(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)
It was reported that the late British novelist Martin Amis, when the first of his four grandchildren was born, dryly noted that “being a grandfather is like getting a telegraph from the mortuary.” He was in his 50s at the time.
That’s not a telegraph from the mortuary. This is: One of my best college pals died last month. This, too: Days earlier, the wife of a second close college buddy (and former roommate) called to inform me that her husband has dementia.
Yes, both of them virtually the same age I am—mid 70s, the kind of statistic I almost never think about. Plenty of people are older than that and still functioning quite well. As long as I continue plodding through a morning run, working parttime, attending to such minor domestic duties of mowing the lawn and enjoying the countless benefits of an ideal 50-year marriage, it’s difficult even to think of myself as a grownup—much less an advertisement for “the end is near” premonitions.
I just had an appointment with my doctor to deal with the relatively insignificant issue of an upper-respiratory infection and it occurred to me that he technically has twice saved my life. First, for diagnosing that my asymmetrical hearing loss 20 years ago indicated a brain tumor. (It did; a specialist surgically removed the benign tumor without further incident.) Second, for spotting a heart murmur. (Valve-replacement surgery fixed that.)
I thanked him and we riffed on the unpredictability of human frailty. There are no answers. Though there are some obvious recommendations to increase lifespan—get exercise (physically and mentally), eat a healthy diet, watch your weight, don’t smoke, drink moderately, don’t skip medical checkups—I’ll bet you can think of people who practiced all of that and still were bushwacked by a fatal disease.
And fame doesn’t make anyone immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, either. Arthur Ashe, the impeccably fit tennis champion, suffered a heart attack at the peak of his playing career and a second coronary led to quadruple bypass surgery, during which he contracted the HIV virus through a blood transfusion. And died at 49.
It’s possible that he was doomed by the fact that both his father and mother had heart disease. So choose your parents well. And don’t discount luck.
COVID-19 has been a reminder of that. Roughly seven million deaths and no obvious fix on just who was vulnerable and who wasn’t. When the bubonic plague ravaged Europe’s population in the 14th Century, the idea of a Grim Reaper was hatched: A skeletal specter shrouded in a hooded robe, carrying a scythe, indiscriminately collecting souls. The 1918 influenza epidemic made the same point, as graphically illustrated by Katherine Anne Porter’s tale “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” in which the protagonist was an unlikely survivor but her lover died.
Somebody once said that comparative happiness is immoral, so not only does news of the demise of a friend, family member or colleague hit closer to home, but it also stirs some discomfort in the relative knowledge that I’m feeling fine. The “why me/why not me” dichotomy.
Late in his life, the enduring baseball character Casey Stengel noticed that “most of the people my age are dead at the present time.” That happens, but I contend that becoming a grandfather, which didn’t transpire until I was in my 70s, was the opposite of some doomsday-prophesy telegraph; rather, a real red-letter day.