Health-the great escape:

...But in all of us that hope is mixed with some fear that it may not be so, after all...

...Paul's counsel: our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and we should not abuse them...

...Life is, to put it mildly, a powerful reminder of how utterly contingent, and finally helpless, we are...

...There is a good, solid argument to be made for some attention to health...

...To try to extend our lives indefinitely-or to take it to the absurd extremes of the people who aim at physical immortality-is a form of despair...

...But what if they learn enough to revive heads, but not enough to attach them to bodies...

...It is this distracted, busy life that life-extension advocates want to preserve, die more unreflective of them indefinitely...

...When I say that death is unimaginable I mean that all we know of it is what we see of the effects of its coming-other people dying, struggling to live-or of its having happened...

...I watch my diet for weeks at a time, then eat bacon, Mexican and Italian sausages, hot dogs, everything bad for me...

...It is fascinating to see how something literally unimaginable, like death, can have such power over what we do imagine, and fear, and hope for...

...But to say that death is terrible is not to say that the best alternative to it is life as we know it, or that this life is the only alternative...

...While this is, as far as it goes, a legitimate question, there is in her questioning a suggestion that if something hadn't intervened these people might have lived forever...

...My experience has led me to two basic conclusions: First, young people should do what I did...

...What does that fact mean to us...

...This has a meaning less for our future life than for the present one...

...I once heard a woman say of a man who had been in a near fatal car crash in which his brain was extensively damaged, "Why can't the doctors fix him...

...it is an enemy, to be fought...

...Is meaning a human symptom...

...This latter lesson is one I wonder about I don't mean that I wonder whether I am goiag to die, or whether you are, but whether a lot of people really know that...

...Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus...

...It is a belief that the absolute limit with which death confronts us exists only to cancel us out...

...You are going to die anyway, no matter how much you work at being healthy...

...And of course there is St...

...The Orthodox Easter liturgy exults in the fact mat "Christ has risen from the dead, trampling down death by death...

...Christianity says that death is as terrible as it seems, that we are not wrong to fear it-but even death can be used by God to grant life, and the life we now experience is even in its best moments only a dim foreshadowing of what we are encouraged to hope for...

...and at Gethsemane, when he thought of what awaited him, "his soul was filled with dismay and dread...

...Or is it to be found beyond us, in what we cannot know (or anyway know now...

...A friend of mine hears of people in their seventies dying of cancer and wonders what in the environment could have caused it...

...I realize that as a Christian I affirm a belief that life everlasting is possible, and it is my hope that I will be part of it...

...Death is terrible, and it is not the job of Christianity to reconcile us to it, but to bring us to a belief that its power has been defeated...

...Whatever fitness I have began with a middle-age bad back that could be helped by exercise, and was, and then I got into the habit of feeling better in more general ways and kept it up...

...Some of its members are believers in cryonic suspension, and have made arrangements to be frozen immediately after death so that in the future, when scientists have figured out how to revive and fix people, they can wander around for a few more years, waiting for the next technology to give them an even longer stretch of life...

...Is reality finally gracious, or hostile...

...I think most of us understand the agonized father in the Gospels who, asked by Jesus if he believes, cries "I believe- but help my unbelief...

...Our reactions to questions of that sort reveal, perhaps, the most basic differences between believers and nonbelievers...

...The fear of death is part of this, and so is a terror of limitation, and a desire always to be in control of our lives...

...Some of this inconsistent health consciousness has to do with my being in my forties, no doubt...

...In fact this life is so saturated with death that we are often unable to see the fact, until some profound experience-perhaps of love or grief or joy or, most rare of all, real stillness- reveals the ordinarily inert, nearly comatose, nature of ordinary consciousness...

...It does make life more pleasant to feel pretty good, physically...

...However, behind much of the new concern for health and fitness there is a strange fear, even despair...

...Then, when your clean-living contemporaries are beginning to experience the pull of gravity (which, after all, will win in the long run), you should give up smoking, be temperate in drink, watch your diet, and exercise...

...Second, understand that this is a very temporary pleasure...

...It sometimes takes a shock to reveal the usual hardness of our hearts, and only prayer and meditation can bring us to a knowledge of how perpetually distracted from the moment we usually are...

...That would give a whole new meaning to the idea of being left on the shelf...

...It is understandable to fear death, for the simple reason that it means leaving everything we have known, not knowing what we'll funi-if we find anything at all...

...From this point of view, the only meaning our life has is on this side of the limit, and everything must be done to keep us here...

...We have no way of knowing what it is like to die or be dead...

...The despair implicit in this position is that this life is seen as the most meaningful life, in fact the only kind of life, available to us...

...and if, through diet and exercise, I can avoid or at least help prevent some forms of cancer, or a stroke which might debilitate me, or a heart condition which could make my old age more miserable than it is likely to be in any event, it makes sense to be careful about diet and to exercise...

...and nonbelievers...

...One cheaper way offered by some promoters of cryonics is to have your head frozen-I'm not making this up-so that it can be attached to a future body, either one that has been made fresh, or a donor corpse...

...I exercise regularly, gave up srriokmg years ago, and when I am in Europe I feel smug,-downright superior to all those Europeans who still smoke...

...This is certainly an understandable reaction...

...In fact, whatever our fears and whatever we do to allay them, we will die...

...There is even a bizarre life extension movement which is actually looking for ways to assure physical immortality...

...Our reactions to death reveal something of what we feel about the unknowable...

...When you are young you should get as little exercise as possible, smoke, and drink too much...

...You will feel better than you ever did in high school and college, while they will feel much worse, because they have always done the right thing and now, nature taking its course, the right thing isn't working as well as it once did...

...As Wittgenstein said, death is not an experience we live through...