The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
I turned 65 in June and it was inevitable that my thoughts would turn to death. Actually they had begun to do so for months earlier. Even years earlier. When I was born in 1944 the life expectancy for a white male was 64.5 years (according to the U.S Centers for Disease Control) . By that standard my life should already be over. But In 2001 the life expectancy of a white male was 75. Are you locked into the statistic at birth? Or does each year you live increase your chances of living longer?
My father, for example, was born in 1918. His life expectancy at that time was 37.1 years. Had he been born a year earlier or a year later his life would have been expected to last 49.3 or 54.5 years respectively. The flu and World War I must have had something to do with those statistics.
As it turned out he was 75 when he died of cardiac arrest in a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Kileen, Texas in 1993. The Centers for Disease Control had predicted that in 1993 a white male should be expected to live for 73.1 years. Dad had beat the odds by almost 2 years.
He was not the kind of man who would pay attention to his diet. He ate what he liked to eat whenever he was hungry. He rarely drank alcohol, I think to his advantage, but he worried a lot, as I do, quite probably to his disadvantage.
My mother on the other hand was born in 1922. The life expectancy for a white woman then was 61.9 years. She died of cancer in 1979 when her life expectancy was 78.4. She was 58 years old.
I have Gout now (that ancient disease of hedonists and libertines). You don't usually die from gout and it would have a nice aristocratic ring to it if it were not so painful and ominous in its foreboding of more deadly diseases that also result from a life lacking in moderation. I also have a kind of anxiety/depression that is so indigenous to my family that it is like knowing whether you are Jewish or not.
I was looking at train schedules and ferry boats from London to Dublin today and I was thinking that all these statistics won't matter when I get to London to visit my daughter. Life has so much to offer that most of the time you don't have time to think about death. That's the beauty of it.
Still, at the end of Philip Roth's novel, "The Dying Animal," the main character, an older man contemplating the possible early death of his young girlfriend and former student, muses,
In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death, but for someone thirty-two the time between Now and Then is ordinarily so boundless, that it's no more than maybe a couple of times a year, and then only for a moment or two and late at night, that one comes anywhere near encountering that second person and in the state of madness that is the second person's everyday life.
By the time you have lived that second thirty-two years, that second person is a much more frequent visitor and usually arrives dressed in some physical or mental affliction that is clearly the harbinger of a dying animal.
How you deal with it is certainly a measure of your character and personality. If you are a writer you simply want, as Virginia Woolf observed, " to get it all down." Isaac Asimov ( who produced hundreds of books and short stories and complete guides to physics, Shakespeare and the entire Bible) is supposed to have said, "If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
But most people, writers included, have other obligations they want to fulfill before they die. In my own case a lot of that has to do with mundane details. The most pressing for me of the mundane details is how to keep my website together until my children have time to take from it whatever they want to keep. The nightmare laden Kafka made peace with himself by ordering his best friend to burn everything. Fortunately he didn't.
In the last few years my own "typing faster" has included a desire to make peace with those I feel I have wronged in my life. It is an idea I got from the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program. I can't now remember which step it is but the idea of it is to go see everybody for whom you believe your alcoholism caused grief and apologize. The beauty of the AA creed is that it has a lot of meaning even for people who have not stopped drinking. And it has a lot of meaning for people who never drank at all. It is based of course on religious tradition (Christianity in particular but not exclusively).
The list of people to whom I would like to apologize is a long one. Some of those people are already dead: my mother and father most certainly. But for years, my brother was at the top of the list. I've done that now, though I suppose I was surprised to realize that once you have achieved reconciliation with someone it is not like the end of something but the beginning. Every successful sentence a writer writes, like every good deed any person does, is just a prelude to the next one. Like every breath we take.
--Larry L. Dill
June 2009 New Hope Journal
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