I remember as a kid hearing about men dying in their 40s. I never thought of that as old. My mother had me at 43, after all. Nine days later she celebrated her 44th birthday, thrilled, no doubt, to be changing the diapers of her early birthday present.
This week I was reading two books that happen to describe the deaths of two men in their 40s.
In his memoir Insomniac City Bill Hayes writes about his partner of sixteen years, Steve, dying beside him in bed, and not peacefully:
His death had been as swift as it was inexplicable: He had been only forty-three and remarkably fit, with no history of heart problems. At first, I thought he was having a nightmare, but he was thrashing so violently and unable to speak. I called 911, began CPR, EMTs came. I remember how they kept asking me if we’d been doing drugs; the question seemed absurd; Steve was so clean-living, so wholesome really, he never even drank a beer. They got him to an ER just a few blocks away. But by then he was gone.
In The Grand Piano, a collection of autobiographical essays by poets associated with the Language Movement, Carla Harryman writes about the theater director Philip Horvitz:
[At] forty-five years old … his heart stopped beating while he was on a plane between New York and San Francisco, where he was headed to attend his brother Bill’s wedding in Sonoma County. Because of heart trouble, the San Francisco engagement [of Harryman’s Memory Play] following the wedding would have been his first solo performance in many years.
My father had a heart attack at 49*. I am well past 40, and 50 is rather behind me as well. We’re getting to those years where the risks to life arise at least as often in the body as through misadventure. All my life I’ve tried to eat well. I walk regularly; I do yoga. Yet last year during an angiogram I was diagnosed with a blocked artery — 80 to 90% blocked. I don’t know how close a heart attack was lurking. In lieu of major heart bypass surgery the doctor inserted a stent. The stent re-widens the artery and keeps it propped open. I have since learned I have friends who have multiple stents. The stent has reset my capacities by a few years — as far as my subjective experience is concerned. No more angina symptoms. Those were, in case you're interested, a gripping tension in my upper back, which would subside when I stopped walking uphill (I never had any problem walking downhill!), and bad nighttime leg cramps, which made my legs ache deep inside and jerk and twitch. Although I still get mild body aches, there’s really no comparison.
Odd to think one has made it past the years one could get credit for dying early.
sources:
Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and me
by Bill Hayes
2017. Bloomsbury, New York
The Grand Piano, part 3
an experiment in collective autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980
by Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson, Ted Pearson
2007. Mode A / This Press, Bloomfield Township, MI
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* My sister, who has a clearer memory for these things, corrects my original guess, which was 50.
