The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

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 Leon, 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-Edouard Brown-Sequard 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-Sequard, 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 the 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.