Longtime National Post columnist Robert Fulford passed away on Tuesday at 92, after a long life well-lived. This is an excerpt from his last book, an essay in which he contemplated, among other things, death.
Sad and unsettling news arrived by phone early on the morning of Dec. 2, 1966: Ralph Allen, one of the best journalists of his time, a hero for me when I was a teenager and later a model of excellence in my profession, had died unexpectedly, at age 53. The call was a request that I write about him for the Toronto Star, where I worked for eight years in the 1960s and where Allen was managing editor at his death.
I took a long breath and let it out slowly. Fifty-three! That was outrageous. Those of us who admired his work and benefited from his kindness were bitterly disappointed, believing we were entitled to enjoy him for another 20 years. Maybe, with luck, more.
Still, I had another reaction, perhaps surprising, at almost the same moment. I was glad to have the chance to write an obituary tribute to him. I wasn’t even intimidated by the fact that the piece had to be produced in the next two hours. In fact, I remember experiencing a kind of pleasure as I wrote it.
Writing for me usually involves pleasure, always shaded by performance anxiety, but in those ancient days obituaries offered unique satisfaction.
This might be classified as a minor perversity, perhaps what the French call a déformation professionnelle (so much more dignified than “mental conditioning caused by one’s job”), but for some reason writing an obituary of a notable person seemed to me, for many years, a desirable assignment.
Mastering this minor journalistic art, the printed gesture of farewell, seemed important to me. And I tended to believe that no one did it better, provided the subject was someone I had thought about, ideally over a long time.
When I was writing for the Globe and Mail in the 1990s an editor, noting the willingness with which I took on the Harold Town and Northrop Frye obits, jokingly described me as “the angel of death.”
But those were two people whose lives, long familiar to me, deserved whatever elegance I could offer them.
At various times, in various publications, I wrote a final salute (usually one of many final salutes) to Ernest Hemingway and A.Y. Jackson, Lionel Trilling and George Grant, Adlai Stevenson and Roland Barthes. It grew into my form of mourning, my way of carving a small monument. Doing it right became crucial.
I wrote also about a few people close to me, in particular two close friends who were also distinguished journalists of my own generation, Barbara Frum and Peter Gzowski. I cried over them, then and later, and miss them still. Yet I thought it important to write about them. When it was over, I was glad I did. Glenn Gould, the lovable genius whose boyhood I shared, evoked a different kind of mourning.
At age 50 I found myself trying to recall the childhood I had always classified as boring and was only beginning to appreciate for its good qualities.
People often say they begin to feel old the first time they realize that policemen look young. Later they have the same uncomfortable feelings about aging when they encounter increasingly juvenile-looking doctors, dentists, bank clerks, and prime ministers.
I’ve been able, so far as I know, to keep those observations in check, as minor amusements. My own serious proof of age, the clear and brutal sign that my years were affecting me emotionally as well as physically, was the slow realization that the obituary, as a form of literary expression, was losing its charm.
I’ve never stopped writing obits and may write another of them tomorrow. It’s often a duty, to one’s editors or to posterity or to both. But at some point, perhaps between Billy Wilder’s death in 2002 and Marlon Brando’s in 2004, it became clear that my enthusiasm was waning.
What could that mean? Was it possible that death, which I had decided long ago to regard with insouciance as no more than the final (though often bungled) act in the human comedy, was having its way, conducting a sneak attack on my unconscious? Was I letting the death of someone else, the ending of his or her story, cast a shadow over my own life?
In 2004, some months before Brando’s death (though no connection is exactly provable) my heart developed an atrial flutter. This has on three occasions required cardioversion, a mild electric shock that dramatically lifts me an inch or so off the hospital bed but serves as a sharp warning to my atria that they are to behave. Miraculously, they obey.
Then, three years ago, I had a stroke. It was a “minor” stroke even if it seemed relatively major to the patient and his family. In the end I more or less dodged the bullet, thanks to timely drilling by professional therapists and my zealous and therapy-talented wife. After six weeks of intense fatigue, I recovered, with only a few pieces of evidence left at the scene to prove that something had happened.
My voice was permanently changed from fairly sharp and emphatic to faint, woolly, and husky. I lost some conversational fluency and some of my automatic word-finding ability. I occasionally misplaced words. In conversation I still sometimes stumble about, searching, while a word I need eludes me, even a word like “treadmill.” Playing Balderdash with friends, I couldn’t find “abacus,” no matter how hard I knitted my brow. Tragically, I lost the game. But my memory of events remained true, so far as I can determine.
It seems clear that, one way and another, the stroke altered my feelings about age. Cicero tells us that old age, aside from its three most obvious ill effects (it limits what we can do, weakens our bodies, and spoils many forms of enjoyment), has a fourth way of making us unhappy – “It stands not far from death.” That seems to be the problem.
I suppose I should state my age. How old am I? I share with most middle-aged people the ability to say where I was when John Kennedy was shot (in a restaurant called L’Europe on Bloor Street West in Toronto, lunching with my friend and Maclean’s magazine colleague, Jack Batten). But that’s just the beginning. Even if we limit ourselves to public affairs and set aside for another time the births of my four offspring, I can tunnel surprisingly deep into my memories of notable events.
I remember exactly what I felt in 1957 when, at an election-night party with other journalists, I realized that John Diefenbaker and the Conservatives were bringing down Louis St. Laurent’s Liberal government, which till then seemed likely to be eternal. (I felt deep revulsion and horror, and when Diefenbaker became prime minister he did everything possible to justify my worst forebodings.) I know within a couple of blocks the location of the restaurant where, taking a break from my 1945 summer job as a Canadian Pacific Telegraphs bicycle courier, I ate lunch while reading in the Toronto Star that the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I celebrated V-J Day, as I had celebrated V-E Day the previous spring, by standing in a crowd and looking at other people standing in the crowd.
In June 1944, waiting behind Williamson Road Public School for the start of the class day, I discussed with a friend the landing of the Allied troops on the beach in Normandy. I can’t recall hearing George VI give his address to the world in 1939, the one that provides the climax for The King’s Speech, but I remember the adults in our house talking about how it demonstrated that he had improved his speaking ability. I was three weeks short of my fourth birthday when George V died, in 1936, but an aural memory stays with me: for some reason I didn’t understand, the radio played unusual music (hymns, presumably) all day long.
Put it another way: I am so old that I have protégés who are hasbeens. It is unavoidable that if one is born in February 1932, one had one’s 79th birthday this past winter and on that day realized that one was just 365 days away from being an octogenarian. Not to put too fine a point on it, what we have here is an old person. I refuse to retire (it is said to be a major cause of death) and insist I will continue to practice journalism as long as there are journals (or, if necessary, blogs) that will carry my words. A student journalist at Ryerson University e-mailed me with a query: “How long do you plan to write for the National Post ?” I answered: “Till they tell me to stop.”
This exchange reminded me that, at some moment, the status of every senior citizen changes. If the world hasn’t heard of someone for a while, the world assumes he or she is dead. Worse, they may know you are very much alive and wonder why. Here we approach a fundamental contradiction in the desires and assumptions of our society. We agree to do all that’s humanly possible to keep everyone alive indefinitely, but we can’t think what they should do with themselves.
Among those who have picked up a fragment of anthropology there’s a feeling, expressed only obliquely, that there is a time when the decent thing is to move yourself to a convenient ice floe.
It’s embarrassing to realize that personal longevity plays a major role in my thoughts. It now surpasses public debt, the future of the Liberal Party, and even the question of paying schoolteachers according to merit. Scanning the death notices, I look first at the age of the newly dead, obviously reflecting a form of competition I would have considered crass and selfish only a decade ago. This indicates I want more years.
But why? Morley Callaghan, at my age, was clearly not yearning for more. At his 80th birthday party, in 1983, a young woman sitting at his table said she would like to be 80. “No,” he said, “you want to live to 80, you don’t want to be 80.” I have known old people, quite a few of them, who were anxious to go.
David Murdock, an American billionaire who is now a robust 87, holds the opposite view. According to a recent story in the New York Times, he plans to live to 125 and believes that his fanatically careful eating habits (his smoothies contain pulverized banana peels and ground-up orange rinds) will take him to this unusual plateau. A journalist interviewing him wanted to know why he was so committed to this odds-defying project. It appears that he wants to do it to prove it can be done. He hopes his record-breaking life will demonstrate to the world the benefits of his theories about nutrition.
That’s perhaps an egotistical idea, but it’s not ignoble. What’s my excuse? Reading about Murdock, I wondered why, as my end draws inexorably nearer, I do pretty well all I can to stretch my life.
With the support of the federal and provincial governments, I have enough doctors looking after me to staff a small hospital. I think of them as my medical team, an elite coterie of first-class professionals, though most of them have never met the others. They are united mainly by their joint appearances in my appointment book, the making of medical appointments having become one of my main preoccupations.
What is the purpose of all this costly effort? We all believe – or, rather, say we believe – in the sacredness of human life; it follows that individuals naturally think their own lives, being sacred, should be extended as far as possible. But this explanation won’t survive two minutes of serious thought.
Our civilization thinks nothing of driving cars faster than anyone could justify on grounds of need, knowing that every day on our continent speed kills people. “Respect for life” is a slogan, nothing else.
My reason for wanting more years is curiosity, the reigning impulse of my life, the source of my happiness in work and in private life. In the 1960s a woman in my social and professional circle died suddenly, at the age of 34. We were all devastated. A friend of hers, and mine, said: “I hope she didn’t know she was dying. She would have been so angry, not to be able to know what happened to all of us. Not ever knowing how it all came out.”
That was said in the haste of grief and of course made no sense. No one ever knows how things come out because things don’t stop. If we imagine that there are various billboards recording history in terms of virtue or wealth or evil, we must also imagine that their numbers never stop changing. But this doesn’t diminish curiosity. I accept the fact that I won’t know what my now five-year-old grandson will study in university, but I’m anxious to see more of his boyhood. I want to follow the life journeys of my wife and my four children; every one of them has surprised and delighted me, and naturally I want more. The same goes for my siblings, nieces, nephews, and friends.
They are puzzles, to some extent, puzzles I’ll never solve but want, so far as I can, to consider further.
I came rather late to the digitalized world, around 1992, and of course (like all geezers) managed it only with the help of offspring.
But once I arrived there I found its pleasures abundant. It brought into my life the two great inventions of the 21st century. One is my iPod, which holds hundreds of jazz performances, symphonies, lectures, and broadcasts in a plastic wafer that fits in my shirt pocket. The other is my Kindle, which contains scores of books in a package no bigger than a medium-sized paperback. As I said in a letter to one of my daughters recently – if I had died 10 years ago, and missed both iPod and Kindle, I would have been seriously annoyed.
In certain ways communications technology has made this a more amusing world than I ever expected to know. On the other hand, the “real world” remains appalling. Cruelty and chaos are everywhere.
Yesterday my beautiful little iPod read me the BBC news as I walked to my first medical appointment of the day, the one where I give a sample of my blood and a lab determines whether my drugs have thinned it sufficiently to prevent (all other functions going well) another stroke. What the BBC told me yesterday, on this occasion about chaos and cruelty in the Middle East and Africa, sadly confirmed the one truth I know about how it all comes out.
Once more, as W.H. Auden wrote in his most famous poem, “our world in stupor lies, beleaguered by negation and despair.” That was in “September 1, 1939.” Horrible as it seems, despite all our efforts, the tone of human life, on much of the planet, is as it was 72 years ago. What, then, can we do as we live out our lives? Follow Auden and, so far as we are able, “Show an affirming flame.”
A Life in Paragraphs: Essays is still available from fine bookstores and at Amazon.ca. Published by Optimum Publishing International.