Has anyone ever told you that you died? Did they have a point? I’m not talking about flatlining. I mean the grand tour. It happened to me, sort of. A woman, a neuroscientist, shared the unfortunate news with me. She knew someone who looked like me, talked like me, was me, who took too many psych meds, just like me. (The same ones? I didn’t know.) Since it happened to him, it was going to happen to me—or already had, apparently—and this was too much for her to handle.
I didn’t know exactly what to do with this information. I was speechless, and I guess I had to get used to that. I am friends with an obituary writer at the New York Times--his Twitter bio says he’s a “dead beat”—but I figured he should find out from a back channel. I couldn’t micromanage the bio. It would say, “David Yaffe, Joni Mitchell Biographer, 40 nothing, dead of some such.” One day, I will be the late David Yaffe, and there will be nothing anyone could do about it. Until the treadmill is run out, there is still time for something else to make that headline—my sweet Substack, my ageless good looks, the next book that will mess everyone up and disturb the universe? But I am not on the dead beat. That will be up to them, and I will be at zero with the universe, a force even more inscrutable and vast and indifferent than the New York Times.