Story of My Death

By Lev Grossman

In 1919, when he was 9, David Shields' father Milt stepped on the third rail while crossing some train tracks. Using a piece of wood, a friend rescued him from electrocution as well as--with seconds to spare--an oncoming train. Decades later, Milt rammed his car into a garbage truck and walked away unhurt. At 86, he had a heart attack while playing tennis. He not only finished the set but he also won it.

Shields is both moved and baffled by the stubbornness with which his father, now 97, just refuses to die. As a meditation thereon he has written THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU'LL BE DEAD (Knopf; 225 pages), a double memoir-commonplace book in which he presents his and his father's life stories, lovingly encrusted with facts about aging and death (it turns out your soul doesn't weigh 21 grams after all, and your hair and nails do not keep growing postmortem) and quotations ("After 30, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death"--Emerson). The result is an edifying, wise, unclassifiable mixture of filial love and Oedipal rage. "I want him to live forever," Shields writes, "and I want him to die tomorrow."