Immortality has limits: Take a chance on death

“Oh, my gosh,” gasped my mother, “they’re burying people today.”

It was the Wednesday before Christmas, the Feast of the Nativity. I’d driven my mother to the Riverside National Cemetery, where we would place a small Christmas tree and a fresh red poinsettia on my father’s grave.

More relentless than rust, death takes no holidays.

Death delights in working 24/7, 365 days a year. Given the chance, it will take the ill, young or old, rich or poor. It isn’t choosy.

A few days after New Year’s, death spirited away a good woman named Rita, my sister’s sister-in-law. On what turned out to be the last day of her life, Rita and her husband Michael spent the day together buying her a new car. That evening, they went out for dinner to celebrate. Then during the night, as they slept, Rita died.

She was 50 years old. For her husband and children and family and friends, her death was a heartbreaking surprise. We don’t yet know what caused it, though that is the first thing anyone asks. Everyone says that by dying at 50, Rita was robbed.

She was robbed of many more good years with her husband, of graduations and weddings, of grandchildren she will never see. She was robbed of burying her mother who, at 90-something, I’m sure never expected to bury her daughter.

Rita died too young, as many do. But when it comes to death, we have no recourse to a wrongful termination suit. We can say -- whether to placate or console, someone always does -- God has his reasons. In grief, sometimes I think it’s hard to care.

While looking for sympathy cards to send to Rita’s husband and children, I was struck once again by how sketchy we like to keep our conversations about death.

Rhyming stanzas liken the loneliness after the death of a spouse to the irritation of grains of sand in our shoes. If greeting card poets are right, death, like the bogeyman who lived under our childhood bed, is only as scary as we imagine.

In the book “Without Feathers,” Freudianly sex- and death-obsessed comedian Woody Allen wrote, “I am not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” The idea is funny -- in that famously ironic Allen way -- only because the second clause of the sentence belies the first, not for Allen alone but for all of us.

Allen took a snipe at non-mortal immortality as well. “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying,” he said.

I believe Allen’s response to death is universal. We don’t want to die, but if we must, we want an afterlife that preserves our personhood -- our heart, our soul, our mind and, for those of us who have one, perhaps even our sense of humor.

There’s a story about my sister’s daughter. One morning over breakfast, before heading out to preschool, she asked her mother what happened to people when they died.

Her mother told her something like this: When people die they are buried in the ground and their bodies fall apart. They turn into something like fertilizer, which helps the trees and flowers grow.

Knowing my sister, I’m pretty sure she meant this to be a cheerful thought. But I’m just as sure it didn’t strike my niece that way. One night while I was visiting and tucking her into bed, she ran the story by me.

“Well,” I asked her after some silence, “what do you think about that?”

She pulled in her lower lip and bit it. She took a couple of audible breaths and raised one shoulder to her chin. Finally, she said, “I think I’d rather not do that.”

“I’d rather not either,” I told her, and smiled. And she smiled too.

When I read an article written by Steve Chapple titled, “Death. And How to Avoid It,” I thought of that evening again.

For most of human history, what we think and what we think we know about the nature of death and immortality were the province of mythologies and religions. But science has begun its own quest to secure human immortality.

There is now an Immortality Institute, whose mission is “to conquer the blight of involuntary death.” In his online biography, the institute’s chairman, Steve J. Klein, says, “The best way to deal with the terror of death and oblivion is to live forever.” From the institute’s website, www.imminst.org, you can download a free PDF version of a collection of essays titled “The Scientific Conquest of Death.”

Chapple’s engaging article on avoiding death was about the work of Richard Houghten and several other “biotech cowboys” on La Jolla’s ‘Science Mesa’” who are driven to cure our mortality by, say, growing “a human ear in the intestinal tissue of a mouse,” or -- yet to happen -- growing a human heart in a beaker.

It was a quote from Houghten, rendered in large red type, that both nailed my attention and took me back to the evening when I put my questioning niece to bed. “I tell my kids,” Chapple quoted Houghten, “‘Put me in the ground and plant a seed on top of my grave.’”

His point? Much like the point my sister offered her daughter. Chapple frames it like this: “We are but the dust of the stars, and all that jazz.” But in the end, Chapple finds, 59-year-old Houghten is no more reconciled to that than was my very young niece.

On the way to a ballgame at Qualcomm Stadium, Houghten questions him about his interviews with other biotech researchers. Have they found something he hasn’t? Do they know something he doesn’t know?

His curiosity, the writer soon realizes, isn’t about professional vanity. Houghten wants to know, Chapple writes, because “his clock is ticking.”

That scientists may soon grow human hearts in beakers is truly amazing. But until they can replace not just the human heart but also the heart of human darkness, I’ll take my chances with death, which stands, Scripture tells me, between this world and what I trust comes next: everlasting life with our creator in a world far better than this.20060202gzerqeke(LA)