Letters to the Editor
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Death is Small Potatoes
It's living while one is alive that is the daunting prospect for most. The loss of a loved one is an enormous trauma at any age, and of course especially at a young age or with serious unfinished business. But for the Guest of Honor at a funeral the dying was the easy part usually. Getting dead may have been rough, but before that, trying to live life to the fullest was probably the toughest challenge of all.
Bayard's obsession (and I think it is rightfully named that) with stasis, death, attrition, etc., is really a sad thing to read -- or to listen to, as I so often do, especially when it comes from people my age or younger. Everything that happened to us on the way to the far side of, say, sixty, is attributed to youthful idiocy, but everything that happens now is suddenly written off to "falling apart", that inevitable process which sets in upon achieving some magic number (it used to be 40; I think it's 60 now). Hell, a few years ago when I was a mere boy of 60 I flipped off a ladder and landed in a bathtub (a long story and a funny one, but never mind). I broke my left shoulder owing to a horrible landing that could not be avoided. First thing I hear from my slightly older cousins was "What the hell were you doing on a ladder at your age?" What indeed! Changing a lightbulb you morons!
At 49 I got my heart attack out of the way. It was a near thing, too. But everyone then said "You're too young for this stuff!" I agreed with them then and I'd still go with that thinking. Bayard, I suspect, would just take his pencil and check it off his list of failing systems.
Finally (rejoice! The Old Fart is almost done!) why, if we lose so much so early, did my basketball game (I played varsity high school ball) improve so damned much at age 50, a year after a near-fatal heart attack and emergency bypass surgery? Why was I so much more aggressive and dangerous as well as a far better shooter from 20 feet out? What went wrong with the program?
It all does argue ably against Intelligent Design, but at 63 I don't have an enlarged prostate, I have no problem with the shoulder I broke in that dive into the (thankfully empty) bathtub, I've worn glasses since I was 15 and have to keep getting new prescriptions but only because my vision has improved, and though I've been off women for over a year (that last breakup really hurt!) I have my ways of knowing the hydraulics still work fine and the capacity is there; further (damn! He said he was done!), my cardiologist now tells me I have no evidence of heart disease. What the hell is wrong with me?
Hey, I'm not bragging, and I knock on every piece of wood I see, but I've found that I was a lot feebler and sicker (and sick a lot more often) in my teens than I am now. What does it all mean? My hair turned grey in my mid-20s, so I can't blame that on my current senility.
I'm just not sold on Bayard's obsession, but admire the hell out of his dad and only hope that out of simple decency he doesn't live to dance on his kid's grave. Because that would be wrong, no matter how morbid the kid may be. And if, as my old high school buddy says, "There's nothing more dangerous than a sixty year-old man with nothing to lose", then imagine the mass-destruction potential of a vigorous 97 year old man.
I'd just cross the street if I saw him coming.