Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Ten, Part One..

   Death's Been On My Mind Lately. By Dave Jaffe. Part One.




    There's two ways for an ageing progressive like myself to look at death. First off, death is an incredible equalizer and I'm ausually in favour of equality. No matter who you are you will die. So in that way death is incredibly progressive. On the other hand, death is the final injustice because you can't avoid it
     "Old age is a massacre," American novelist Philip Roth once said, and he was right. So many people I admired like Philip Roth for instance are now dead. So are many of my friends. Two of my favourite writers on the visual arts are now gone, namely John Berger and Linda Nochlin. "Who's next?" I ask myself. And the answer comes back, "Maybe I am." After all I'm 76 years old. I've been in hospital now three times in the past two years. In these operations surgeons scooped cancerous tumours out of my body enabling me to go on living.
     Soon I think I'll be gone, but not right now. Still, I believe I'll be gone in three years time or less. Death by the way can sweep anybody away any time. Ten centuries ago when Canada was a land of aboriginals most people died in Europe before the age of 40. Then came the scientific revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries.  Then came the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries.
     At first, people kept on dying early in life just as they always had. Yet then came new surgical procedures, new drugs and big public health improvements. All of this, lengthened people's lives quite a bit. Cholera, plagues, typhoid fever and other death causing infections vanished. Miracle drugs like streptomycin taken with other medicines vanquished tuberculosis which used to kill so many people. Think D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell. Penicillin got rid of other infections. Whooping cough and scarlet fever vanished. The vaccines of Salk and Sabin erased polio. All of this took place between 1870 and 1960.
     "People were really scared in the summer .That's when polio epidemics would come," One man who'd lived in Montreal recalled in the 1980's. By 1960, polio epidemics were a thing of the past. So were many other diseases. People lived longer than 30 years old, or 40 or often past 70.  Many people, especially women live into their late 80's. Yet death is still around especially in the poor countries of the world.
     In many poor nations thousands of poor children die before the age of five. And many adults in really poor places don't get to the age of 60. Then there's the casualties of adolescence and early adulthood in the rich countries. Rona was a young woman, still a teenager who died in a car crash. Robert was a hiker and a bit of a daredevil. He jumped off a cliff one summer afternoon and died in the waters below. Connor was an illegal drug user though his parents didn't know it. He died from a drug overdose when he was in his early 20's. Paul was a manic depressive. He committed suicide when he was in his late 30's. These are just some of the deaths of relatively young people that I remember. I know there are many others I can't recall.