When I was nineteen years old I had a head on collision in an automobile accident that almost ended my life.  The cliché that your life flashes before your eyes before you die is true or at least it’s true that it happens when you think you’re going to die.  In the six seconds between realizing I was going to crash at eighty miles an hour and the actual impact all the stages of accepting death went through my mind.  The last thing I remember thinking was "I’m nineteen and I didn’t get to do anything."   I had accepted this fact though and even though I was completely sure I was going to die in that moment I felt as if I was ready for it.

          I’ve talked to other people who have had "close calls" like I had and we share the same feelings and thoughts no matter how different we are as individuals or how different the circumstances of our near demise have been.  Every day of my life now feels like a gift which I might have been denied.  At the same time I think about the fact that I’ll face that moment for real one day and I wonder if I’ll feel as prepared for the inevitable as I had that one day as a teenager.  The idea of death is a hard thing for human beings to wrap their heads completely around.  It is usually considered distasteful to talk about death in a serious way and most of us try like hell not to think about it.  At the same time it is the only thing that bonds us all.  Death is humankind’s greatest collective experience.

         That is what the new book The Thing about Life is One Day You’ll Be Dead is about.  The author David Shields is fifty-one years old and has just realized that he has entered "the youth of old age."  His fourteen year old daughter is becoming a woman and is able to do the things that he now can not due to back problems and other ailments.  His ninety-seven year old father seems more alive at his advanced age than most people at any age and remains optimistic and dedicated to longevity even though it’s becoming more obvious with each month and year that he doesn’t have much time left. 

         The book tells a combination of stories about both father and son and it also details the life cycle from the womb to the grave.  Along the way we are treated to a wide variety of fascinating statistics about the way we live, how we age and finally about the way we die.  As a boy the older Shields had a close call when he stepped on an electrified third rail while crossing railroad tracks.  Shields the younger, wonders about the fact that if things had happened slightly differently he never would have existed at all.  Would it be better never to have existed at all rather than to know consciousness only to give way to death?  

         Despite the subject matter Shields, an atheist, never gets bogged down in metaphysical or religious discussions on death.  This is good most of the time but it can be maddening.  He offhandedly mentions that churchgoers live longer than the nonreligious.  He even cites a study where hospital patients that had people praying for them lived longer than those without prayer.  He doesn’t include where this study comes form though immediately making one question its validity.  At the beginning of one chapter he states, "Despite popular belief the body doesn’t loose twenty-one grams upon death."  Then he refuses to elaborate.  Mary Roach spends a whole chapter on this meme in her excellent book ’Spook: Science Investigates the Afterlife’. 

        But this isn’t that kind of book anyway.  Even while pummeling us with facts and figures about death, telling us the age in which famous people have passed on and featuring quotes from great minds on the most important of all subjects death and aging, the book is essentially about the love of life and most specifically about his father’s seemingly inexhaustible love of life.  This is both where the real heart of the book is and also where it cuts the deepest.

         "I want my father to live forever and I want him to die tomorrow," Shields writes.  "’Accept death,’ I tell him.  ’Accept life is his natural reply.’    The most remarkable thing about his book is how Shields so perfectly captures that tug of war constantly going on in his head.  While he loves his father and wants him to be around he finds the older he becomes the more his father represents the dread of his own mortality.  "Why do I have an almost oedipal desire to bury my father in death data and statistics?" he asks in the first chapter.

         My personal favorite quote about death is one that Shields does not include in his book.  When the novelist Joseph Heller was asked toward the end of his life if he was afraid of death he had an interesting answer.  "I’ve never had a root canal," Heller began.  "But from what I’ve heard about it I think I could stand one."  Anybody who says they don’t fear death is a liar but much of the time fear is a useless emotion. Heller gets this and I relate to his quote but part of me also sympathizes with the perspective of Mel Brooks.  "If Shaw and Einstein couldn’t beat death then what chance do I have?  Almost none."

        Some detractors of Shields writing have accused the author of being overly self absorbed and in this book in particular being much more interested in his own stories than his father’s.  This misses the whole point of his style which holds up his own memoir like a lens for others to project their own experiences onto it.  ’The Thing about Life is One Day you’ll be Dead’ is everybody’s story and that’s the point.  Sadly this will invariably be labeled "not a book for everybody".  Maybe that’s true.  With our junk culture and constant shallowness not to mention seeming inability to make lasting relationships with other people in the modern age, many people will not have much use for a book like this.  If anything about Sheilds’s accomplishment is truly sad then that is it because whoever you are, whatever you do and wherever you go..... You’re gonna die.