchased shirts at wholesale and sold them to his friends for a small profit. As a teenager, my father would help my grandfather lug the boxes of shirts through the streets of their neighborhood. When he was older and had a car, my father would drive him around Brooklyn to collect signatures on loans. My father says, “I never knew where he found the energy to keep up the pace he did.” My father says this.

  Sam spent Sunday mornings reading the three Yiddish newspapers: Forward, Der Tog (The Day), and Freiheit (Freedom). A Socialist, he introduced my father to notions of “dialectical materialism,” “left-wing infantilism,” “alienation of the proletariat,” and “means of production.” He would say, “Milteleh, don’t ever forget this: under Communism, man exploits man, while under capitalism, the reverse is true. No matter what fancy words presidents or commissars or kings use, it’s money—economics, the cash nexus—that rules the world. Money is the world.” For emphasis he would repeat this last formulation in Yiddish: “Geld ist der veldt.”

  My grandfather gave my father Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed’s account of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which my father read over and over. In high school history classes, my father would sometimes challenge what the teacher said or the textbooks omitted. When questioned where he got a particular fact or point of view, he would say, as instructed, “My father, who knows whereof he speaks.”

  “You can tell, Dave, can’t you, how his life touched me?” my father likes to say about his father. “There was the sense of doing things for his fellow men; there was the kindly, mediating approach. Ess vett soch oy spressen, he liked to say. It will press itself out. It will take care of itself. He couldn’t cope with problems. He let them drift, grow, fester, or fly away. Recognize some of your dad’s penchants and peccadilloes in that?”

  The night before my grandfather’s funeral, my father and I wandered around his apartment. I was 7 and had never met him. My grandfather’s skinny belts and wide ties hung from hooks in a closet. Badly warped classical record albums were stacked against a wall. His wallet and a Nikon sat atop the stripped bed. His favorite coffee mug was carefully wrapped in plastic, as was, of all things, a brand-new basketball: undelivered present for me, my father figured, and then he fell to pieces.

  How to Live Forever (i)

  In 1600 B.C., the Egyptian papyrus Book for Transformation of an Old Man into a Youth of Twenty recommended a potion involving herbs and animal parts. In ancient Greece, old men were advised to lie down with beautiful virgins. When my father visited me at college, he virtually ignored my girlfriend and focused on her roommate, whom he kept calling “a very attractive young woman.” Castration—believed to extend the life span a few years—was popular in the Middle Ages. Eunuchs do live longer than uncastrated men. A sterilized dog or cat, male or female, will live, on average, two years longer than unsterilized dogs and cats. In the early sixteenth century, Ponce de León, age 55, searched for the Fountain of Youth because he was unable to satisfy his much younger wife. Later in the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon thought that if the body’s repair processes—that is, our capacity for tissue regeneration and healing and our ability to recover from disease—were perfected, aging could be overcome.

  In the nineteenth century, the French physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard removed and crushed the testicles of domesticated animals, extracted vital substances from them, then used this concoction to inoculate older people, who reported improved alertness and vitality. When Brown-Séquard, at age 72, injected himself with the extract, he claimed to have better control over his bladder and bowels. He died four years later. Eugen Steinach, a professor of physiology in Vienna in the 1920s, convinced older men that they would be rejuvenated by a vasectomy or by having the testicles of younger men grafted onto their own. Rejuvenation clinics sprang up around the world: surgeons devised a number of anti-aging therapies, including the application of electricity to the testicles and doses of X-rays and radium to the sex organs.

  According to Michael Jazwinski, a molecular biologist at Louisiana State University: “Possibly in 30 years we will have in hand the major genes that determine longevity, and will be in a position to double, triple, even quadruple our current maximum life span of 120 years. It’s conceivable that some people alive now will still be alive in 400 years.”

  William Regelson, professor of medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, says, “As we learn to control the genes involved in aging, the possibilities of lengthening life appear practically unlimited.”

  Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at University of California-Irvine, permitted only those fruit flies that produced eggs later in their life span to contribute eggs to the next generation. (This is equivalent to selecting women age 25 and older to be mothers and then only permitting the daughters who were fertile after age 26 to reproduce, and so on, for many generations.) Each generation of fruit flies lived a little longer than the previous one. The fruit flies from this ongoing program of selective breeding continue to live progressively longer than their ancestors. Rose believes that if a similar experiment could be performed on humans, a measurable increase in life expectancy would be observed within 10 generations.

  Fruit flies given resveratol, an antioxidant found in red wine, live significantly longer than other flies. Molecules in resveratol called sirtuins mimic the life-extending effects of caloric restriction, which slows aging in mammals. Living creatures are hardwired to reproduce; a low-calorie diet sends a message throughout the body that conditions aren’t optimal for reproduction. Cellular defense systems arise and aging slows, preserving th
e body for better, more reproduction-friendly times. Caloric restriction triggers a release of stored fat, which tells the body it’s time to hunker down for survival.

  Two thousand people belong to the Calorie Restriction Society, and 10 percent of them have cut their consumption by at least 30 percent. The greatest life extension, as much as 50 percent, comes from starting a severely restricted diet in young adulthood and continuing it throughout life. Starting in midlife and cutting calories 10 to 20 percent yields a smaller benefit. Fasting every other day (while otherwise eating normally in between) also increases average life span. My father, with his lifelong and much trumpeted and unrelievedly austere diet, should have been the founding member of the Calorie Restriction Society. Interviewed by his own paper on his 95th birthday, he focused almost entirely on the importance of nutritional discipline, with special attention to bran muffins.

  A near-starvation diet dramatically reduces the incidence of most age-related disease: tumor and kidney problems, brain-deficit problems such as Alzheimer’s, and degenerative problems such as Parkinson’s. Rats on a 40 percent reduced-calorie diet have a 30 percent longer life span. Monkeys on a reduced-calorie diet—30 percent less for 15 years—live longer and avoid many age-related diseases. In humans, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are closely correlated with increased caloric intake. I ask my father: Is cutting calories 40 to 50 percent worth the extra years and protection from disease? He treats it as a rhetorical question. Someone might abstain from cheesecake for 20 years, I point out, then get hit by a bus at 57. “Life,” I say, quoting Damon Runyon (one of my father’s heroes), “is 6 to 5 against.” “I do what I can,” he replies, and he isn’t joking, “to even those odds.”