This week’s celebrity animal is the Greenland shark, the subject of a piquant feature article in Sunday’s New York Times.
Headline: “This Shark Lives 400 Years. Its DNA May Explain Why.”
The poor Greenland shark has something-something special DNA that has mutated somehow-somehow to allow him to survive many times longer than all the other creatures of this big blue marble, planet earth, even including the bowhead whale, which can live to 200, and the Galapagos tortoise.
Do you remember Jonathan, the Seychelles giant tortoise supposedly born in 1832, during the administration of President Andrew Jackson? Jonathan the tortoise lives on the island of St. Helena and is 191. Jonathan, unlike the poor Greenland shark, is fortunate to have a circle of friends and companions in his old age. He resides on the lawns of the governor’s mansion with four other giant tortoises, including two lady friends named Myrtle and Fredrika. “He is virtually blind from cataracts, has no sense of smell — but his hearing is good,” the veterinarian of St. Helena told the BBC in 2016.
The Greenland shark is a homelier and lonelier behemoth: “Its hulking frame is covered by sandpaper skin,” writes The Times reporter, Jonathan Moore. “Its fins, stunted, sit awkwardly along its sides. And its eyes, perpetually cloudy, are often host to wormlike parasites that dangle as the shark slowly roams the depths of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans.”
In the photographs accompanying the feature, the Greenland shark looks like an artwork drawn by a kindergartner with a gray Crayola, with an oval snout, floppy body, and disproportionately tiny little pointy side fins and tail.
You feel the heart appeal of the Greenland shark immediately.
The poor Greenland shark. Who wants to live an endless 400 years inspiring little but pathos?
Let’s all spare a thought for the Greenland shark.
Longevity has been on my mind lately, because, naturally, as the daughter of the family it has fallen to me to be the main elder-care-arranger for my mother, Helen Selden Rattray, and she will be turning 90 years old on Sunday.
My mother has the longevity genes of the Greenland shark. Her father, Abe, lived to be 97, I think it was; her mother, Yetta, 96, if I’m not too mistaken, and there was an uncle in California who lived past 100.
This longevity sounds like good news but, indeed, in my mother’s own eyes, to speak baldly and frankly and without any false sentiment, it is not. My mother is not at all thrilled with this long closing chapter. There is zero dignity in it. She has Alzheimer’s and has not been enjoying life for some years now.
My mother was a powerful person with a remarkable intellect before the misfortune of dementia, but she doesn’t have much to say anymore. She often doesn’t even know where she is, why she is standing upside-down, or why it has to be roast chicken again for supper. She has taken a keen dislike to the gerontologist over at Peconic Landing, where she lives.
Indeed, my mother has only been cogent and coherent recently on one topic: the topic of her upcoming 90th birthday.
This is kind of a super sad story.
Prepare yourself.
Here is actual mother-daughter dialogue from early September, recorded faithfully.
Helen, for the hundredth time: “Did you know I will be 90 soon?”
Me: “Yes! I know!” And: “Shall we throw you a birthday dinner?”
Helen: “Yes. Maybe a very fancy Chinese restaurant.”
She’s thinking of something like Mr. Chow on 57th Street, where in the 1980s you could enjoy cashew chicken alongside Andy Warhol and Giorgio Armani.
I’m thinking that, for most of the last year, she has been much too unwell, confused, miserable, unwilling, frail, and unkempt to leave her cottage at the Landing but that we might dress her up in a silk scarf and linen blouse and carry her one last time to some place more local, like Shelter Island. A brisk day trip on the North Ferry, one last time, with the salt breeze in what remains of her curly hair.
Me: “What about the Ram’s Head Inn? You always liked the Ram’s Head Inn?”
Helen: “Yes. We could take over the Ram’s Head Inn. All my friends will like that better than a very fancy Chinese restaurant.”
Oh em gee. My 90-year-old mother — who spends her days sitting in a chair, not speaking, unable to even read The Star or The New York Times, no longer able to follow what’s happening on PBS “NewsHour” or follow “All Things Considered” on NPR, and, if she says anything at all, is prone to telling strangers to go to hell — thinks she’s having a few dozen of her nearest and dearest to a blowout takeover of the Ram’s Head Inn.
The real reason I’m oversharing and telling you all of this, dear reader, is because many of you knew my mother back in her glory years, when she ran this newspaper brilliantly and hosted many a blowout party for dozens of her friends, with singing ’round the piano, thumping on pots and pans for percussion, roasted oysters, and case after case of good wine from Domaine Franey. And it seems to me that perhaps some of you might want to send her a postcard, birthday card, or bouquet on the occasion of her 90th.
Please do.
Spare a thought for the Greenland shark.
Her address is: Helen Rattray, 62 Egret Lane, Greenport, NY 11944.