The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Knopf, 2009

David Shield's The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead is a strange animal: bits of memory - recollections of boyhood sports and reflections upon his father's late-life vigor - interspersed with statistical notations on the human body's journey from cradle to grave. The pieces are loosely connected, often ham-handedly thrown together with quotations on mortality sprinkled throughout. It's disjointed, but somehow the pieces of this odd book coalesce in the end to affect the reader with an appreciation of life's impermanence.

At seven years of age, our risk of dying doubles every eight years. So begins a laundry list of the effects of human aging. The Thing About Life is divided chronologically into chapters representing life's stages - Infancy, Adolescence, Adulthood and Middle Age, and Old Age and Death - each of which is peppered with these statistical tidbits that are fascinating even if somewhat depressing or of questionable veracity (source material for these factlets is not provided).

• IQ is highest between ages 18 and 25, at which point the brain begins to shrink.
• Strength and coordination peak at 19, stamina in your late 20s.
• Lung capacity decreases 1% each year between the ages of 20 and 60.
• Reaction time to noise slows 20% from age 20 to 60.
• Starting at 30 you lose 1/16" of height each year.
• At 40, white blood cells decline in their ability to fight disease.

The Thing About Life is largely a memoir and a paean to Shields' father, with whom he shares two great loves - writing and sports. It's not surprising then that the book is rife with short recollections of the author's high school basketball career. At first, these "Hoop Dreams" (i-ix) seem out of place, apropos of nothing, but it's not long before the pieces form a larger picture in which Shields stacks his own vitality against that of his father and finds himself lacking.

Shields' athletic career ended with a leg injury in his junior year of high school, and he currently suffers from back pain that keeps him well aware of his physical decline: "I go to sleep with a night guard jammed between my teeth, a Breathe Right strip stretched across my nose (to mitigate snoring), and a pillow tucked between my legs. I walk around with an ice pack stuck in one coat pocket and a baggie of ibuprofen in the other. I'm not exactly the king of the jungle."

In contrast, his father, age 97 at the book's publication, who Shields recalls doing roadside jumping jacks on long family car trips and adhering to an ascetic diet throughout his life, played tennis into his 80s and jogged daily into his early 90s, late-life vigor that the author finds baffling.

And because Shields spends a considerable part of the book mourning his own lost youth and grousing about his father's incomprehensible vivacity, it's natural (for this reader, anyway) to find the father a more likable character than the author. Ultimately however, it's not a popularity contest. In the end... well, the title says it all.

Arteriosclerosis, dementia, baldness - Shields rattles off the many ways in which the years strip us of our health, our strength, and our charm. To some, this all may seem morose, but given the proper attitudinal inclination, acceptance of one's own end downplays the drama of day-to-day stresses and struggles, puts them in perspective. For those so inclined, The Thing About Life is a bracing read.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.