The following is
Essay #6, What Hath Roth Wrought?, of Dr. Ring's new book,
Waiting to Die: A Near-Death Researcher's
(Mostly Humorous) Reflections on His Own
Endgame.
Philip Roth, who
wrote so fiercely about the torments of
aging and the calamity of approaching death,
has died. In the end it was congestive heart
failure that brought his long life to its
close. His wait is over.
I can only
wonder what his last days were like. I'd
like to think they weren't what he had so
long imagined them to be, and that he went
easy into death with a sense of relief if
not of hope. For as he often said, he had
none where death was concerned. For him,
death simply was extinction. The flickering
flame of the candle of life would be snuffed
out for good and after that -- no after, no
nothing, no more Phillip Roth.
In any event,
when I heard the news about Roth's death at
the age of 85 last year, it was natural for
me, as it was for millions of his readers,
to think about the man -- about his life and
work, and perhaps his legacy. What had Roth
wrought?
I was never a
big fan of Roth's, however. (I was always
more partial to his great rival, John
Updike.) Of course, I had read a number of
his books, beginning with his breakout
novella of 1959,
Goodbye Columbus, when I
was just a graduate student hoping to break
out in my own way. After Roth's death, I
heard an interview with him that had been
conducted about ten years earlier in which
he told a funny story about that book. He
took his parents aside to warn them that the
book would almost surely be controversial,
and possibly a bestseller, so they should be
prepared for attacks on their beloved son.
His mother said nothing at the time, but
years later Roth learned that afterward she
confided to her husband. "Oh, the poor boy.
He has delusions of grandeur. He's bound to
be disappointed."
And then about a
decade later, Roth fulfilled his early
promise by writing what is still his best
known novel,
Portnoy's Complaint. And over
the many years of his writing career, which
didn't end until 2012, he churned out many
books, mostly novels, and I read my share, I
suppose. Offhand, I can think of his
semi-autobiographical Facts (of course, many
of Roth's books are autobiographical in
nature),
The Human Stain, The Plot Against
America, and probably one or more of his
Nathan Zuckerman novels -- who can remember?
I also read a lot about Roth who was
naturally much written about. Especially
damning was the memoir by his second wife,
the actress
Claire Bloom, who had her trials
and grievances with Roth, a difficult and
cranky man who prized his solitude. Not a
good bet as a husband, and on that, in the
end, Bloom lost.
But the book of
his that is particularly germane here in
these essays about waiting to die is one
Roth wrote in 2006, when he was in his early
70s, after he had suffered a number of
painful health crises and had begun to
ponder what we all do if we live long enough
-- the horrors of old age and the terrifying
specter of death. I use this phrase
deliberately, not because I think of aging
and death in these ways, but because Roth
did.
The book I am
referring to is his novella,
Everyman, which
is his meditation on disease, aging,
diminishment, pain, loss, loneliness and
death. On these subjects, his view is bleak
and without hope or consolation. But before
we turn to the story that Roth tells in this
book in such a chilling way, it will be
helpful if we take a brief glance at what
Roth himself suffered during the course of
his long life.
Actually, since
I have not read a biography of Roth, I am
not conversant with all of his physical
woes, but
David Remnick, the editor of
The
New Yorker, and a good friend, in a brief
obituary gave us a quick summary:
"He lived to be
eighty-five, but he had little expectation
of making it much past seventy. Over the
years, there had been stretches of
depression, surgeries on his back and spine,
a quintuple bypass, and sixteen cardiac
stents, which must be some kind of American
League record." |
Claire Bloom also recounted
some of Roth's other illnesses and
surgeries, including occluded arteries and
an unsuccessful operation on his knee. After
that, he found himself in great pain,
suffered from insomnia and nightmares and
ultimately had a kind of crack-up, which
Bloom ascribed to his use of the drug,
Halcion, which was supposed to help him
sleep but clearly had the opposite and a
psychologically destabilizing effect. Of
course, Roth recovered in time. But it's
clear that over the span of his life, he was
no stranger to serious illnesses and many
surgeries.
All this
certainly colored the narrative line in
Everyman, which tells the story, in the
third person, of a nameless man (he is
"everyman") retrospectively after his death.
The book actually opens in a cemetery where
he is being buried and toward the end Roth
has him visiting his parents' grave in the
same cemetery.
The book simply
tells the story of this man's life from
childhood to the expiration of his life.
Talented as an artist, he winds up as an art
director in an advertising agency and is
quite successful in his career. He marries,
has two sons, but finds himself constricted
by the routines of marriage and drained by
frequent quarrels with his wife, so he
leaves them all behind and obtains a
divorce. Later, he meets another woman whom
he woos and wins, and they marry. After a
blissful month's vacation with her, he
becomes very ill and is in great pain from
what turns out to be a burst appendix, which
might have killed him were it not for its
discovery at the last moment. But he
recovers and lives a healthy life for over
twenty years until he has another serious
illness. This time it's his heart and it's
again life-threatening. He has to endure a
seven-hour surgery and undergoes a quintuple
bypass operation. By now, he's on his third
marriage, after having had a number of
affairs, and finding himself alienated from
his two boys. His third wife, a former
model, is useless and his only close
relationship is with his daughter, Nancy,
from his second marriage. He will have seven
more operations, usually heart-related,
before his life comes to an end.
In the book,
this man reflects on his life and, as he
ages and becomes increasingly preoccupied
with his own bodily decay and that of his
friends, he finds himself ruing many of the
choices he has made in his life. All the
pain he has caused his wives, the loss of
the affection and respect of his sons, his
pointless affairs. Increasingly, wearied by
disease, he becomes acutely lonely and
clings, almost desperately, to the only
person who has remained close to him, his
daughter.
Some passages
from the book will be helpful to illustrate
not just this man's thoughts about the
process of aging and the prospect of
incipient death, but also Roth's since he,
too, is the everyman of whom he writes.
When toward the
end of his life, he talks with several of
his work colleagues who have become ill with
serious diseases like those he has suffered,
he thinks:
"Yet what he'd
learned was nothing when measured against
the inevitable onslaught that is the end of
life. Had he been aware of the mortal
suffering of every man and woman he happened
to have known during all his years of
professional life, of each one's painful
story of regret and loss and stoicism, of
fear and panic and isolation and dread, had
he learned of every last thing they had
parted with that had once been vitally
theirs, and of how, systematically, they
were being destroyed, he would have
[realized that]... Old age isn't a battle; old
age is a massacre." |
And he comes to
see that he is in exactly the same condition
as his colleagues:
"Now it appeared
that like any number of the elderly, he was
in the process of becoming less and less and
would have to see his aimless days through
to the end as no more than he was -- the
aimless days and uncertain nights and the
impotently putting up with the physical
deterioration and terminal sadness and the
waiting and waiting for nothing." |
The man now
finds that his life has become pointless,
without meaning, and comments:
"All I've
been doing is doodling away the time." |
Roth has often
spoken of his disdain for religion and its
empty consolations, which he dismisses as
superstitious fantasies unworthy of any
intelligent and rational adult, and his
character in this book feels the same way:
"Religion was a
lie that he had recognized early in life,
and he found all religions offensive,
considered their superstitious folderol
meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the
complete unadultness -- the baby talk and
the righteousness and the sheep, the avid
believers. No hocus-pocus about death and
God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him.
There was only our bodies, born to live and
die on terms decided by the bodies that had
lived and died before us. If he could be
said to have located a philosophical niche
for himself, that was it." |
He sums it all
up in a tone of savage bitterness as one:
"... who put no stock in an afterlife and knew
without doubt that God was a fiction and
this was the only life he'd have." |
And this is how
he goes to his death. This is the death of
everyman.
It may surprise
you to learn that when I read this book,
there was much that I could identify with.
I, too, had left wives -- I had four -- and
had to leave two of my children behind after
my second marriage collapsed. I have also
spent a great deal of time (and wrote one
entire confessional book on the subject)
reflecting with considerable anguish on my
wayward love life and the pain that it had
brought to others. And like Roth's
character, there have certainly been times
in my life recently, during my "waiting to
die" period, so to speak, that I have found
myself aimless, seemingly just marking time.
Particularly when suffering from chronic and
painful conditions, I have also become
ruefully aware that I was in the midst of
mourning the person I used to be who had
already died.
Nevertheless,
there are many and important differences
between me and Roth's character. For one
thing, I've been lucky, very lucky, that so
far -- knock on silicon -- I have not had to
endure any serious illnesses or undergo any
of the kinds of surgeries that Roth or his
character did. For another, I have always
remained close to my children, even after
two them no longer lived with me, and am to
this day. But the most important difference
of course is my spiritual outlook on life,
which was permanently affected by my first
psychedelic experience when I was in my
mid-thirties and was further deepened by my
many years of working with near-death
experiencers.
As a result, my
view of death is exactly the opposite of
Roth's. He is one of those Jewish
intellectuals influenced by
Freud and the
tradition of psychoanalysis that was such a
pervasive element in the intellectual lives
of East Coast writers and artists who came
to maturity during the middle part of the
last century. I encountered many of them
during my years of working in Connecticut
and spending a lot of time in New York. For
them, it's the familiar symbol of the grim
reaper that represents death, a frightening
image indeed. "Life is grim, and then you
die." And after that, you disappear for
good.
But I, a
California Jew, who like Roth has no use for
Judaism or any other religion, nevertheless
find the teachings of
the Buddha far more
persuasive than those of Freud concerning
how to view illness, decay and mortality.
And of course, what has influenced me even
more is my many conversations with
near-death experiencers who have actually
crossed the barrier between life and death,
at least for a time, and who almost
universally aver with the greatest certitude
that there is indeed more to follow once
death occurs. For them and for me the real
symbol of death in our own time should be
"the Being of Light." For Roth death is
indeed a dead end. For those who have
actually glimpsed beyond the veil, it is
just the beginning of true life. For them,
when death is encountered, it is not
terrifying; instead it has the face of the
Beloved.
Roth, an
atheist, died in character, and for that we
can admire him. But how many of us would
really want to live as he did toward the end
of his life -- often shut up in his cabin
chained to his writing desk and striving to
hold the enemy, remorseless death, at bay as
long as possible? Even after his
"retirement" in 2012, he was seemingly
unmoored and lost for a time when faced with
the end of his career as an author:
"I had
reached the end. There was nothing more for
me to write about. I was fearful I'd have
nothing to do. I was terrified, in fact…." |
He did apparently manage to enjoy himself
afterward for a while, but I still wonder,
as I remarked at the outset, about the state
of his mind when his waiting was finally
over and he found himself face to face with
death.
I like to think
that maybe he was surprised at what he saw.
A necessary
postscript: Just because Roth was an almost
vehement atheist, I wouldn't want you to
suppose that I am implying this is the way
that most atheists live and approach death.
Far from it. You can be an atheist and go
gladly into death or at least without the
crippling terror that death had for Roth.
Think of David Hume, for example, who seemed
to greet death joyfully and with humor. No,
there is nothing about atheism per se that
should make death difficult. But having some
kind of spiritual perspective on life does
help, and this is precisely what Roth and
his everyman lacked. Fortunately, not all of
us are that everyman. Roth will leave his
legacy for those who are drawn to his view
of life -- and death. For my part, I choose
to leave it, period.
In any case, as
I've said, Roth's wait is over. I, on the
other hand, am still waiting to die. But I
am very far from being eager to approach my
terminus. I hope there's still plenty of
time before I shout "Can't wait!"
Kenneth Ring's New Book:
Waiting to Die:
A Near-Death Researcher's (Mostly Humorous)
Reflections on His Own Endgame
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