The Central Fact of Our Lives

In this excerpt from A Mother’s Story, Gloria Vanderbilt is writing about a conversation between her son Carter (Anderson Cooper’s older brother) as a very young and precocious child, (he would die at 23) and her husband Wyatt Cooper, who would also die young, at age 50.

He had begun trying to understand the fact of death some time earlier. After seeing the movie Ben Hur, he asked one day, “All that was two thousand years ago?” His father answered, “Yes.” “And all the people who were alive then are dead now?” Again, “Yes.” “And lots of people have been born since then and then got old and died?” “Yes.” “And someday everybody alive now will be dead and there will be other people living here?” “Yes.” There was no other answer to give. He had summed up the whole story very well. He thought it over for a few moments and rendered a judgment.” “It’s a strange way of doing it,” he said.

His father thought, Well, he’s not the first one in history to whom the idea has occurred, but he came to a conclusion, accepted it, and was able to get on with his life in the light of that knowledge. It might not be exactly as Wyatt would have arranged it if he had invented mankind, but there it is, the central fact of our lives. Sooner or later we learn to live with it. It may be our tragedy, or it may be precisely that truth which gives our lives the meaning, the significance, and the perspective that they have. Wyatt believed that the accommodation we make with our knowledge of the transient nature of time may be the single heroic element in our lives. (67)