mortality

Just yesterday, through a stray remark, I learned that my college classmate Larry Saporta died of a completely unexpected heart attack. That was on September 9, the same day I spoke at NYU, and generally I wasn’t paying much attention to Facebook during that busy New York trip. So I missed the news.

Larry was never a close personal friend of mine, nor had I had even the least contact with him since graduating in 1990. I’m not sure why not, because I was always very fond of him. He was one of the funniest members of our typically small St. John’s class (80 or so students?). He also seemed like one of the most benevolent. I’d usually smile when I saw him coming because I always knew he was about to say something cultivated and witty and unpretentious.

Like most of us in that class, he was 43, much younger than one usually expects to die of heart failure, especially for a guy who (when I knew him, at least) always had the build of a long-distance runner.

I had no idea what he’d been up to, but from poking around a bit on Google, I saw that he’d finished his Ph.D. two years ago in Art History at Bryn Mawr, with a thesis on Velázquez. (And I believe Larry had a Spanish father himself.) He was living next door in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

Larry was always an enlivener and a morale booster in every situation, and I would imagine that this came as a terrible blow to dozens of people in his immediate environment. I see that he was married, and feel very badly for his wife, and also for his mother.

It’s also a chilling reminder to his peers that we’re all living on borrowed time. You shouldn’t actually die of internal bodily causes at age 43, but it does happen, even to the healthy-seeming ones. What decisions have we all been putting off that shouldn’t be put off forever?