The recent death of Ernie Banks, at age 83, got me thinking about life spans: what we hope for, what we’ll accept. Banks lived a famously full life: he was scouted by Cool Papa Bell*; he hit 512 home runs; he was a first-ballot Hall of Famer; he had a great laugh. Offer the young Ernie Banks that magnificent future, along with eight decades and change, and he surely takes it, right? But then he’s 83—and it’s last week, let’s say—and he thinks (maybe), I need more time.
Because time is the one thing we can never have enough of. We spend all of it; time-wise, we die broke. Would Keats have traded an ode or two for a few more years? I’m guessing he would have. It’s easy for us to say that “To Autumn” is worth any number of nights in Fanny Brawne’s arms. Harder for John or Fanny to say it.
Keats died at 25; Shelley at 29; Emily Brontë and Sylvia Plath at 30; Paul Laurence Dunbar at 33; García Lorca at 37; Flannery O’Connor at 39; Kafka at 40; Baudelaire and David Foster Wallace at 46; Jack Kerouac at 47. The causes vary: tuberculosis, drowning, suicide. I’ll be 48 in less than a week.
In 2008, when I was teaching in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program and had a book coming out in the fall, I spent several days preparing students for a class visit from Edward Hirsch. We read some of Hirsch’s mind-bending poems; we studied his bio. A student named José and I did some quick math and figured out that Hirsch’s first book was published when he was 31.
José: “How old are you?”
Me: “Forty-one.”
José: “And this is your first book?”
Me: “Uh-huh.”
José: “You better pick up the pace.”
Hirsch recently wrote a book I imagine he would give almost anything not to have had to write.
Lyman Bostock was murdered in his hometown of Gary, Indiana, at age 27. Lou Gehrig died, at age 37, of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Frank O’Hara was run down by a beach buggy at age 40. You never, ever know. Ogden Nash lived a semi-long life (68: you might accept this span, at least in your younger years, in exchange for the promise of Nash’s achievement), but then he ate some bad coleslaw and that was that. In “Crossing the Border,” Nash writes:
Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendants
Outnumber your friends.
Ring Lardner covered Chicago sports from 1913-1919—several decades before Ernie Banks arrived at Wrigley. He wrote about the White Sox and the Black Sox, and he wrote what’s perhaps my favorite sentence ever written in English: “Shut up, he explained.” Oh, to have written that sentence! He died at 48.
* Ernie Banks is a fantastic name. Cool Papa Bell is such a fantastic name that fantastic doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s above and beyond fantastic. Sur-fantastic, maybe.