Physician and ObamaCare architect, Dr. Zeke Emmanuel, wrote a controversial essay several years ago in which he asserted that he hoped to die at age 75. “Here is a simple truth,” he wrote, “living too long is a loss.”  

In fact, he added, old age even transforms the way people remember us.  “We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged,” Dr. Emmanuel says, “but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

That’s the idea at the heart of Lionel Shriver’s new novel, “Should We Stay or Should We Go”:  Is living beyond vibrancy and into frailty; is experiencing the diminishment of cognition and physical strength so imbued with loss that it’s better to take one’s end in hand?

Cyril and Kay think so as Kay’s father descends into dementia when she’s in her 50s and she finds it impossible to replace his undignified end with the memories of him in his heyday.
So Cyril, a physician for Britain’s National Health Service, proposes a pact. They will die together on Kay’s 80th birthday. “The key to not ending up like everyone else,” Cyril tells her, “is to be proactive.”

But as the years advance, Cyril remains resolved while Kay begins to rethink the bargain: Could they go beyond 80? Could they take it year by year?

And then Shriver’s novel spins off into some intriguing and provocative scenarios — including one that contemplates the development of a drug that essentially ends aging.

“Children didn’t really want to picture their parents as contemporaries,” the narrator tells us. “and children didn’t really want to think of their parents as regular people.”

My Thread Must Read is Lionel Shriver’s “Should We Stay or Should We Go.” Check out the interview I did with Shriver in June on my podcast.