Reading Atul Gawande in the New Yorker over the weekend and then starting Philip Roth's Everyman on my morning coffee breaks has made it more difficult than usual to forget about what is happening to us all--the long slide toward dissolution and oblivion. My sister, 47, was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and my mother is about a year removed from chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer. A few weeks ago my wife's uncle went to bed one night, no complaints, his evening constitutional completed, and never woke up: in the morning his wife discovered she had been sleeping with a corpse for around six hours. I think he was 62.
For years nothing seems to happen. Nevertheless at a zoomed-in level a highly unusual assortment of matter slips toward something less unusual. Eventually some visible disaster occurs and the whole complicated system implodes.
I remember an old letter to the editor in which the writer argued that Ted Kaczynski, the unabomber, should be sentenced to spend his days walking around with a ticking bomb on his back without being told when the inevitable explosion would occur. Okay, I thought, but what should be the penalty for his crimes?
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