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

  On the upside: the oldest verifiable father was 94 at the birth of his last child; the oldest mother was 66.

  On the upside, somewhat more viscerally: my father, at 70, telling me a couple of years after my mother’s death, “I’ve been more active this year with Sarah [his new paramour] than I’d been the previous twenty-five with your mother, and I don’t mean once a night. I mean two or three times a night most every night of the week and then again in the morning.”

  Memento Mori

  Hair is produced in the skin’s hair follicles. A follicle contains more than just hair-producing cells. The melanocytes deposit their pigment in the root of the hair, coloring the hair shaft proteins as they’re made. If pure melanin is made, you’ll have brown to black hair. If an analogue of melanin called phaeomelanin is made, your hair will be red or blond. If the cells quit functioning altogether, your hair will be white.

  There’s really no such thing as gray hair. Your hair turns white, not gray. The gray hues you think you see are actually only the intermediate steps as this process advances unevenly across your scalp. The amount of gray you perceive depends on how much of your original hair color mixes with the white.

  Everybody has a million hair follicles; only about 100,000 follicles have hair growing from them (blonds slightly more, redheads slightly fewer). The other 900,000 follicles are resting. Each strand of hair grows six inches a year, eventually reaches two to three feet in length, and has its own blood supply. As you age, the density, diameter, and strength of your hair decrease; fewer hairs grow, more rest; you lose hair on your scalp and gain it on your face; and your hair can change not only in color but in texture: your hair can go from straight to curly. Men’s eyebrows get thicker, and hair sprouts on the inner canal of the outer ear.

  Because they have less estrogen to counteract their bodies’ testosterone, postmenopausal women grow facial hair; by age 55, about 40 percent of women grow hair above their upper lip. As women age, they have less armpit hair, which, in older women, often disappears. Armpit hair disappears in most postmenopausal Japanese women. Pubic hair vanishes in a small percentage of women over age 60.

  Approximately 100 hairs fall out of your head each day, more during the fall and fewer during the spring. Hair loss is the result of changes in the levels of hormones. If you lose hair, you’re more sensitive to these changes in hormone levels. People whose parents experienced hair loss are more likely to lose their hair. One in four women loses some of her hair.

  Because of a gradual decrease in adrenal secretion—which begins, for both men and women, in the late 20s—the cells that manufacture hair protein, the germ centers, are selectively destroyed or deactivated. When the affected hair is shed, no replacement occurs.

  Forty million American men are bald. Thirty percent of 55-year-old men are bald; 60 percent of 65-year-old men have experienced significant hair loss. Both men and women view bald men as weaker and less attractive than men with a full head of hair. Seventy-five percent of men feel self-conscious about their baldness, and 40 percent wear a hat to hide their baldness. Hair transplants are the most common plastic surgery for men.

  There’s no cure for baldness. The Ebers Papyrus—dating to 4,000 B.C., one of the oldest written documents—advised Egyptian men to treat baldness with a magical potion composed of sea crab bile, blood from the horn of a black cow, burned ass hoof, and the vulva and claws of a female dog.

  Woody Allen says, “The best thing to do is behave in a manner befitting one’s age. If you are sixteen or under, try not to go bald.”

  Harlan Boll, a publicist for celebrities, says, “There wasn’t as much pressure on men like Bob Hope or Frank Sinatra to look young. Even today this is true. If they keep their hair, they pretty much have it made.”

  While campaigning for Bush-Cheney, former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, who’s bald, said about Kerry-Edwards, “Everybody is given a certain amount of hormones. If you want to spend yours growing hair, that is your business.”

  My father has been bald since his early 40s, is unusually self-conscious about the fact, and is fond of saying that the only cure for baldness is a baseball cap, which he wears around the clock, indoors and out. Although I’ve repeatedly explained to him that a man inherits baldness at least in part from his maternal grandfather, he frequently apologizes for bequeathing to me a bald head. Throughout my 30s I did all the usual boring things: applied Rogaine, studied glossy brochures featuring color photos of weaves, transplants, and men and women in hot tubs. Several years ago, I stumbled upon the shaved-head-and-goatee approach, which I must say I like. It’s an acknowledgment of death rather than a denial of death (as, to take an extreme example, the comb-over is). Your head becomes an early memento mori.

  The Trouble with Being Food

  Your taste buds regenerate; cells within the taste buds die every ten days and are completely replaced. Even if a nerve that forms taste buds is destroyed, other buds will form around the new nerve that replaces it. However, it takes more molecules of a certain substance on your tongue for you to recognize the flavor later in adulthood. As you get older, you enjoy food less. Whenever I visit, one of the first things my father always wants me to do is drive him to a specialty market, where he buys gourmet health food. I’m not sure he enjoys food anymore, but he’s obsessed with efficient fuel for his body, that amazing machine. He talks with his mouth full and sprays food so often and so far that Natalie, Laurie, and I take turns sitting across from him at restaurants. Natalie has suggested building a portable sneeze-guard.

  Nevertheless:

  In Britain in 1991, 13 percent of men and 16 percent of women were obese—twice the number of 10 years before. Half the British population is now overweight; more than 20 percent are obese. In the U.K., snack-food consumption has risen 25 percent in the last 5 years.

  More than 60 percent of Americans are overweight or obese; 127 million people are overweight, 60 million are obese, and 9 million are severely obese. American adults are now, on average, 25 pounds heavier than they were in 1960; the average man has gone from 166 to 191 pounds, while the average woman has gone from 140 to 164 pounds. I doubt my father has ranged more than a few pounds over or below 155 since World War II. More women than men are obese (34 to 27 percent). The average 10-year-old boy weighed 74 pounds in 1963; he now weighs 85 pounds. The average 10-year-old girl weighed 77 pounds in 1963; she now weighs 88 pounds.

  In 1980, the government recommendation was 1,600 calories a day for women and 2,200 for men; women now consume 1,877 calories a day and men consume 2,618. In 1970, each person ate 1,497 pounds of food; in 2000, each person ate 1,775 pounds. In the United States, health care costs for treating obese adults amount to $100 billion a year. In 2004, obesity caused 300,000 deaths.

  Was my father ever not as skinny as a (third) rail? His meals very nearly always consist of oatmeal and juice for breakfast, a sandwich and a bowl of soup for lunch, “a lean piece” of fish or chicken for dinner. Has he ever taken a second helping of anything? Has he ever not grumbled before reluctantly accepting an offer of dessert? Has a day ever gone by in which he didn’t exercise a couple of times? On long family car trips, did he ever not get out every few hours and execute a hundred jumping jacks, to the admiration and/or puzzlement of other travelers on the highway?

  I live across the street from a fundamentalist church, and on certain melancholy Sundays I’m filled with empathy for the churchgoers. Adulthood didn’t turn out to have quite as much shimmer as we thought it would. For an hour a week, they’re hoping to get caught in a little updraft; who can blame them?

  Leonard Michaels wrote, “Life isn’t good enough for no cigarette”—which is precisely how I’ve come to view my relationship to sugar. Today was a disaster, I tell myself at least twice a week, stopping at a café that makes the most perfect Rice Krispies Treats, but this tastes delicious. “Eat dessert first,” as the bumper sticker says, “life is uncertain.” Quentin Tarantino, asked why he eats Cap’n Crunch, replied, �
�Because it tastes good and is easy to make.” Cap’n Crunch, Rice Krispies Treats: I’m addicted to refined sugar in its less refined forms: breakfast cereal, cookies, root beer floats, licorice, peanut brittle, et al., ad nauseam—kid stuff.

  When I’m happy, I consume sweets to celebrate. When I’m upset, I eat treats as consolation. I’m therefore rarely without a reason to be in the throes of sugar shock. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. I do sugar, in massive doses. So what? Who doesn’t? What’s the harm? I still stutter slightly, and much of the glory of sugar overload is the way it mimics the biochemical frenzy of a full-blown block and crystallizes it into the pure adrenaline of a brief, happy high (followed quickly by a crash). To me, sugar consumption is a gorgeous allegory about intractable reality and very temporary transcendence.

  Everything I Know I’ve Learned from My Bad Back

  Intractable reality (ii): I’m not thrilled to acknowledge that I date the origin of my back problems to the period, 14 years ago, when I repeatedly threw Natalie, then an infant, up in the air and carried her around in a Snugli. It’s a dubious etiology, since another cause would surely have come along soon enough; my back, one physical therapist has explained to me, was an accident waiting to happen. It makes perverse sense, though, that in my own mind Natalie and my back are intertwined, because dealing with a bad back has been, for me, an invaluable education in the physical, the mortal, the ineradicable wound.

  When he became a father, Jerry Seinfeld said, “I can’t get enough of my baby, but let’s make no mistake about why these babies are here. They’re here to replace us. They’re cute, they’re cuddly, they’re sweet, and they want us out of the way.”

  I wish I got to indulge in the luxury of being lionized as Atlas by Natalie, but I can’t. I’m still quite good at unscrewing tight bottle caps and pinning her arms when I’m tickling or wrestling her. However, if she’s sitting atop someone’s shoulders on a walk in the woods or getting tossed around in the pool, they’re going to be someone else’s shoulders, or it’s going to be someone else in the pool. At parties, I look first for a chair, since I can’t stand for more than a few minutes. I can’t hula hoop with Natalie or dance with Laurie. Trying to jog, I usually get pins and needles down my right leg. When we take trips, Laurie has to carry the heavy luggage; at home, she moves the furniture. Atlas I ain’t.

  You might suspect—I might suspect—Laurie definitely suspects—that maybe I just have a pathetically low pain threshold. And yet my back doctor assures me that with my back, some people play golf and tennis while others have been on disability for 15 years. I fall about in the middle: I’ve never missed a day of work because of my back, but I certainly complain about it a lot; it’s weirdly toward the forefront of my consciousness. I’m not so much a hypochondriac as a misery miser, fascinated by dysfunction. A couple of years ago, I heard an elderly woman, interviewed on the “Apocalypse” episode of This American Life, say she welcomed entering the kingdom of heaven because she would finally be granted relief from her incessant physical pain. While I was listening to this, I was driving, my back was killing me every time I turned the steering wheel, and at that moment, I must admit: I could relate.

  My father has never even tweaked his back, never had a single physical ailment until the last few years, and yet he’s not prone to expressing gratitude for his near-century of good health (“I’ve had to see more doctors from 94 to 97 than I did from 0 to 94”). Over the last decade I’ve gone to innumerable physical therapists and doctors. One doctor said I should have back surgery immediately; he had an opening later in the week. Another doctor said all I had to do was perform one particular leg-lift exercise that Swedish nurses did, and I’d be fine. One therapist said I should run more; another therapist said I should run less. One said that human beings weren’t built to sit as much as I sit; another said people were never meant to stand upright. One thought I would need to keep seeing him for years and years; another criticized me, after a few months, for not cutting the cord. I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back. Gerald Jonas’s book about stuttering is called The Disorder of Many Theories. Back Theory seems to suffer from the same Rashomon effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.

  A few days after 9/11, I saw a back doctor who, unlike 95 percent of doctors I’ve ever seen, presents himself as a person rather than as an authority figure; ask him how his day is going and he’ll say, “Terrible; no one’s getting better.” He, too, has a bad back, and when he drops his folder, he’ll squat down to pick it up, the way back patients are instructed to do, rather than just lean over, the way everyone else does. When I speak to most doctors, I feel slightly or not so slightly crazy, whereas I feel like a person, like myself, when talking to Stan Herring (great name—sounds like a figure from my dad’s Brooklyn childhood, like a character from a Malamud story). At my first appointment with him, he emphasized how many of his patients with bad backs carve their entire identity out of the fact that they’re patients; they’d have no idea what to do with their lives otherwise. The WTC suicide bombers were, to Dr. Herring, similar to professional patients; their entire existence was given structure and purpose by the fetishization of their pain, their victimhood. The message was subtle, but I got it: don’t let yourself become a suicide bomber.

  Herring recommended that I see a physical therapist with the unlikely name of Wolfgang Brolley, who goes by the name “Wolf” and looks and moves in a rather lupine way as well. As I am, he’s bald (with a shaved head), bespectacled, and goateed, but he’s elfin where I’m tall and lanky/clanky. I feel somewhat similar to Herring, who’s Jewish and self-deprecating; Wolf is Irish, Chicago-born, passionate, earnest, views himself unselfconsciously as a healer, goes to Zen retreats around the globe. I give him an essay I wrote about my adulation of Bill Murray (that death-haunt); he gives me an article he read about the international black-market slave trade. He directs the Center for Physical Arts and Rehabilitation, which features framed quotations from ancient Chinese philosophers and Christian mystics. He’s not my buddy; he’s something of a taskmaster. When he measured my hamstrings’ flexibility—lack thereof—he couldn’t help it: he snorted. One morning, when I called to say I felt too bad to come in for my appointment, he said, “You have to come in—that’s what I’m here for,” and gave me electronic stimulation and a massage. One of my favorite experiences in the physical world is a massage from Wolf.

  I used to throw my back out completely—the classic collapse on the sidewalk and yowl to the heavens—but now, thanks in large measure to the Stan-and-Wolf program, I seem to have it under control to the point that my back never goes out completely anymore. (Knock on lumbar.) I sit on a 1" foam wedge on my chair and get up every hour to do exercises or at least tell myself I do or at least take a hot shower or apply an ice pack or a heat pad. I sleep on my side, on a latex mattress; upon waking, I don’t just sit up but rather first “find my center” (there really is such a thing, I’m pleased to report). Wolf keeps reminding me that neither he nor Dr. Herring has a solution: I have to become my own authority and view my recovery as an existential journey. I reassure him that I do, I do. I see going to the drugstore to get toothpaste as an existential journey.

  And what existential journey hasn’t been aided by chemistry? I’ve been in and out of speech therapy all my life, but nothing has mitigated my stuttering as effectively as taking 0.5 mg. of alprazolam before giving a public reading. The ibuprofen, the muscle relaxants have certainly helped my back, but the Paxil has been transformative.

  At first I strenuously resisted Dr. Herring’s prescription, primarily because my father has suffered from manic depression for most of his adult life. In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.

  “What do you
mean?” my mother, who was a young 31, asked. “You get down in the dumps every now and again?”

  “I think I’m on the road to having it licked,” he said, “but after the war, then again during a brief period of unemployment before we met, I needed a little electroshock to get me through some bad patches.”

  Living with a manic depressive wasn’t like living with a drug addict. It wasn’t like living with a funeral. Last December, Laurie received a card that showed the words “Merry Christmas” being manufactured by a bunch of goofy little guys who looked like Santa’s sugar battalion. It was more like that: just knowing every lake is man-made and sooner or later needs to be emptied. For several years my father would be fine and funny and athletically buoyant; then one day he’d come back with an entire roll of negatives of the freeway. Once, in Sacramento on behalf of the poverty program, he mailed me an epistle consisting entirely of blank pages—for no real reason that I could make out. Another time, I was looking for some leftovers in the fridge and came across a note Scotch-taped together, sticky with bloodstains, like advertisements for a sympathetic reader. My mother packed his suitcase, and he waved shy good-byes like a boy leaving for camp.

  However, Herring assured me that I wasn’t being “secretly” treated for depression; Paxil has apparently been used to treat chronic pain for more than a decade. For the last several years I’ve been taking 10 mg. of Paxil a day. I worry a little about becoming a grinning idiot, but I figure I already have the idiocy part down, and I’m so far over on the grouchy side of the continuum that a little grinning isn’t going to kill me.