Did you know that each peaceful, natural death at age eighty-one is a tragedy without compare? Every day people, individuals-Americans, if that makes it And then, a brief almost-century later: drooling on some poor Mexican nursemaid in an Arizona hospice. But what ah our chil’ren? Lovely and fresh in their youth blind to mortality rolling around, Eunice Park–like, in the tall grass with their alabaster legs fawns, sweet fawns, all of them, gleaming in their dreamy plasticity, at one with the outwardly simple nature of their world.
“I’m gradually dying for my kids” would be more accurate. The phrase “I live for my kids,” for example, is tantamount to admitting that one will be dead shortly and that one’s life, for all practical purposes, is already over. The song’s next line, “Teach them well and let them lead the way,” encourages an adult’s relinquishing of selfhood in favor of future generations. They are our future until they too perish. The children are our future only in the most narrow, transitive sense.
I’m quoting here from “The Greatest Love of All,” by 1980s pop diva Whitney Houston, track nine of her eponymous first LP. We don’t die because our progeny lives on! The ritual passing of the DNA, Mama’s corkscrew curls, his granddaddy’s lower lip, ah buh-lieve thuh chil’ren ah our future. There’s more, isn’t there? There’s our legacy. When I beg the pilot of this rickety UnitedContinentalDeltamerican plane currently trembling its way across the Atlantic to turn around and head straight back to Rome and into Eunice Park’s fickle arms, that’s a journey. When I take the number 6 train to see my social worker, that’s a journey. Don’t let them tell you life’s a journey. Their lives, their entirety, will be marked by glossy marble headstones bearing false summations (“her star shone brightly,” “never to be forgotten,” “he liked jazz”), and then these too will be lost in a coastal flood or get hacked to pieces by some genetically modified future-turkey. Nothing of their personality will remain. Rome–New York Dearest Diary, Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die.
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