“Life has the name of life but in reality it is death,” writes Heraclitus. No Bronx boy, even one who has celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday, has enough chutzpah to argue with that. Yet having survived to so ripe an age, I find that when it comes to death, I prefer a more American voice, say, that of John Dewey, who didn’t spend much time thinking about death but who understood that experience was every bit as useful as philosophy in teaching a man how to face the sense of ending. Even Heraclitus must have heard the rumblings of memory as he approached the one indisputable reality of his life. For whether it comes at nine or ninety, death does not stamp any life a success or failure. Nor does death judge that life worthy or unworthy, good or bad. It simply pronounces it a life lived—and now ended.
Eighty-four years is a lot longer than I thought I was going to live when I first apprehended my own death as an actuality. I was eleven then, lying board-stiff in bed, in a large room of the small redbrick Julia Butterfield Memorial Hospital in Cold Spring, New York. Across from me lay another eleven-year-old boy, Jerry. I no longer remember Jerry’s surname. What I remember is that chance had seated us next to each other in July 1944 on a bus headed to a summer camp for working-class boys sponsored by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. That two-hour ride led to the discovery that we shared an avid passion for the Brooklyn Dodgers, which alone was enough to seal a friendship and make us eagerly ask to be placed in the same bunk. A fatal choice, as it turned out. Ten days later, Jerry lay choking to death in an oversized yellow balloon that the nurse called “an oxygen tent.” I lay across from him, aware of the prospect of my death for the first but not the last time.