The following is
Essay #15, Eighty-Three And Counting, of Dr. Ring's new book,
Waiting to Die: A Near-Death Researcher's
(Mostly Humorous) Reflections on His Own
Endgame.
It is good to
have an end to journey toward;
but it is the
journey that matters, in the end.
--
Ursula K. Le
Guin |
I've just turned
eighty-three. Of course, I'd prefer to turn
back, but so far I haven't been able to
locate a reverse gear. Still, I must confess
I had a good time this year. My birthday
actually has become something of a national
holiday over the years and goes on for well
over a week during which time I enjoy
receiving greetings from near and far from
my misguided friends, family and a stray fan
or two. And then there are various
celebratory lunches with local friends and
more and diverse pleasures with my
girlfriend, Lauren, the nature of which my
innate modesty precludes me from disclosing.
Well, I could go on, but then I'm sure you
would justifiably accuse me of an undue
level of
rodomontade.
Now if can
manage to live to be 1000 months old, I'll
be 83 and 1/3. A good time to die. And did
you know that the hero of my admittedly
callow youth,
Sigmund Freud, also died at 83
& 1/3 -- at exactly 1000 months. You could
look it up. Hey, I'd be in pretty stellar
company, right?
And look at some
of the other famous people who died at 83.
David Lean
Lord Alfred
Tennyson
Edgar Degas
Gene Wilder
Thomas Jefferson
Victor Hugo
Gene Kelly
Paul Newman
Henry Ford
Samuel Beckett
Ted Williams
Leonard Nimoy
Andrew Carnegie
I sure wouldn't
mind joining that 83 club, even if I lack
any celebrity credentials of my own, though
I can always hope to achieve some measure of
posthumous fame if ever a good biographer
comes along to extol my virtues and conceal
my sins.
Actually, not
long ago, just as I was approaching 83, I
had a near-death scare because if I believed
the rumors that were circulating about me
for a couple of days then, I seemed to have
died already.
I had no idea
about the rumors swirling about concerning
my alleged death until I received a call
from a longtime NDE colleague of mine who
NEVER calls me. When I heard his emotional
voice on the phone, I thought he was calling
me to tell me that someone in the NDE
community had died. I had no clue that that
someone seemed to be me!
When I picked up
the phone, I heard my friend gasp and then
say, "Oh, Ken, you're alive!"
"Of course, I'm
alive, you silly goose. Just because I've
been writing all these essays about waiting
to die doesn't mean I've actually caught the
disease." (I am paraphrasing and
exaggerating a bit here for dramatic effect.
Am I having any?)
My friend said
that a near-death experiencer (NDEr) of our
acquaintance had been spreading the good
news. It made me wonder why she didn't call
me first.
As soon as I
hung up, the phone rang again. This time the
incoming President of
IANDS, the NDE
organization I had co-founded in 1981, was
on the line. Another version of the same
conversion took place. Egad, what next?
Shortly
afterward, I was able to piece together how
this rumor got started. Do you remember in
one of my earlier essays called "Cheers at
the Half," I had mentioned a letter from a
longtime NDE friend and author she had
entitled "Remembering Ken Ring?" At the
time, I joked that it made me think I was
reading my own eulogy.
Well, recently,
that letter was published in
Vital Signs,
the quarterly newsletter of IANDS, and the
NDEr I mentioned apparently read it as if it
were entitled "In Remembrance of Ken Ring,"
so naturally she thought I had left the
building -- for good (pace Frasier). At that
point she got in touch with the woman who
had written that article who, having no
reason to doubt the NDEr, put out an
announcement about my purported death of her
website. Why she didn't check in me with
first, God knows?
Well, you can
imagine the next two days, putting those
rumors to rest that I had not been laid to
rest. Apologies were extended, laughs were
exchanged, and I got back to merely writing
about waiting to die again and was spared
from the formality of its actually
occurring.
Not long after
this faux near-death episode, I wondered
into my local bookstore looking for a new
novel. And guess what immediately caught my
eye? A book by the title of
The Secret Diary
of Hendrik Groen, but it was the full title
that told me this was the book I was meant
to read at this time.
The Secret Diary
of
HENDRIK GROEN
83 1/4 Years Old |
And this
Dutchman, my exact contemporary, turned out
to be an octogenarian after my own heart
and, if I may say so, in my own moldy mold.
(To my surprise, Hendrik turns out to be a
fictional character but not to me nor, I
suspect, to most people who discover him.)
Like me, he has found that humor is what
gets him through his day as he deals with
the kind of decrepitude that I have often
bemoaned in these essays. His piquant sense
of humor is delightful as this passage will
demonstrate. Does Hendrik remind you of
anyone you know?
My "dribbling"
keeps getting worse. White underpants are
excellent for highlighting yellow stains.
Yellow underpants would be a lot better. I'm
mortified at the thought of the laundry
ladies handling my soiled garments. [Hendrik
lives in an assisted living home in
Amsterdam.] I have therefore taken to
scrubbing the worst stains by hand before
sending the washing out. Call it a
pre-prewash. If I didn't send out anything
to be laundered it would arouse suspicion.
"You have been changing your underwear,
haven't you, Mr. Groen?" the fat lady from
housekeeping would probably ask. What I'd
like to reply is, "No, fat lady from
housekeeping, this pair is caked so firmly
onto the old buttocks that I think I'll just
keep wearing them for the rest of my days."
It has been a
trying day: the body creaks in all its
joints. There's nothing that will stop the
decline. Hair is not going to grow back.
(Not on the pate at least; it readily
sprouts from the nose and ears…) and the
leaking nether parts aren't going to stop
dripping.
I can't seem to
get away from tales of urinary distress so
reminiscent of my own, especially those that
I alluded to in my very first essay.
For example,
during the last couple of weeks, my
girlfriend Lauren and I have been watching a
very popular comedy on Netflix called
The
Kominksy Method. It stars a 74-year-old
Michael Douglas as a theater coach (since
his career as a leading actor -- at least in
this series -- is washed up) and
Alan Arkin,
who is ten years older and Douglas's former
agent, as well as his best friend. Arkin,
whose beloved wife has just died, is the
archetypal curmudgeon while Douglas, with
his grizzled beard and cool leather jacket,
still is trying to cozy up to women, oozing
the last drop of his fading charm.
Unfortunately,
that's not all he's oozing.
In the third
episode, Douglas begins to have prostate
problems and is always having to go to the
bathroom, at the most embarrassing times, so
that everyone becomes well aware of his
urinary exigencies. One night, he is saying
goodnight to his girlfriend -- one of his
drama students -- outside her house. They
kiss, and he starts leaving when he stops
and says "uh-oh." He looks around furtively,
sees that no one is watching, and then pees
in her bushes as a sigh of relief washes
over his face.
The story of my
life! I have been there, believe me, and
worse! Did he have to remind me?
Eventually,
Douglas has to visit a urologist who is
played by the hilarious
Danny DeVito. Any man
of a certain age, and I am of that age, will
relate to the examination that DeVito then
performs. I squirmed throughout that scene
while my girlfriend, of course, found it
uproarious.
I do recommend
the show, however, particularly to men under
the age of thirty.
Seriously,
however, it does depict, both with humor and
with a certain pathos, the trials of old men
like me, especially Arkin, who is about my
age, and in the series is clearly waiting to
die.
Before I leave
this bathroom humor behind, I have to
confess that I still find that when I piss,
I often continue to get a secondary stream
that runs down my left leg. That really
pisses me off. Sometimes it happens twice in
a row. What do you think I say then?
Another double
dribble.
I'm winding up
talking about the same things I mentioned at
the beginning of these essays. I'm not
progressing toward death; I'm going in
circles!
One day long ago
I had a shocking realization. I received a
new credit card whose expiration date was
November, 2023, when I would be almost 87
years old. Surely, I thought, I would expire
long before that. But, then, a horrible
thought occurred to me: What if I don't?!
What if I live to 86? Honestly, before
seeing that card, I had never imagined such
a thing. No, no! Will I still be walking on
this road toward death, still waiting to
die, for years to come? What a ghastly
thought.
I realized I'm
not afraid to die; I'm now afraid of living
too long!
Meanwhile, I
seem to have reached the end of this stage
of my journey toward death, if not the end
of the road -- but the road stretches on. I
am still shooting for 1000 months. If I get
there, I may possibly shoot myself since I
think it would be keen-o to go out with a
bang (get it?) on such a splendid number.
[Just kidding, don't worry. Not being a
rabid gun-toting member of the NRA, I have
never even touched a firearm. I don't even
know anyone who has one, and I don't think
I'd like to, thank you.]
I will now take
leave of you by recalling the lyrics of a
song I've mentioned before from
Carousel,
the musical by
Richard Rodgers and
Oscar
Hammerstein. In light of these essays
dealing with NDEs, try reading these lyrics
as a metaphor for life's journey on the road
toward death and what you will experience on
the way:
When you walk
through a storm
Hold your head
up high
And don't be
afraid of the dark
At the end of a
storm
There's a golden
sky
And the sweet
silver song of a lark
Walk on through
the wind
Walk on through
the rain
Though your
dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in
your heart
And you'll never
walk alone
You'll never
walk alone |
On the road
toward an infinite journey with Lauren by my
side.
Sorry to
disappoint you. I’m sure you expected a
dramatic finish with me in the hospital,
tethered to tubes, surrounded by my
relatives some of whom surely wondering if
they had been mentioned in my will, and me
about to expire.
But la morte,
come
la donna, è mobile. Death is fickle. It
comes when it pleases. It has no respect for
the contrivance of literary endings. I am
not in a Chekhov play after all.
If you want to
find out if I made it to my 1000 month goal
in four months, write my agent. If he
doesn’t respond -- well, draw your own
conclusion. This is mine.
Kenneth Ring's New Book:
Waiting to Die:
A Near-Death Researcher's (Mostly Humorous)
Reflections on His Own Endgame
|