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    You're Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story
    You're Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story
    You're Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story
    Ebook142 pages2 hours

    You're Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story

    By David Horowitz

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    About this ebook

    Continuing his acclaimed series of meditations on life and death, David Horowitz turns to the consolation that his marriage and family have brought him amid the trials of age and illness. You're Going to Be Dead One Day is a political warrior's reflection on the mysterious rejuvenating power of love, the bittersweet way in which our children reward us while also leaving us behind, and how kindnesses to others bring blessings home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRegnery
    Release dateJun 15, 2015
    ISBN9781621574330
    You're Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story
    Author

    David Horowitz

    DAVID HOROWITZ is a noted chronicler and opponent of the American Left, a conservative commentator, and a bestselling author. He is the founder and CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles and the author of Radical Son, The Black Book of the American Left, and The Enemy Within.

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      Book preview

      You're Going to Be Dead One Day - David Horowitz

      one

      May

      Igenerally have a soft spot for family occasions and warm weather, which is an obvious reason for my contentment today. Not only is the sun shining down on a brilliant spring morning, it is also Mother’s Day, and my wife, April, and her sisters have planned a small gathering at our house to celebrate. At this moment I am off by myself in a corner of the sitting room where the windows meet, contemplating how occasions like this inevitably bring bittersweet memories to the surface, and looking forward to them.

      Since it is still early, I have settled into a luxurious leather chair that my wife bought for me recently. The new chair is also elaborate with stainless steel rails and machinery that

      electronically tilts the user back and raises the legs to an optimal therapeutic point. It is equipped with a glass holder and a retractable desk that allows me to write with the least discomfort. The manufacturer calls my catbird seat The Perfect Chair, and from where I am perched I would not argue. Its price, if you were curious, has been set accordingly and would discourage many people from even considering the option. It certainly would have discouraged me if the decision had been mine. But it was a surprise from April on my release from Los Robles Hospital’s acute physical therapy unit, where I was laid up for two weeks for reasons I will divulge shortly. It is one of many gifts that bear the imprint of a wifely concern for my well-being, which is a healing balm in itself.

      Along with the chair, she has set up a new movable desk by my bed, and these two pieces of furniture are where I spend most of my time now, since I am no longer mobile. A little over a month ago, I went into the hospital for what I thought was a routine hip replacement, but while I was under the anesthetic the surgeon slipped up and damaged my sciatic nerve, leaving me with a paralyzed left foot and a reservoir of neuropathic pain. Until this mishap, like most people I took my limbs for granted and had no idea how a useless foot and damaged nerves could take a person down.

      My wife is understandably upset about my condition and pressing me to sue. I have contacted an attorney but am skeptical about securing any positive result. In the litigious environment of the medical profession, doctors have availed themselves of elaborate defenses that are difficult to breach. Only time will tell whether I will ever recover the use of my limb or whether the courts will deliver me a modicum of satisfaction.

      When I signed up for the operation, I had not the slightest inkling that a calamity like this might be awaiting me. I had undergone a similar procedure on my right hip ten years earlier, after which I was out of the hospital in a day, and functioning reasonably well within a few weeks. This encouraged me to follow my normal approach to problems: just get them out of the way and get back to work. But when I awoke from this procedure in my hospital bed, I knew immediately that something was very wrong. My foot was hanging lifeless from the ankle, a syndrome known as drop foot, and instead of my release papers the hospital had provided me with a morphine pump. I could not move my toes. I could not feel my toes, and barely the foot itself.

      My doctors have told me that my present condition is not hopeless and some sort of recovery is likely. But they remain evasive as to when this might materialize and what it might be like. Nerves apparently have their own schedule and manner of repair. Whether they will heal enough to restore what I once took for granted remains disconcertingly uncertain. Nonetheless, I have accepted the ambivalent prognoses and canceled engagements for the next several months, at not a little personal cost. Two of the speeches I was scheduled to give would have been before thousands of people and carried with them honorariums I now have plenty of use for. I have accepted this setback with as much philosophical attitude as I can muster, having found in the course of many lost battles that it is better not to fight the inevitable when it is staring you in the face.

      It is also wise to try to enjoy the life you have before the gates begin to close. In the years before sixty, I led a physically robust existence and never paid much attention to matters of health. But in 2001, as the country reeled under the attacks of 9/11, I was diagnosed with a prostate cancer and underwent a radical prostatectomy to remove it. I seem to have been battling significant ailments ever since. I don’t wish to exaggerate these trials, because until my present unfortunate case, I have managed each of the problems without too much disruption of my activities and accepted the new limits my body has laid on me.

      Entering this new world naturally prompts thoughts about last things. I have written three philosophical memoirs about the lessons to be drawn from our brief journeys on this earth, and this is undoubtedly the beginning of a fourth. I began them with a book called The End of Time, a title with dual meanings since the end of time can refer either to the purpose that we give to our lives or the purpose our limited allotment of time imparts to them. In this book, I also included observations on the utopian quest for a perfect world, which is a secular religion for many, and has been the focus of most of my thinking life. This quest is really an attempt to deny the permanence of injustice, of which death is the exemplary case.

      The second memoir, A Cracking of the Heart, was about the admirable life and untimely demise of my daughter Sarah. You do not really know death until you have lost someone you love, and lost her forever. Writing about my child was a way of salving my grief, and the book has been helpful to others dealing with irreparable loss. The third volume, A Point in Time, while slim like the others, is actually a summa of my life’s work. Its focus is again the social redeemers who want to escape the meaninglessness of life by pursuing the fantasy of a heaven on earth, while sewing the seeds of catastrophes along the way.

      While I am awaiting the family’s arrival, I can enjoy an interlude of undisturbed solitude in which to consider these matters. Of course I could fill my head with happier reflections, but I won’t. Thinking about our mortal condition, and the way it affects how we live in the here and now, remains as seductive to me as ever. It provides my old age with the frisson of youthful discovery and has been the inspiration for some of my most satisfying work. Others may suppose that so morbid a preoccupation on a bright spring morning could only be inspired by the fact that in a week I have a longstanding appointment to see my oncologist. But I can assure you this is not the case. After all, I have lived with the same cancer for thirteen of the most productive years of my life. And who isn’t facing a death sentence?

      Nonetheless, my reflections on mortality are disturbing to those like my wife who are immersed in the life around them and instinctively understand the utility of fresh air and sunshine to the human spirit. I appreciate and respect this attitude, which is why I choose to conduct my ruminations in a corner by myself.

      Family Matters

      Mother’s Day has not always been a tradition in the Horowitz family. As a reflex of his communist politics my father dismissed the occasion as a greeting card holiday designed to make profits for Hallmark. I was long influenced by his view until a Mother’s Day came along when April said we should buy a helium-filled party balloon shaped like a heart and send it to my mother Blanche with our prayers. The idea was pretty alien to me. My mother had been dead for twenty years, and the idea that we could communicate with her through a plastic balloon sent skyward seemed ridiculous. But the little ceremony April contrived and put her heart into brought tears to my eyes, because her thoughts for my mother were so sincere and put me in reverent mind of the woman who was once such a towering presence in my life.

      It is April’s family who will be joining us this morning. Her younger sister, Kim, is already here, and has been staying in the house since April’s accident (which I will come to shortly), taking only a few days off now and then to attend to her own household in Huntington Beach. This has been a great help in our family crisis, as Kim does the cleaning and cooking, and, equally important since we are both on medications, drives us to our respective doctor’s visits.

      April and Kim were the youngest pair in a brood of ten, but were separated twenty years ago when Kim and her husband, Jim, were forced to move to Indiana because of a work-related problem. On their return to California, they settled two hours down the coast and kept to themselves. It was only when April’s mishap occurred that the two were reunited and began to resurrect the tomfoolery of the times they had together when they were young.

      Now their laughter rings about the house, triggered more often than not by April’s manic impersonations and pranks. The two women are on the back porch attending to our yelping canines. When the dogs have finished their breakfast, they exit the kitchen door to romp about the sprawling lawn at the back of our house. There are four Chihuahuas and two Boxers in the menagerie. One of the Boxers, named Max, belongs to Kim, the other, named Merry, to us.

      We will not be a large group this Mother’s Day, but sufficiently entwined to make the occasion work. April’s older sister Cherri will be driving up from West Covina with her husband, Wendell, a Vietnam veteran. Kim’s husband is coming up from the beach, while their son, Ryan, will arrive separately to complete the gathering.

      Unanswered Questions

      My solitude has begun at the far end of the house from the women’s laughter and the dogs’ happy cries, and I am deep into my head and the dark thoughts that preoccupy me. A stream of light pouring through the living room windows has brightened this pleasant interval of not so pleasant concerns, making them even more incongruous. But press on I will.

      All questions about death begin with observations that only a religious faith can answer. I have no such faith, and therefore my posing of these questions is without a hope that life eternal awaits us where all will become clear. Consequently, I am left to grapple with these stark facts: there is no one to tell you when you will be gone from this life, and no one to tell you why you are here and waiting to be gone in the first place; and there is no one to tell you what happens then—whether you will be nothing at all with every memory of you vanished. These questions at the heart of our existence are formidable loose ends of our earthly stay that threaten to undermine it at every turn. It is remarkable to consider that even though they are central to our lives, we are no closer to answering them now than when Pythagoras discovered that musical notes could be translated into mathematical equations.

      The dialogue that goes on in my head in response to our dilemma is the product of a lifelong conviction that we should strive to understand the existence into which we have been cast and not merely endure it as we would a case of drop foot or a dose of bad weather. Is there something peculiar about this? Or is the subject averted because it might ruin our day?

      A Hidden God

      At seventy-five I have reached what would once have seemed to me a formidable age; but it hardly feels that way now that I am here. Having begun to understand how the game is played, I am

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