Everything's Going To Be OK

I’M SITTING WITH my old friends Ron, David, and Neil at one of the tables along the back wall of what was once my favorite bar. We’ve been pals since we were in high school, the surviving members of a close-knit group. It’s always good to get together with these guys, but it’s impossible to do so without thinking about the friends who are no longer with us. Roger’s been dead the longest, killed in a car accident nearly thirty-five years ago. Jason went next, from a heart attack at the age of forty-six, just a few days before he was to be married. And then Eddie about a year ago, after what his obituary said was a “long battle with kidney cancer.”

Ron’s recently been diagnosed with kidney cancer as well. The similarities are spooky. Just like Eddie’s, his tumor grew undetected, possibly for years, and had spread into his lungs by the time his doctors found it.

“Big as a softball,” Ron says with a kind of awe. If anyone at the table besides me recalls that this is the same image Eddie used three years ago to describe his own tumor, they give no indication.

According to the cancer-information website I went to after Ron called me with the news (probably the same website I visited when I first heard about Eddie), metastatic kidney cancer has about a 92 percent mortality rate over a five-year period. It’s an almost shockingly dismal prognosis.

“This treatment they’re going to try,” Ron is saying, “if it doesn’t cure me, should at least buy me some time — keep me aboveground for another year or two anyway.” There’s an awkward silence at the table. Seeing our discomfort, Ron quickly comes to the rescue: “What’s that old saying? ‘If you want to see God laugh, make a plan.’ ”

I haven’t seen my friends since Eddie’s funeral, and I’m struck by how much older everyone looks. Is it possible that we’ve aged so much in barely more than a year? Just about ten years ago, when I turned fifty, I was secretly proud that I looked younger than most of my contemporaries. Even during my years of active alcoholism and drug addiction, I’d never quit working out, half hoping that staying fit would keep old age and death at bay indefinitely. How could a man get old if he was running forty miles a week? How could a man die if he could manage forty-five minutes at the top level of a Stairmaster?

But I’m not running forty miles a week anymore — less than half that is the best I can manage — and I haven’t been on a Stairmaster in years. I no longer hope that I’m somehow an exception to the laws of nature. Besides, if fitness conferred any immunity to illness and death, Eddie, a superb athlete who was still competing with men decades younger than him well into his fifties, would have outlived us all.

At the table Ron suddenly looks directly at me. “So, Alan,” he says, “what do you think?”

I search for something worthwhile to say. Ron and I have been close since tenth grade. “Well,” I finally manage, “I’ve got to tell you, I admire your courage. If it were me, I’d be home curled up in a little ball with a bottle of Jim Beam in one hand and a bottle of pills in the other.”

Everyone laughs, but I’m not joking. Since the day I got sober back in 1986, I’ve reserved the right to go back to drugs and booze if I ever have what I consider a “legitimate need.” Being diagnosed with a terminal illness would certainly qualify.

There’s no question in my mind that Ron will fight as long as he has the strength. It’s certainly what Eddie did, going from one agonizing treatment to the next until the doctors ran out of options. The last time I saw Eddie, he couldn’t have weighed much more than ninety pounds, and yet I got the sense he still didn’t believe he was dying. I used to think that addicts were the world champs when it came to denial, but if a man doesn’t want to accept that he is near death, then just about nothing can convince him otherwise.

When my father was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer at the age of eighty-seven, his doctor mentioned that he’d seen people with his type of cancer live five years or more. Although my father was a frail old man with a bad heart, he instantly adopted that number as his official prognosis. No matter that he quickly became very sick, he never stopped believing he had five years to live, right up until the very end.

“Five more years,” my father moaned, just a few days before he died, “like this?”

IT’S NOT THAT TIME IS PASSING FASTER as I get older. It’s more that time has been profoundly cheapened, as if by hyperinflation, like some runaway Third World currency. How many days would it take to equal the kind of day I experienced as a kid? Wheelbarrows full.

My wife, Anne, tells me I spend too much time obsessing about such matters. When I come in from a jog and complain about how slow I’ve gotten, she says, “Who cares how slow you are? Just be grateful you’re healthy enough to be out there.” Her tone is kind but with an undercurrent of impatience, as if she were trying to reason with a dull-witted child.

“Any slower and I might just fall over,” I say, unwilling to hear her. “I wonder if there’s something physically wrong with me.”

Perhaps I wouldn’t feel so bad about all the speed I’ve lost if Anne, who’s also a runner, had slowed down right along with me. But in the twenty-odd years we’ve been together, she’s only become faster — at least, compared to me. I used to relish letting her get out ahead of me when we raced, then speeding past her just before the finish line. Now she runs twice as far as I do, and much faster. More annoying still, she virtually never gets injured, whereas I’ve had just about every known running injury — some of them two and three times over. As if those blows to what’s left of my pride weren’t enough, she’s also three years older than I am.

“You know,” I joked recently, “if you were a professional athlete, I’d have to ask you for a urine sample.”

She laughed, but I’d happily trade what passes for my sense of humor for the body I had twenty years ago. I loathe getting older; my drooping chest and hairy ears are enough to make me cringe. If I can’t stand turning sixty, how will I ever handle seventy or eighty?

“I just don’t see how people deal with being really old,” I say to Anne one day after we get home from visiting my eighty-six-year-old mother. “If I were my mother’s age, I’d wake up every morning wondering if this day was going to be my last.”

“Sometimes I get the feeling you do that now,” Anne says with a pitying look.

She’s half kidding, of course, but it’s a valid point. If I don’t change my worrying, hypochondriac ways, I probably won’t live to be my mother’s age. On the other hand, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing. Just a few short years ago my mother was still arguing passionately about politics and rushing off to aerobics class three times a week. Now she spends her days poking around her little apartment in an assisted-living facility and playing endless games of solitaire. She accepts her diminished circumstances without complaint, but if I were her, I’d be heartbroken. Isn’t there such a thing — speaking strictly for myself, of course — as living too long?

DAVID, NEIL, AND I ARE DRIVING to Beth Israel Hospital in Boston to visit Ron, who’s receiving interleukin in an attempt to stop the spread of his cancer. The therapy is so arduous and potentially dangerous that they do it in the intensive-
care unit.

In the car I ask if anyone’s read about the recent study that concluded — contrary to all reasonable expectations — that people tend to get happier as they get older. According to the study, happiness begins to pick up at age fifty and steadily increases from there. Something they call “global well-being” peaks at age eighty-five. My first thought was there had to be some mistake. Maybe somebody had put a decimal point in the wrong place. Maybe they’d meant to say your well-being peaks at age eight-point-five.

Neither of them has heard about the study, but Neil tells us about his elderly father, who’s just moved in with an overweight eighty-year-old diabetic woman with one leg. “I realize it sounds pretty grim,” Neil says with a laugh, “but I’ll be damned if the old guy isn’t happy as a clam. He says he’s in love for the first time since my mother died.”

Before I can stop myself, I have an all-too-vivid picture of Neil’s father and his lady friend in bed together, which causes a tightening sensation in my scrotum. I don’t like what my reaction says about me, but my body doesn’t worry about being superficial or “ageist.” It just knows what it knows, which is that, on some cellular level, it’s repulsed by old age.

When we get to the hospital, I’m surprised to see Ron sitting up in bed, joking with a nurse. If it weren’t for the dark circles under his eyes, I would never guess he’s ill. His attitude since the beginning has been one of almost heroic cheerfulness. He tells us that so far the treatment’s “not that big a deal.” The most bothersome side effects are chills and nausea, which they’re treating with medication. “No doubt in my mind I can handle this,” he says.

It’s hard to talk about Ron’s cancer, and soon the conversation turns, as it always does lately, to the good old days. I don’t remember them as particularly terrific, but everyone else seems to, and this is not the time to be a contrarian.

Whenever we get together, we tell the same tired stories: The trip we all took to Woodstock. (Only rarely does anyone bring up that we didn’t get within ten miles of the music.) The time we tripped on morning-glory seeds after having read in a magazine that certain types are more powerful than lsd. (I’m the only one who took the right kind, and I almost lost my mind.) The summer we got jobs as second-shift janitors and had a “blast” skipping work and going to the racetrack “all the time.” (I think we did it twice, and we all went home broke.)

The older we get, the more determined we are to believe that we had wonderful, adventure-filled youths, but for the most part I think of my youth as miserably squandered. I try not to live in the past, but there are times I can’t help myself. If I don’t watch out, I’m going to turn into the kind of pa
thetic old man I’d have secretly laughed at not that many years ago.

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