After a long lifetime of being regularly up close and personal with it, of fearing it, resenting it, and being terrified by it, Death and I have become friends. Time and experience have finally stripped it of its terror, its threat, its dread, even its panic-inducing “What the fuck is an eternal void?” thing. Put another way, I’m cool with him at last (Death has to be a He, right?).
Not that I have even the slightest desire to meet the guy. I would gladly settle for 72 more years to pursue any number of new vocations: Tagging otters, say, for MassWildlife. Playing second trombone in the Buffalo Philharmonic. Trying my luck as a painter of the Cubo-Futurist school c. 1918. Designing radical sports stadia.
And while we’re at it, okay, I could also use another seven decades to finally really experience the power of the “nature” I missed out on until recently, being before that obsessed with finding literary fame, journalistic fame, authorial fame and fame in general, as long as it involved me. That it took me seven decades to finally have conversations with the crows in our trees, or to marvel at the crayfish nibbling my feet in my favorite secret stream in the woods, seems sort of unfair, but all that beauty is enhanced by the temporariness — of nature, and now, of me.
Once when I was interviewing the late former owner of the Baltimore Orioles during the 21-game losing streak to start the 1988 season, he told me the story of the Persian king who’d told his wisest monks to go into the mountains and not come back until they’d come up with the wisest thought ever. It was, “This, too shall pass.”
That’s me. I’ve come to pleasant terms with how my time here has passed. I might have experienced just about every emotion life has to offer, and I think I’m pretty full. I don’t really need anything more from Here and Now. I ran the table with what it had to offer, for better or worse. For sure there was more better than worse.
Part of why I’m cool with whatever’s next is that I lived it well, according to Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, whose psych department regularly interviewed a few hundred men in the Boston area over the course of their entire lifetimes, then gave George the data. He coded it, looking for common attributes of the men who reached their eighties on top of their world, and wrote “Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Study of Adult Development.”
Vaillant’s number one commonality was having one long-term relationship. We’ve been married now for 43 years and neither of us are going anywhere soon. So, check the big one.
But my favorite Vaillant guidepost was that the men who’d aged gracefully had taken a divergent “work” path at some point, taking a new trail that wasn’t far removed from the previous lifelong pursuit, but a definite re-routing. As Vaillant said, paraphrasing here, “If you get up in the morning at the age of 65 still wanting to be the best at what you do, you’ve missed the point of living.”
In my case, it was getting an MA in Teaching at 65, and teaching in the college’s Education Department, but mostly absorbing the life force of college students for five years, thereby taking years off my own ossified brain lobes. I was no longer taking in the world and rearranging it to sell in written words, but regaining a passion for learning again. It all really was a tremendously satisfying second act.
As to the science/philosophy/religion about the nature of the place where I’m heading after Death herds me with a scythe through his portal? Please. Using a human-being mind’s three-dimensional, linear-time skill set, I’m supposed to be able to understand or envision the everythingness of everything? My brain’s inability to remotely conceive of what happens next is what makes me so relaxed about it. How can you fear the unknowable?
In fact, as I see it, the next step is so inconceivable that “next” doesn’t even figure in, at least according to String Theory, which is the only model of the “universe” I can even begin to understand. The String Theorists theorize that in their model, “time” and “space” as we seem to be experiencing them are not necessary. As I sort of understand it, their model posits infinite congruent universes that can be envisioned as infinite sheets on hanging on laundry lines plastered against each other and going out in infinite directions.
Then, the ’62 Barracuda I glued and painted as a kid was a model, too, but wasn’t a ’62 ‘Cuda. Not even close.
*
But in the end, what’s given me a healthy relationship with Death is my particularly intimate history with it. When I was seven my dad died in a collision of commercial airliners (no survivors) over Staten Island nine days before Christmas, which automatically off-kilters the rest of life. From second grade on, you’re the kid in Bronxville whose dad died in that front-page crash with pictures of the United plane’s tail in Park Slope, and from that day on, Death is sort of a partner in the rest of your life, in the background, but always there.
But you have to keep going on whatever kilter you’ve landed on. With me, the new kilter involved a bigshot stepfather whose portrait hung in the Yale Club in New York because he’d been its president. On the upside, this meant my eventual automatic admittance to Yale, which I eventually took full advantage of. On the downside, he convinced my mother to send me to a boarding school in the woods in seventh grade, which was a kilter of a whole different kilt. Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be boarders at 11.
Last year author Richard Jay Hutto published a great book called The Countess and the Nazis: An American Family's Private War that used a quote I’d given Hutto about how my stepfather, who appeared on a couple pages of the book because his first wife had figured into the tale, had been a fuckstain of the first order. In a thank you email, Hutto told me, “I have to add that I’ve not found a single person, including his son and grandson, who will say a nice word about him.”
He died a few years after my mother divorced him. Hallowed centuries-old St. Bartholomew’s Episcopalean Church on Park Avenue in Manhattan was overflowing for his funeral. His casket was covered in red roses. This was a Social-Register funeral. It was all theater. Death as something to be curious about, to get a feeling of, was not present in the least. The hymns were morose and somber.
Then, one day twenty years later, we met again. In 1982, when I was a sportswriter for the San Diego Union, Sports Illustrated published a story that named Chuck Muncie, Charger running back, as a user of cocaine. My editor put me on a plane to Muncie’s resident town of New Orleans that same night.
The next day Chuck’s neighbors told me he was in the Bahamas, and didn’t know when he’d be back. I told my editor, an old-school heavy drinking man of terrific newspaper instincts. I figured he’d call me home the next morning because the company that owned the newspaper was super cheap, but he told me to hang one more day, just snoop around, and if nothing turns up, fly home the morning after that using my open ticket on the one daily flight to San Diego, on PanAm 769. That next morning wind-shear slammed Pan Am 769 down just after it had taken off. The right wing-tip hit a pine tree and the 727 did a cartwheel through a residential area. Everyone on the plane died, and some on the ground.
My editor said, “Go get me a scene.” So, as an intrepid reporter, avoiding police blockades, I walked through some woods behind the airport to a field lit by portable arc lights and, pretending I was one of them, tagged along with two men planting little flags when they found body parts. There weren’t any whole bodies. One on the ground was half tw-dimensional. When I got home a week later, all reporting done, I found out that on the first night, my editor had taken out the stuff about specific body parts I’d seen on the ground and in the trees.
If I’d been religious I’d have thought that it had all happened for a reason: Chuck flees to the Bahamas, I stay an extra night, I don’t die on on PanAm 769. But then why let me see a plane-crash site up close? Maybe I wanted to. I don’t know. But at that point, Death was becoming pretty matter-of-fact.
*
I was always drawn to death narratives, knowing, I guess, that I was mining a fertile landscape. My story about a professional football player who took out a hit on his pregnant girlfriend was anthologized in both Best Sportswriting and Best Crime Writing of the Year. The same for the one I wrote about the drunken basketball player who had been giving his pals a tour of the mansion when he took a shotgun from the wall and snapped it shut when he was aiming at the limo driver, and killed him. The one I wrote about a rodeo star gored to death by a bull at 25, made only Best Sportswriting, as did my story about Jimmy the Greek in his final years of exile, which led with his quote, “I’m dead.”
The story that got the most response was he one about the 18 marines who died in the training crash of a V-22 Osprey maybe because I knew from plane crashes. But there’s no doubt that apparently my best writing was about death. I didn’t have to interview him to make the power of his presence known.
When I was writing a book about my father, weirdly — fate? which is what? — I interviewed one of the marines he fought with on Guadalcanal who told me he’d happened to be helping out in the Kings County Morgue the morgue the day my dad’s plane fell into Brooklyn, and when someone had wheeled out the morgue drawer, he’d said, “My god! That’s major Richmond!
When I asked him how the body looked, the man said, “Like he was sleeping. Couldn’t see a mark on him.”
*
Then, seven years ago, my only son died of an overdose. Watching the paramedics wheel his body down the driveway, looking back, I went into shock, of course, like at the plane crash site back in New Orleans. But after the shock wore off, and a new life had to grow out of a soil of grief, my relationship with death took its final step, toward being a natural thing in the big (well, infinitesimally tiny) scheme of things.
Seven years later I still haven’t retrieved Max’s ashes from the funeral director who’d taken advantage of my grief that night as they wheeled his body out of the house, because they have nothing to do with Max. Max, an anarchist to the core, would approve. Instead I carved his name into a huge tree dwarfing a robber-baron’s family plot in the cemetery in Rochester where he loved to walk his dog. Meantime, we’ve never been closer. Not a second goes by when he’s not there.
So why would I fear Death? FDR nailed it with, “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself.” For me, there seems to be no actual fear now. There’s nothing gnawing, or causing psychological cold sweats about all that unknowingness anymore. The panic of not being able to surround the idea of “infinite” for the “next” destination is completely gone.
I’m not talking about he kind of fear that’s on “No Fear!” baseball caps and tee shirts that people who must really be terrified of something wear in public to ward it off.
I’m talking about not being scared of the man with the scythe anymore. But as I tell him every day, for the time being, since we‘re friends, can you just keep staying the fuck away a little longer?