James Wolcott: Final-Exit Strategies

[babylonsister]

Final-Exit Strategies

The baby-boomers—newly aware of their mortality—have turned death into a teaching moment (Tuesdays with Morrie), motivational tool (The Last Lecture), and sales pitch (all those bucket-list books of things to do before you go). It’s the Grim Reaper as life coach.

by James Wolcott March 2009


Illustration by Edward Sorel

As if death weren’t exacting enough (lights out, party’s over, stop tape), we now have the burden of attaining wisdom and bequeathing it to others before we go, providing a gallant example at the exit ramp to a round of glistening tears. (For a master class in glistening, take a gander at Katharine Hepburn bidding farewell to John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn.) It seems an awful lot to ask of a sick, dying person—admirable conduct plus a lifetime’s treasury of pithy lessons handed out like Wheat Thins—and I blame the legacy of Tuesdays with Morrie (1997), the memoir by Mitch Albom that stayed on the best-seller lists longer than seemed rational or seemly. (More than four years for the hardcover edition.) In it, Albom, a Detroit-based sportswriter too tunnel-visioned and career-driven to stop and sniff the roses, paid a call every Tuesday on his former favorite teacher, Brandeis University professor Morrie Schwartz, afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease. From these tutorials, Mitch learned how to live, how to love, and how to appreciate each moment in its hummingbird flight. Although the actual content of Morrie’s imparted wisdom (“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in”) was no great advance on any other humanistic sage, it was Morrie’s individuality that made him a revered Yoda figure, a talking fortune cookie. It wasn’t his fault he ended up a sentimental prop for Everyman’s personal growth. The prime audience for Tuesdays with Morrie was Albom’s fellow baby-boomers, whose sense of mortality had begun haunting the midnight hour (think of the opening of Martin Amis’s novel The Information, with its panoramic view of men weeping with the stricken realization that they’re going to die). For guidance, consolation, and useful tips, Morrie’s readers were looking for wise elders who were already toeing the threshold.

After all, Julian Barnes asks in Nothing to Be Frightened Of, “Who can teach us to die? There are, by definition, no old pros around to talk—or walk—us through it.” So those on the ridge overlooking the valley of the shadow of death serve as the next-best trail scouts. In 1999, Tuesdays with Morrie was adapted into an Oprah Winfrey–produced made-for-TV movie starring Hank Azaria and Jack Lemmon, the latter drawing an extra measure of schmaltz from the audience’s fond associations with his storied career. (Well, it made for a more dignified send-off than The Odd Couple II, where Lemmon’s Felix called Walter Matthau’s Oscar a “shithead.”) The best thing about the spaniel-eyed bathos of Tuesdays with Morrie was that it inspired a caustic takeoff on Will & Grace, with Orson Bean as the retired English professor they once esteemed. Grace: “Such an inspiration. You know, he’s the one who made me want to write.” Will: “You don’t write.” Grace: “But I wanted to.” Bean’s Professor Dudley turns out to be not a living shrine of Socratic equanimity but a crusty, embittered coot who is fed up with former students making pilgrimages to his house in the hope he’ll be like Morrie: “If you’ve come for inspiration, you’re too late. If you’ve come for the funeral, you’re too early.” When Grace insists that Tuesdays with Morrie had nothing to do with their visit, that she hasn’t even read the book, he snaps, “So, you haven’t written anything, and you haven’t read anything. I can see I’ve made a marvelous impact.”

As if Morrie weren’t paragon enough to put the rest of us shabby creatures to shame, then came Randy Pausch, whose humor, fortitude, and courage in The Last Lecture set an even higher bar for grace under pressure. The critic Seymour Krim wondered, when contemplating the prospect of his own death, “What shape will the bastard take? How will I feel when I know it’s on me if I’m given that last thin dime of consciousness?” For Pausch, the bastard took the shape of a cancerous liver, but he was never down to that thin dime. He had time and clarity enough to get his mind in order and to share its illumination. Pausch—a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon whose curriculum vitae included stints at Adobe, the Alice project (a 3-D programming environment intended to nurture creativity in novice animators), Electronic Arts, Google, and Walt Disney Imagineering—learned just weeks before he was to deliver a topic idea for the university’s “Last Lecture” series that his recent treatment for pancreatic cancer had failed, giving him only a few months to live. (After having his gallbladder, a third of his pancreas and stomach, and several feet of his small intestine surgically removed, Pausch, sneaking a look at his chart in the oncologist’s office, discovered that the cancer had metastasized to his liver, tumors sprouting like multiple warheads.) Rather than cancel the lecture, Pausch decided to use the public occasion to deliver a personal testament. “These lectures are routinely videotaped,” Pausch wrote in The Last Lecture (with Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow), the subsequent book that became a best-seller (and remains so). “Under the ruse of giving an academic lecture, I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children.” The video of the lecture, which was given in September 2007, went viral on YouTube, tallying over three million viewings, its cultural impact amplified by Pausch’s appearance on Oprah, where he delivered a condensed version of his talk.

Part of what made Randy Pausch’s story so wrenching was the photographic solar-plexus impact of his family album—his appearing so hale, cheerful, and outgoing, balancing his three young children in his arms and on his shoulders in the back-cover photo, a tree of life that was withering inside. It wasn’t fair, a devoted father and husband this young, accomplished, and buoyant-spirited receiving an early death sentence. But illness plays no favorites, eventually every number on the roulette wheel is called, and Pausch wasn’t one to bewail his fate with the wounded cry of “Why me?” Pausch’s absence of self-pity is a model many will strive to emulate, between crescendos of helpless sobbing. The most memorable passages in The Last Lecture are not the truisms conveyor-belted under chapter headings such as “Don’t Obsess over What People Think” and “Don’t Complain, Just Work Harder” (though I did appreciate the provocative old-school sentiment of “Earnest Is Better than Hip”: “I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every time, because hip is short-term. Earnest is long-term”), but the geekier effusions. Such as Pausch’s idol worship of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk—the perfect Method-actor role model for decisive leadership—and his thrill at meeting William Shatner, who graced the virtual-reality lab at Carnegie Mellon with his brimming charisma. “When Shatner arrived, we put the bulky ‘head-mounted display’ on him. It had a screen inside, and as he turned his head, he could immerse himself in 360-degree images of his old ship. ‘Wow, you even have the turbolift doors,’ he said. And we had a surprise for him, too: red-alert sirens. Without missing a beat, he barked, ‘We’re under attack!’” A fitting posthumous hurrah awaits Pausch, who died in July of 2008. J. J. Abrams, the director of this spring’s Star Trek prequel (featuring Kirk and Spock at the Starfleet Academy), cast Pausch in a cameo role which has him crossing the bridge of the Enterprise to deliver the clarion line “Captain, we have visual!” For an American nerd born in the second half of the 20th century, suiting up in a Starfleet uniform and serving with Kirk—truly, there can be no higher civilian honor. Since heaven is a hypothetical destination spot, the imaginary airport hangar of the Hereafter, being an even infinitesimal spark in the Star Trek cosmology is the closest any of us can come to immortality.

Slipping off the mortal coil is no excuse for slacking off. Only in America could the prospect of dying be promoted as a motivational tool to rack up frequent-flier miles. Bookstores and Web sites abound in self-help guides listing the 10 (or 100, or 1,000) things and places you must do and visit before you die (there’s even a 100 Birds to See Before You Die catalogue), as if life were a race through the supermarket aisle to grab as many experiences off the shelves as possible before collapsing at the checkout line. Breadth of experience rather than depth is what’s being peddled. Such quests require the luxury of time as well as the luxury of disposable income and still don’t ensure deep-down soul satisfaction, as Billy Crystal taught us so well. In City Slickers (1991), the thrill of running with the bulls at Pamplona and getting ass-gored isn’t enough to banish Crystal’s protagonist’s midlife ennui. His tiny, mopey pout provokes his patient saint of a wife (Patricia Wettig) to urge him to go forth and “find your smile,” which results in his and his fellow sad sacks’ taking part in a cattle drive—a Hardy Boys adventure that makes them feel like kids again. Grown men taking part in a fantasy baseball camp or its equivalent isn’t a repeatable refresher (the midlife crisis eventually wears out its warranty), yet the cult of experience persists. Round up those city slickers once they’re card-carrying A.A.R.P. members and they’d be the ones compiling their “bucket lists” (the things they most desire to do before kicking the proverbial bucket, like Jimmy Durante in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World).

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http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/03/wolcott200903