Becoming the Story by L. E. Henderson Page A

was enough. Some people think you get a kind of immortality
by having kids. Bullshit!
    Sorry. I have noticed that Dead Me cusses a
lot.
    Okay, this is one of my pet peeves, so bear
with me here. I decided in college not to have kids. Babies are
super cute, but the world has enough people. I wanted to devote my
life to creative pursuits like writing.
    But every time I would read a book on
biology, I would see the same irritating word repeated over and
over: “successful;” The successful organisms were the ones that
reproduced.
    I am all for Charles Darwin, but that word
“successful” slaps a value judgment on a blind natural process.
According to this definition of success, Sir Isaac Newton, Emily
Dickinson, and Nikolai Tesla were unsuccessful.
    After reading The Selfish Gene by
Richard Dawkins, I think this definition of success is all wrong.
According to him, the real winners in reproduction are the genes.
Genes only want one thing: to make copies of themselves. They do
not really care how they do it. In fact, the whole point of making
people at all is so that the genes will have a host that will fall
madly in love and send them marching out into a healthy new
host.
    If the first host dies a horrible, agonizing
death afterward, that is all perfectly fine with the genes, as long
as they get to escape into a new person first. Wake up, people. Our
genes are farming us.
    Richard Dawkins compares genes to viruses.
When you have a bad cold, the virus hijacks cells for the purpose
of copying itself and makes you sneeze. When you do that, you
spread the virus into the air where other people breathe it in. The
whole self-copying cycle begins again. Same with genes, except that
the genes create their own hosts, which includes you and me.
    Genes are sketchy bastards. Never trust
them. If you ever see a gene coming at you, at night, in an empty
parking lot, run like hell!
    In fact, I am pretty sure I know who made
the writers of the biology textbooks use the word “successful” when
it comes to reproducing: A gene made them write that. In fact, I
would not be surprised if a gene seized the pen from the writer and
wrote the whole thing itself.
    If I could be really be immortal by
reproducing, I should be able to see the world through the eyes of
my far-future grandchildren. Through them, I should be able to eat
moon-rock ice cream and taste it. Through them I should be able to
skim the surface of Mars in a jetpack instead of being a dusty and
earth-bound remnant of the distant past.
    But it seems silly to vent about that now.
Here I am. This really happened. The big “D.” I think I expected
more of it, but now that I am here and can see it for what it is,
it all seems very… disappointing. But not in the way you are
thinking. If I have any major complaint it is that it is not scary
enough. No pain. No irrational obsessions. No worries about what I
need to do next. Just a kind of sigh.
    Still, it is hard to look back over my life
and wonder what it was all for. All of my petty jealousies, silly
compulsions, my fretting over bad hair days, and anxiety over
slights from other people, real or imagined.
    I think about all the journals I kept
throughout my life, all part of my effort to make sense of the
relentless march of days. And I think about all of my stories,
conceived in great ambition or in a frenzied bid for fame or wealth
or admiration.
    Would I have done anything differently if I
had truly believed this day would come? Really believed it down to
the core of me? I really cannot say. For the most part, I think I
did the best I could.
    The actions that stand out gold-rimmed in my
memory are the ones where I was able to step outside my routine and
say, “What a strange and beautiful and horrible and fascinating
thing it is to be alive. Maybe I should look around. Maybe I should
enjoy this while it lasts” – not when I was rushing from one
frantic activity to the next.
    Those were the times when I made the best
and most