I Don’t Want to Know Who Died
And please don’t tell me their age
When I was a kid, I used to laugh at my parents’ always reading the obituaries in the daily newspapers, back when we had daily newspapers, and frequently noting how young the person who had just died was. How that person was younger than they were. I thought I would never do such an old-person thing.
I now do such a thing.
Matthew Perry died? He was only 54. Two decades younger than me!
Suzanne Somers? She’s a year younger than me.
Pee-Wee Herman. Vida Blue. Linda Kasabian. All younger than me, even if I can barely remember who they were.
Then I began to even notice the passing of the ones who were older than me but still felt like they weren’t that old, who seemed to have been part of our generation, constant colleagues of our twenties and thirties.
Robbie Robertson of The Band. Willis Reed of the Knicks. Mary Quant. Newton Minow. I read their obituaries and I was reminded of my father-in-law, in his nineties, who said — every time a famous person of his generation died — “There’s no one left. They’re all gone.”
I know we’re not all gone. Lots of people are living longer today than ever before. Jimmy Carter is still hanging on at 99. Vic Seixas, a famous tennis player of my youth, is still alive at almost 101. Bill Leuchtenberg, a presidential historian whom I met years ago, will soon be celebrating his 102nd birthday.
Mel Brooks, Dick Van Dyke, and William Shatner are all still alive and maybe still kicking.
That should, of course, be encouraging. And yet, when you get to my age, when you get to your seventies, you start wondering why you haven’t heard from an old friend in a long time. You start hearing about a college buddy needing an MRI, or a friendly neighbor having a fall at home or a cousin’s worrisome visit to the dermatologist.
It seems, sometimes, that bodies, including my own, are beginning to break down all around me and to be honest, I’m not happy knowing about it all. I would rather not dwell on how fragile so many of us seem to have become, despite our swimming five days a week, running half-marathons, doing tai-chi or buying low-sodium soy sauce.
But then again, I don’t have much choice. None of us do. All we can do is just stop reading the damn obituaries.
