The Last Book, The Last Lecture, The Last Chapter: Lessons in How to Live

   
     In an essay in the New York Times called "My Own Life," neurologist Oliver Sacks announced to the world with characteristic bluntness that he was "face to face with dying." An eye tumor whose treatment nine years earlier had cost him the lost of one eye had metastasized. The 81-year-old best-selling author was counting his life in days and months, not years.

     Three months later Sacks published his Last Book: On the Move: A Life. In reviewing the book for The New York Review of Books, Jerome Groopman of the Harvard Medical School admitted that Sacks' revelation changed the way he read the autobiography:

    "Reading On the Move and knowing that Sacks is facing a terminal illness heightens certain parts of the book."

      Even the title of Sacks' autobiography -- On the Move -- resonated differently when you realized that this would be Sacks' Last Book.

      Readers sense that authors writing "somewhere towards the end," to use the phrase that nonagenarian Diana Athill chose for her very late-in-life memoir, have a unique perspective to share. They aren't wrong.

     Remember Randy Pausch? He was the computer science professor who was scheduled to give a routine end-of-the- school-year speech at Carnegie Mellon entitled "Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" when he was disagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer. Professors commonly call these talks "Last Lectures," but this time the label took on a more poignant meaning: It really was going to be the last lecture for 47-year-old Pausch. Suddenly phrases that he uttered, phrases that we might have heard before and even thought of as cliches -- "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think" -- took on a burning intensity. Pausch's Last Lecture, posted on the Internet, instantly went viral and was later published in book form.

    Those who measure their time in months -- either because of terminal illness or advanced age -- have a different take on what matters. They are no longer projecting far into the future. They are feeling the fierce urgency of now.

     In his New York Times essay, Sacks expressed that sense of exigency:  "I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can."

    Sacks said he took inspiration from the last words of philosopher David Hume who, upon learning of his terminal illness at age 65, wrote "My Own Life," a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776: 

    “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

     Life becomes more, not less, intense when we are aware of its shortening. What characterizes these Last Books and Last Lecture is not their focus on death, but their focus on life. With death in sight, life does not diminish but is augmented.  A life of striving to achieve some sort of recognition -- a job, a sale, a marriage proposal -- gives way to a life that concentrates on internal measures of success: "ardour in study...gaiety in company." No wonder the words of someone who is "somewhere towards the end" take on heightened meanings.

     I first wrote about Diana Athill and her memoir Somewhere Towards the End in 2013.  Back then I lauded her for her late blooming publishing successes: a memoir, chronicling her 50 years working as an editor, published at age 83; a second book about her English childhood published two year later, and, best of all, a National Book Critic Circle Award for Somewhere Towards the End, written when she was 91.

     "Success in old age, when things have stopped really mattering, has a frivolous sort of charm unlike anything one experiences in middle age," Athill said after receiving that award.

     In quoting Athill's reaction to all the attention she was receiving, I conveniently glossed over that phrase "when things have stopped really mattering." Now I realize that one of the "things that stopped really mattering" to Athill were all those pats on the back from others. Not that she didn't enjoy her late-in-life fame. I'm sure she did. But what really mattered to Athill ran far deeper than a search for celebrity.

      I should have been tipped off by Athill's choice of title. Calling her book Somewhere Towards the End reveals just how acutely aware she was that that memoir might be her Last Book. When facing such a formidable main event as death, success is a side show.

       Of course, even when we think death is in sight, we can never be certain just when that end will come. When best-selling author and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was told at age 40 that he had a deadly cancer with a median mortality of only eight months, he reasoned that the median is a halfway point. That meant that 50 percent of those with his cancer would die in eight months, but another 50 percent could live longer, even a lot longer. He was determined to be on the latter side of that statistic. Gould lived another 20 years before dying of a totally unrelated cancer at age 60.

     As for Athill, Somewhere Towards the End wasn't her Last Book after all. Now 98 and living in a retirement home with others who are 90 and older, she is still writing and publishing. Last year she came out with her sixth memoir with a title that tells us she's as surprised as anyone that she is still Alive, Alive Oh!  

     In that memoir, subtitled And Other Things That Matter, Athill evokes French philosopher Michel de Montaigne who suggested that we think about our deaths every day in order to get used to it as a natural part of life. When my grandmother reached her late nineties, one of my sisters complained that all she talked about was death. "Well," her wry husband pointed out, "it is her next big event."

     In Alive, Alive Oh!, Athill devotes the Last Chapter to her "next big event." Calling death not an "end of life" but a "part of life," she writes about her own death -- and the death of her fellow residents -- in a stark, unsentimental way:

     "Death is no longer something in the distance, but might well be encountered any time now. You might suppose that this would make it more alarming, but judging from what I now see around me, the opposite happens. Being within sight, it has become something for which one ought to prepare."

     Oliver Sacks, who died six months after his New York Times essay appeared, also talked about preparation and about focusing on things that matter in the months that he had left:

     "Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

     On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well.)"

     A good prescription for all our lives, don't you think?

 

   


 


   

DIANA ATHILL: "SUCCESS IN OLD AGE...A DELICIOUSLY SURPRISING TREAT"

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MEMOIRIST DIANA ATHILL: Age 95
 (She turns 96 on December 21

Now available in paperback

HER LATE-BLOOMING STORY: At age 83, Diana Athill published Stet, her reflections on more than 50 years working at Andre Deutsch Publishing in England, editing such literary giants as Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Jean Rhys, Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Atwood. In 2002, at age 85, she published Yesterday Morning, a memoir about her very English childhood. The memoir, however, that brought her international fame was published when she was 91 years old: Somewhere Towards the End. That devastatingly honest and wry rumination on growing old won her the Costa Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008. The next year Granta published Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill. In 2010 Athill was the subject of a BBC documentary, "Growing Old Disgracefully." Now living in a retirement home, the editor and writer still drives her car, writes essays for the Guardian and attends book festivals.

LATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: The Guardian listed her as one of 2013's Best Dressed-Over 50

ON GROWING OLD: “I think getting old very often is horrible, really. But if you’re lucky, if you keep your health, if your aches and pains are not too bad, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a perfectly agreeable life, in many ways, discovering new and nice things.”

NO ONE EVER SAID IT WOULD BE EASY:  “From the age of 22 to that of about 39 I knew myself to be a failure,” Athill wrote this summer in the Guardian’s “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure.”  Stunned after being rejected by the man she thought she was going to marry, Athill stumbled through her 20s and 30s with her sexual confidence in shatters. Then she discovered she could write. “It was the writing that really put an end to failure,” she says. Although success would allude her until her 70s, she continued to write: An Unavoidable Delay, a book of short stories, in 1962 at age 45; Instead of a Letter, a memoir in 1963 at age 46; Don't Look at Me Like That, a novel in 1967 at age 50; and two more memoirs -- After a Funeral and Make Believe -- in 1986 and 1993 at age 69 and age 75.   

WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER GIVE UP: “Success in old age, when things have stopped really mattering, has a frivolous sort of charm unlike anything one experiences in middle age,” says Athill. “It feels like a deliciously surprising treat. Perhaps as one advances into second childhood one recovers something of first childhood's appetite for treats. Whatever the nature of the feeling, it allows me to state that it is possible to recover from failure: to digest it, make use of it and forget it. Which is something to remember if you happen to be experiencing it.”

Fifty Shades of Grey for the Grey-Haired Crowd: Books About Sex, Love and Aging

    Here's a delicious story: Rejected for 20 years by the old, traditional publishing route, an older woman is hitting it big with a novel about sixty-something romance, thanks to the upcoming, new kid on the publishing block: the ebook.

Hilary Boyd in north London. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

    English journalist Hilary Boyd had published six non-fiction books on such subjects as pregnancy, step-parenting and depression, but she never gave up writing fiction. Finally, last year she published her first novel, the story of a romance between 60-somethings who meet in a park while the woman is looking after her grandchildren. Alas, Thursdays in the Park, didn't exactly fly off the shelves; it sold under 1,000 copies. But this year Boyd's publisher, the independent imprint Quercus, posted the novel on Amazon as an ebook and something surprising happened.

    As an ebook, Thursdays in the Park began selling like crazy, topping more than 100,000 copies. Now Boyd has sold translation rights to the novel, which is also available in paperback, in France, Sweden, Finland and Germany and English director and actor Charles Dance (he once played a Bond villain) wants to make a movie of the story. At 62, Boyd has a bestseller on her hands.

      Obviously, there's an untapped market for novels about middle-aged love among Kindle readers. "Old people falling in love and having passionate relationships is not a story that's had much exposure before, but I'm in no doubt that the market's out there," Boyd told the London Observer. 

       It's the same market that flocked to "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" and "Hope Spring."  It may even be the same audience that has been reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Why should the rules be any different for an older crowd? If you get the packaging right, sex obviously sells.

       

     The London Observer heralded Boyd's ebook success as a sign of a rise in gran-lit, but books addressing the subject of sex, love and aging are not really new. What is new is the packaging. As baby boomers get comfortable with using Kindles and Nooks, I suspect there will be more demand for ebooks -- both novels and memoirs -- that speak to the challenges that sex and love pose as we age. Meanwhile, here are some of my favorites that I read in old-fashioned book form: 

NOVELS

My Dream of You, by Nuala O'Faolain

On the eve of her 50th birthday Kathleen a writer living alone in a basement apartment in London, has all but given up on love. She returns to her native Ireland and researches a 150-year-old mystery about an infamous love affair and ends up finding her own unexpected path to love in the process.

Julie & Romeo, by Jeanne Ray

What would you do if your widowed mother or father began dating? The children of Julie and Romeo are not thrilled with that prospect in this light-hearted novel about steamy late-in-life romance. with a nod to the Bard, the trysting widow and widower hail from two bitterly feuding families who own the town's rival florist shops. But don't expect a tragic ending from Ray, who is the mother of novelist Ann Patchett. Age does have its privileges.

The Leisure Seeker, by Michael Zadoorian

John and Ella Robina have been together for more than 50 years. Now in their 80s, they both face serious illness. Ella has cancer; John has Alzheimer's. They decide to escape from their doctors and adult children and go off on a final adventure, running away from Detroit for a cross-country trip.

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Boy meets girl. Girl rejects boy. Boy waits fifty years to get his chance again. Marquez's classic novel begins with a comical death and ends with the long-delayed union of Fermina Daza and her old sweetheart, Florentino Ariza. The two chapters point to the unexpected twists life offers. But they also bookmark a tale that unexpectedly offered something that had been rare in literature: sensual scenes of late-in-life romance. "It is life more than death that has no limits," writes Marquez.

MEMOIRS

A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, by Jane Juska

The author ran a personal ad in the New York Review of Books: "Before I turn 67, I would like to have sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." She then wrote this refreshingly honest account of what happened next.

Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman, by Alice Steinbach.

Middle-aged and seeking adventure (but not too much), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steinbach ventures alone to Europe to let her hair down. She wants to experience life, not just observe it. This divorced mother of two grown son finds romance with a Japanese businessman in Paris, goes ballroom dancing in Oxford and almost gets mugged in Rome. "This is what I will have forever," she says on her last day. "The memory of this moment, of rain falling on Venice."

Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir, by Diana Athill

Long-time publisher Diana Athill in her 90s takes a hard look at growing old and concludes that its advantages outweigh its disadvantages in this funny, brutally honest chronicle of her own loves and long life.

The Virginia Monologues: Twenty Reasons Why Growing Old is Great, by Virginia Ironside (based on her stage play)

Ironside embraces her inner (and outer) oldster. She thinks growing ancient is a gain not a loss. So much the better if your memory is going. You can forget the bad times, like all the creepy men you slept with in the other sixties. She gives plenty of advice: Take lots of drugs, and not just those prescribed by your doctor. Talk about your various ailments ("I take so many fish oils I'm thinking of joining an aquarium"). Enjoy your grandchildren ("The reward for not killing your children.") As for sex, she's over it: "I have to admit that, at 65, I think I've had enough sex to last me a lifetime -- and I know I'm not the only one...I've found one can have so much better relationships now sex is out of the equation."

Post Scripts: A Writing Life After Eighty, by LaVerne Hammond

LaVerne Hammond (my mother) wrote this collection of columns and essays for senior section of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). Hammond sold her first piece to the newspaper when she was 86. Many of her columns address the subjects of love and old age and, yes, even sex. In one column she describes how she managed to keep the sexual fires burning in her own long marriage of 52 years. In another, after the death of her spouse, she offers advice on dating in your eighties and nineties. Hey, it really is never too late.