David Shields - The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Tolstoy, in his late 70s, said, “As I was at five, so I am now.” St. Ignatius Loyola said, “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” Wordsworth wrote, “The Child is father of the Man.” Is the father the father of the man as well? I suppose he must be.

Aging begins immediately after the actuarial prime of life. In the United States and in most other developed countries, the actuarial prime of life is age 7. After you turn 7, your risk of dying doubles every eight years.

By the time you’re 5, your head has attained 90 percent of its mature size. By age 7, your brain reaches 90 percent of its maximum weight; by 9, 95 percent; during adolescence, 100 percent. Two percent of total body weight and 60 percent fat, the brain receives 20 percent of the blood coming from the heart and consumes 20 percent of all the oxygen in the body.

Between ages 5 and 10, your kidneys double in size to keep up with the increased metabolic wastes of the body. At ages 6 and 7, lymphoid tissues, which produce antibodies, reach a peak in size.

A toddler’s stomach is the shape of a cow’s horn; at 9, it’s the shape of a fish hook; at 12, it’s the shape of a bagpipe and has achieved adult functional maturity.

The average duration of a 6-to 10-year-old’s activity is six seconds for low-intensity activities and three seconds for high-intensity activities. “At ten,” Schopenhauer said, “Mercury is in the ascendant; at that age, a youth, like this planet, is characterized by extreme mobility within a narrow sphere, where trifles have a great effect upon him.” This is a perfect description of my father as he is and as he always has been: a perpetual 10-year-old.

Growth from birth to adolescence occurs in two distinct patterns: the first, from birth to 2 years, is one of rapid but decelerating growth; the second, from 2 years to the onset of puberty, is one of more consistent annual increments. An average 1-year-old is 30 inches tall, a 2-year-old is 35 inches, a 4-year-old is 40 inches, and an 8-year-old is 50 inches. During the elementary school years, children’s growth slows to about two inches a year. Your height relative to your peers usually doesn’t change much after age 6, and the proportions of your weight tend to remain the same as well.

Weight increase follows a similar curve. An infant doubles his or her birth weight by 5 months, triples it by 1 year, and quadruples it by 2 years. Between ages 2 and 5, you gain about the same amount of weight each year: four to five pounds. Between ages 6 and 10, your growth levels off—a lull between the rapid growth of early childhood and prepubescence. During these years, you gain about five to seven pounds per year.

Between ages 6 and 11 your head appears to enlarge, and your facial features exhibit significant changes, because of the growth of your facial bones. Your face literally grows away or out from its skull.

By age 5, the heart has quadrupled its birth size. At age 9, it’s six times its birth weight, and by puberty it’s almost ten times its birth weight. As the heart grows, it assumes a more vertical position within the thoracic cavity. The diaphragm descends, allowing more room for both cardiac action and respiratory expansion.

When you’re born, taste buds cover your mouth, with flavor sensors on the roof of your mouth, your throat, and the lateral surface of your tongue—which is why most very young children don’t like spicy food. The entire top of their oval cavity is covered with taste buds; for young children, tasting Tabasco sauce is an entirely different experience than it is for an adult. By the time you’re 10, most of these extra taste buds are gone.

The ability to exactly duplicate foreign sounds disappears after age 12.

Two to four years before puberty, most children have already attained 75 to 80 percent of their adult height and 50 percent of their adult weight. Just before the onset of puberty, the shaft and ends of your “long bones” (femur, tibia, fibula) fuse: the maturation of the skeletal system and that of the reproductive system are perfectly synchronized. What fearful symmetry to our mortal frame.

Nobody knows what causes puberty to begin.

Every once in a while, an egg cell becomes activated while it’s still in the ovary and starts to develop all on its own. The result, in mammals, is a teratoma. (The sperm-forming cells of the testis also produce teratomas on occasion.) The egg divides and begins the early stages of embryogenesis seemingly normally, but it fails to complete the proper developmental sequence. The embryo forms a shapeless mass of cells containing a variety of different cell types and partly formed organs: bones, skin, bits of glands, and even hair.

A teratoma can develop into a teratocarcinoma, a life-threatening cancer that will, when transplanted—in a lab experiment—from animal to animal of the same genetic strain, grow without limit until it kills its host. However, if some cells are taken from the teratocarcinoma of, for example, a mouse, and if these cancerous cells are then injected into an early-stage mouse embryo, the resulting animal will be entirely normal: the teratocarcinoma cells will be tamed by the developmental signals being produced in the early-stage embryo.

In other words, cancer cells can behave very much like the cells of an early embryo. Many of the genes responsible for cancer late in life are intimately involved in the regulation of cell growth and differentiation early in life. The genes that have such devastating effects late in life when expressed in diseases such as Alzheimer’s seem to be identical to their early life form, when they serve a useful function. In a teratocarcinoma, the germ cells become a voracious parasite of the body. The balance is lost between the goals of the body (preserving health and life) and the goals of the germ cells (reproduction).

For every cell, there’s a time to live and a time to die. Cells can die by injury or by suicide. The pattern of events in death by suicide is so orderly that the process is often called “programmed cell death,” which destroys cells that represent a threat to the integrity of the organism—for instance, cells infected with viruses, cells with DNA damage, or cancer cells. Dylan Thomas wrote (I love this line and my father abhors it),

As members of the Borel Middle School Bobcats, we worked out in a tiny gym with loose buckets and slippery linoleum and butcher-paper posters exhorting us toward conquest. I remember late practices full of wind sprints and tipping drills. One day the coach said, “Okay, gang, let me show you how we’re gonna run picks for Dave.” My friends ran around the court, passing, cutting, and screening for me. All for me. Set-plays for me to shoot from the top of the circle or the left corner—my favorite spots. It felt like the whole world was weaving to protect me, then release me.

That summer, my father had been fired from his job as publicity director for the Jewish Welfare Federation and accepted a much lower-paying job as director of the poverty program of San Mateo County. He sat in a one-room office without air-conditioning and called grocery stores, wanting to know why they didn’t honor food stamps; called restaurants, asking if, as the signs in the windows proclaimed, they were indeed equal opportunity employers. Sometimes, on weekends, he flew to Sacramento or Washington to request more money for his program. Watts rioted; Detroit burned. His constituents worshipped him. He said, “Please. I’m just doing my job.” They called him the Great White Hope and invited him to barbecues, weddings, softball games. At the softball games he outplayed everybody. The salary was $7,500 a year, but he was happy. The ghetto was his.