Brave New World

The March issue of the English monthly "Prospect" focused on a recent finding that a third of the babies born in Britain last year can expect to live for a full century.  There was a contributing essay by Garrison Keillor at age seventy, who has an exceedingly upbeat take on this prediction.  Keillor’s essay reads like those glowing accounts of exciting, new and active celebrity lives described in the monthly journal of the American Association of Retired People--you just know that Cher will still be striding the stage in her thigh high boots at Las Vegas when she's a hundred. But I thought immediately of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” that stark, chilly, and deadly description of the intimation of our end.  I thought of Brian Moore’s The Lonely  Passion of Judith Hearne, the story of an aging alcoholic alone in rented rooms, or Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn, a kind of wry narrative smile evoked by four lonely office workers nearing the end of their time at work, or Evelyn Waugh’s short story “Bella Fleace Gave A Party,” in which an elderly woman waits with dance band and hired footmen for the guests who never arrive because she had forgotten to mail out invitations. And I think of the folks I have known in our building in Manhattan, the one on our floor, for instance, growing blind, and still somehow creeping out of her room, leaving a trail of powder in footprints, to feel her way to the elevator and down the front steps, turn left and somehow end up at the all night diner on the corner where she got her meals, and other shadowy figures alone in their rooms until one fine day they were carted off.  I think of my best and dearest friend with whom I spoke almost every day for fifty years who finally admitted to being ninety.  “Why did you tell me?”  “Because I am old now and I don’t care.”  It was the beginning of conversations on another plane.  “Charles, what do you think it is to die? I don’t think I’m ready to.”  “I drive to the store; I don’t care.  What am I supposed to do?  I would be a prisoner.” (This is California where there is no life without a car.)  “I need projects.  I need something to do.”  “These damn people around me, they keep coming in to visit me.  What for?”  (No point saying “They want to assure themselves you’re still alive.”)  “Charles, Elizabeth is dead, now I am the only one still alive from her wedding party. Everyone I grew up with in San Francisco is dead now.” And finally she as well at 97. I think of my mother-in-law who fell on the stairs at 98 that sent her into a sharp decline, her pain eased by morphine, who said softly one Thanksgiving when her daughter invited her to come to the table, “I don’t want to eat anymore,” and, God bless them, they upped her morphine, and helped her to take her leave.  I think of her neighbor, an old, old regal lady who lived alone, found one day by someone who noticed her absence at church, frozen on the floor, the furnace having failed. Let me be upbeat, sort of, in an anecdote that gives me comfort,  an extraordinary experience a while back at Sanders Theater in Cambridge at a performance of Bach’s Passion According to St. Mathew, almost at the end after the Evangelist has described the death of Jesus, when the chorus sings an impassioned, beautiful passage that recapitulates one of the great musical themes of this work, in which they call out for the Lord to be with them when they die. At that moment in Sanders Theater an old man three rows in front of us, let his head fall backward.  As we were soon to discover he had died.  I have always thought to myself “Old man, what a great way to go.”