Living the Good Life
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on October 26, 2022.
Apple+ streamed The Last Days of Ptolomy Grey last spring. It’s the story of an old Black guy with dementia holed up in a crammed apartment in a not-so-nice part of town, dependent on his nephew’s occasional visits to keep him functional. When that nephew dies – shot in the head, no suspects – a young girl takes refuge with him, cleans up the joint, and is witness to Ptolomy participating in an experimental treatment for dementia that will restore his cognitive functioning for a while: the scientific question under study is how and for how long. Long enough, it turns out (in the world of Hollywood), for Ptolomy to identify the murderer and revenge his nephew’s death, and address his childhood demons in order to locate and distribute his significant (and hitherto unsuspected) fortune with Bibical righteousness. And then he sinks again into dementia and dies a prolonged and lonely death, consigned to a geezers’ warehouse by his avaricious relatives, shackled in a cot, visited by no one save, once, by stealth, the young girl who supported him to regain his life, and whose life he has transformed through the magic of love and money. Not a happy story.
It reminds me of the book, Flowers for Algernon, written in 1966 by Daniel Keyes, later made into a movie called Charly. Charly is an illiterate boy with an IQ of 69, the butt of abuse by fellow workers and the boss in the bakery where he works. He is invited to participate as a human subject in a trial treatment that had spectacularly increased the intelligence of Algernon, a mouse. Charly takes the treatment, becomes a certified genius, and falls in love with his teacher, who falls in love with him, perhaps for the miracle he is. Then Algernon’s intelligence begins to fade, and Charly’s inevitable decline becomes clear. Also not a happy story.
But the theme is movie-worthy because it reflects our ongoing concern about how our cognitive functioning defines us. And, in an aging demography, how and by whom the gaps will be bridged as our brains age and change and become insufficient to the tasks at hand. Science to date, as for Charly and Ptolomy, offers only temporary reprieve. Covid may have undermined our confidence in pharmacology as a magic bullet for all that ails us. And if that’s so, we may open our minds to the lessons of Ptolomy and Charly, that human connection is what differentiates a living death from a lively death.
Neither movie treats us to a lively death, the kind where you’re fully alive until you’re fully dead. I expected, Hollywood being Hollywood, that Ptolomy would die by gunfire as he shoots his nephew’s murderer, going out in a blaze of glory. But no, his ending is protracted and ugly in the extreme, the worst of long term ‘care’. And we don’t know whether Charly’s teacher and the other members of the research team who became his friends when he was brilliant maintain their connection and affection when he is once again a moron. But both Ptolomy and Charly experienced the fullness of life, if but briefly, and convey the sense that, while it could have been better, it was good enough. Death isn’t a body in a grave; it’s a life not fully lived.
And that is a happy thought. We have limited control over our physical death, but considerably more about the attitude we bring to our life. As we become practiced at living life well, we are better prepared to figure out how to die well. We will become more comfortable with exercising the choices we now have, including limited rights to a medically assisted death, and to lobby rationally and reasonably for those rights to be extended and respected.
Rights always come ballasted by responsibilities. As the demography ages, we owe it to ourselves, individually and collectively, to learn how to live well and to die well, and to know the difference.
