JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And in this hour we've been talking about aging mostly, but now we're gonna turn our attention to the end of that aging process.

ROBERT: You're talking about dying?

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Maybe we've avoided that topic because that's generally how people deal with death, which is to avoid it.

ROBERT: To deny it, yeah. Well, this next piece is about actually a different way of dealing with death. I should say before we begin it that it does contain some graphic descriptions of the normal bodily process of aging, but if you have someone in the room who is squeamish or you don't think should hear these things—and it's nothing terrible, it's just—it's actually quite ...

JAD: Nasty.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: It's nasty.

ROBERT: It's nasty. Then maybe this is time to shoo them out of the room.

JAD: This piece was produced by Lu Olkowski. It's about one family, three generations.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: Introduce myself?

JAD: This is Jeremiah, the youngest.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: I'm Jeremiah Zagar.

JAD: He's a filmmaker.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: Son of Isaiah Zagar.

JAD: His dad, Isaiah, is a muralist. And his grandfather ...

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: I'm the grandson of Asher Zagar.

JAD: ... Asher Zagar is a health nut.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Asher Zagar: 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.]

JAD: This is a video of him that Jeremiah shot of Asher doing his daily exercise routine. He's in his 90s, he's jumping on a trampoline and counting each jump.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jeremiah Zagar: How old are you now?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Asher Zagar: Me? I'm 90.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jeremiah Zagar: 90?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Asher Zagar: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jeremiah Zagar: You're a healthy man for 90.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Asher Zagar: Yes. And I'll be still healthy when I'm 91, 92. The great great grandfather that I'm named after lived to 102.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jeremiah Zagar: So you're gonna live to 102.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Asher Zagar: I don't know, but maybe.]

JAD: At the age of 93, Asher began to decline quickly.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: How do you deal with a man dying in your house? How do you deal with that? Well, you know, my father starts taking photos of him.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: One of my modes of understanding was either drawing or photographing.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: He was always taking pictures of my grandfather.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Just to see ...

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: Thousands of slides. Thousands.

JAD: And that's how it went for a while. Isaiah, the dad, would take care of his dad and take some photos, while the grandson Jeremiah basically looked the other way.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: Well, I never really knew my grandfather.

JAD: But then Isaiah got an idea.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: I thought to myself, "Challenge this young boy to this duel: who can take the most objective photographs of a dying man?"

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: It wasn't like we threw down and, like, I pulled my camera out of my holster and he pulled his camera out of his holster, you know? It wasn't like that. He was involved in my grandfather's death and I wasn't, and so he said this is how I get involved. It's my senior year of high school, and I was a busboy in this restaurant down the street, and I loved it. And I would bus tables 'til two or three in the morning and then I would get drunk with the people after work, and then I would come back and I would take care of my grandpa.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: And so I would lift him up and change his sheets, because otherwise his bedsore would burn more. And he had this horrible bedsore—you can see it in the photographs—and he would hit me while I lifted him up. And then I would photograph him, because I would want to sit with him, because you want to calm him down. And the way you sit with him—I mean, my father was right. You have a camera. I mean, that's how you cope. Otherwise you're sitting with him and he's just looking at you.

JAD: During the contest, dad and son shared duties of taking care of grandpa, and at night they'd sit at the kitchen table and compare photos.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: As soon as I took the first pictures, you knew mine were better than my father's because my father's were from far away, and they were snapshots, and mine were like, specific. Like, I was fascinated with him dying. I wanted to know what it looked like.

JAD: And this went on for about a month, during which time even Jeremiah's friends ...

ISAIAH ZAGAR: All of his friends ...

JAD: ... got involved.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: ... in the wee hours of the night, I would wake up and I would see that there, surrounding my father, were four or five young people. Sure, they were drinking beer and they were joking around, but they were there. They were there while he was there. What I remember most was you and your friends changing his sheets and lifting him and moving him around.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: Yeah. Gabrielle did it with me once.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Who else did it with you?

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: John. Lincoln.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: They all became initiated into the most problematic event in our lives. It was an amazingly rare scene to see these teenagers attending to death.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Well, this is a book of photographs of my father, your grandfather's last week of life, in this very room. So the contest was a month long. Smart guy I am, huh?

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: You're good. You know how to make a contest.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: I kept it going for one month.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: Good job.

LU OLKOWSKI: Isaiah, can you describe this one for me?

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Well, the feet look like they're—they were out in the desert, that they've been baked and cracked and they're dry, dry, dried out.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: I mean, look at them. They look like—I mean, look at the nail, the nail is wild. But I mean, everything. It's like, "What the ...?"

ISAIAH ZAGAR: I have these same legs.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: Stop touching the photos.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Well, I can almost feel him by feeling them. I'll feel you instead.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: There. That's the bedsore. That's what happens.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Oh, it's awful. Awful. All awful. Awful, awful, awful. A man who prided himself on his health, look what happened. How does one describe that?

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: It looks like rotting meat.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: I mean, they're just open wounds, and you move him around, move him around, but still it was impossible.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: It's crazy to look at the colors too. Pink and then white and then green and then brown where it's rotting.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Well the white is the muscle, isn't it?

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: I took these photos in color because in black and white you'd never get it. You know, you'd never get how painful this must've been. His anus is all red. I mean, like, really red. And you can see that parts of it have broken and there's just blood gushing out, and it's dried. I mean, the blood is dried. I think this is the last photo. Oof, this one's tough. You can see, like, the cognition is gone, mouth is agape, he's buried in his pillow.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: He knew it was over. It was just a matter of time now.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: That's it. That's the closest I got to him dying.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: He wanted to live forever. The fix was in from the beginning.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: [laughs] The fix was in? I was supposed to win?

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Sure, sure. How could it be any other way?

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: I don't know, I could have taken—I could have given up. You wanted me to win?

ISAIAH ZAGAR: It was a subterfuge to get you to be with your grandfather as much as possible.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: I thought it was a fair fight. It wasn't. Oh, you knew all along.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Can there ever be—can there ever be a fair fight?

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: You knew all along that you couldn't take a good picture.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: When a person is dying, it's very important that they're surrounded, they're surrounded by the light of life, and you don't go into the place of oblivion alone.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: You want me to be there?

ISAIAH ZAGAR: I don't know. At this point I don't know. I'm not—I'm not at that place yet. Well, what does that mean with the camera? I mean, just be with me. Be with me, be close to me, be soft with me.

JEREMIAH ZAGAR: Yeah, I guess that's what it's about, really.

ISAIAH ZAGAR: Mm-hmm. Be soft with me.

JAD: Thanks to Lu Olkowski for that story. And to Isaiah and Jeremiah Zagar. Well, we've come to the end of our hour. I guess we should wrap.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm. We should mention the website.

JAD: Yes. Radiolab.org is the address. And also, if you want to sign up for our podcast ...

ROBERT: How do you do that?

JAD: Well, you go to Radiolab.org or to iTunes directly. And if you want to send us an email, Robert?

ROBERT: If you want to send us an email, you should really write us to our email address.

JAD: [laughs] Which you can never remember.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Radiolab@wnyc.org is our email address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll see you later.

[CHILD: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad, Ellen Horne, Lulu Miller, Dean ...]

[MAN: Cappello.]

[CHILD: Cappello.]

[ISAIAH ZAGAR: Hi, this is Isaiah Zagar. Production support by Sarah Pellegrini, Mark Phillips, Scott Goldberg, Sam Lavender, Avir Mitra, Ryan Sciamo and Jacob Weinberg. Special thanks to Jocelyn Ford, Sam Dingman, Leonard Lopez, Josh Kain.]

[JEREMIAH ZAGAR: This is Jeremiah Zagar. I want to thank you for listening. Radiolab is supported by a grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Radiolab is produced by WNYC—New York Public Radio, and distributed by NPR—National Public Radio.]

 

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