Ghosts That We Knew
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.
It’s a great little saying, and for the most part I try to abide by it. I believe the premise, certainly. I think we should try to find joy when and where we can. Life can be difficult, and while we can’t control a lot of what happens, we can control how we react to life’s challenges. So, the saying is fine. I have no problem with the saying. The thing is, sometimes life doesn’t hand you lemons so much as it whips them at you at top speed, square in the face. Life has hurled a few of those particular lemons at my little circle over the last couple of months and while I’ve tried to stay strong and make gallons of damn lemonade, this week all I wanted to do was whip the lemons back at life and tell it to f**k all the way off.
My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 2 years ago, the day my son turned 13 actually. He had surgery and has been receiving chemotherapy every 2 weeks since. He receives scans every 3 months, and so far his pancreas has remained clear, though we know he has some nodules in both his lungs. Still, he’s done well, and we are beyond grateful for the time we have with him.
This past Monday my father had a doctor’s appointment to receive the results of his latest scan and to receive his next round of chemo. Because of COVID, we haven’t been able to physically attend these appointments with him for more than a year. So my father would call us when the doctor came in and he’d put us on speaker phone so we could hear the results. This visit marked the first time that Dana Farber was allowing patients to be accompanied by someone. My mother went with him and because I was scheduled to be at the ALS ONE golf tournament, I brought along my air pods and was going to find a quiet corner to listen in on the appointment as I’d done in the past.
We’ve been pleased with the results of all of his past scans, relieved that the cancer has been kept at bay and the nodules in his lungs have been fairly stable. So I certainly was not expecting to get bad news during this appointment, which is why I certainly didn’t mind being out in public during the call. I could not have been more wrong.
My father called when the doctor came in. The connection wasn’t great, and I strained to hear what was being discussed. I missed the first few things the doctor said, but I quickly figured out that it wasn’t the news we wanted to hear, or quite frankly were expecting after so many decent scans. The pancreas was still clear, but the tumors in Dad’s lung were continuing to grow, albeit slowly. The doctor, in an uncharacteristically dismissive tone, announced that the chemo was no longer working and that we were out of options. The world around me disappeared as I tried to wrap my head around what he was saying. At some point the call dropped and I just sat there trying to catch my breath when the phone rang and startled me back to reality. My parents had finished their meeting with the doctor and were walking out of the building. There would be no treatment that day. There would be no more treatment at all.
After a lot of family discussion, my mother and I accepted my father’s decision to pursue no further treatment since the doctor didn’t believe he could offer anything that may help. My father will be put on hospice and we will begin to navigate this new normal together.
On top of everything going on with my Dad, one of my oldest and dearest friends was diagnosed two months ago with advanced-stage ovarian cancer. I can’t begin to tell you what a gut punch that was. Cheryl moved in two houses away from me in Braintree when we were 6 years old, and we have been constants in each other’s lives ever since. Hearing her diagnosis brought me to my knees. It was another one of those moments in life when you’re not even sure what’s real anymore. The world goes eerily quiet, and you can hear your own heartbeat as it quickens and pounds in your chest and in your ears. Life changes in an instant and you know nothing will ever be the same. But I know all too well the importance of a positive attitude and so I am determined to be a rock for Cheryl as she has been for me. We still have a lot of living to do and a lot of memories to make. Fearing what the future holds robs us of the beauty the present promises, and I’m not OK with that. I’m determined to embrace each day, each moment, I have with those I love.
Still, having these two people who I love so much face such uncertainty is heartbreaking, and it necessarily leads me to consider deeply the meaning and fragility of life.
We’re all mortal. Death is a certainty for every one of us. But we’re not wired to contemplate such realities on a regular basis. So when the possibility, or the reality, of our own mortality, or that of one we love with all our heart comes into such sharp focus, it can feel like the Earth is starting to spin off its axis. Death has such power to change life so completely. When one of my closest friends, Paul, passed away 10 years ago it left a gaping hole in my universe. I was unprepared for Fortune’s turn, and it took me far too long to reconcile myself to it. I am not prepared for that kind of grief again. It all draws out so woefully. And there remains only the great solitude in the shadow of memory.
This week it’s felt as though I’ve lost my relation with the cosmos. I can’t connect anything. I felt like the synapses in my brain are just firing at will, wildly, madly, with no regard for sense or logic. I’ve let the sadness overcome me for now because I know that I need to sit with it, but I also know that I won’t give it the power to overwhelm me, to drown me, to suffocate me, to turn my world utterly dark and devoid of joy. Ultimately, I know that I will compartmentalize the sorrow and the fear, and I will grow stronger in my resolve to embrace the joy that life never fails to provide. If we let the sorrow and the fear overcome us, we lose precious opportunities to truly live and not merely to exist.
But this week…well, this week I’ve allowed myself to drown my sorrows some. The afternoons and evenings have drifted on the slow river of several glasses of wine. And the fear and the sorrow have slipped to the bottom of each glass, becoming more distant, less threatening.
This evening I sat on the deck and squinted hard against the sun, which was still high in the sky, though descending quickly, preparing to be engulfed by the impending dark. For as slow as daily life is moving right now, my mind is spinning at a frenetic pace and everything–my past, my present, my future–is coming at me with blinding fury. I’m trying to keep that all at bay.
Tonight I sat quietly with my memories, slightly overwhelmed by the deafening cacophony of silence. I started looking through some old photo albums and was instantly transported back to each of those moments in time.
Those memories hit me hard tonight. Alone in my room, lying in bed with only my computer screen illuminating the room, I suddenly had the feeling of being in a Stanley Kubrick movie.
How to put this. In his movies, I think there’s a kind of vast silence underneath everything. It’s an expression of detachment and alienation.
As I flipped through the yellowed pages of the albums I had pulled out and stared deeply into the cracked and faded pictures, the memories rushed at me in dizzying fashion.
Cheryl and I celebrating 40+ years of birthdays together, the Patriots games, the Halloweens, the trips together. Dad and I in our Sunday finest for Easter, being goofy together, dancing at my wedding together…
It’s amazing how memories like that can steal the breath from your lungs without warning. The memories have settled in around me tonight, but instead of feeling empty or sad, I actually feel content and blessed. None of us are going anywhere just yet and we still have plenty of time to be together, make new memories, live our lives, and love one another.
And to think that it all started with some exploration of the Kubrickian sense of isolation that resulted from my perusal of old photo albums, leaving my anxieties to grow large via the magnifying effects of solitude.
Three Paths Diverged…
I’m going to get all philosophical now because all this has got me thinking a lot about Soren Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard believed that when humans confront their mortality, they experience a sense of despair. This is a result of the tension between the finite and the infinite, wherein we realize the nature of human existence and we are tormented by anxiety and apprehension about our lives. In response to these feelings of dread, he proposed three paths of existence: the aesthetic path, the ethical path, and the religious path.
With the aesthetic path, we adopt a method of escape by ignoring these feelings of dread. It is an individualistic path in which we concern ourselves only with sensory experiences and pleasures. We seek to find things that distract us from ruminating on things like the meaning or meaninglessness of life and our freedom and responsibility. The lure of the aesthetic path is that it provides instant gratification. We immerse ourselves in things that interest us. In the aesthetic path, we live only for ourselves; it is a path of egoism and selfishness.
The ethical path is a method that confronts the issue of dread. Instead of trying to hide from these issues, we face them head on. In contrast to the individualistic nature of the aesthetic path, the ethical path is universal and objective. The emphasis here is on reason, logic, and moral theory. We try to resolve issues of mortality by trying to rationalize meaning or purpose in life. This approach attempts to ascertain objective truths and morals. The ethical path is not necessarily in direct opposition to the aesthetic path; one living an ethical life can still experience pleasure. However, the focus is universal, not individual. As such, it precludes self-exploration since it requires following a set of social norms and rules.
The religious path is a method that embraces acceptance of our own mortality. On the religious path, one chooses total faith in God and suspends reason. Our relationship with God is exclusively personal. It is not universal, but rather it is a matter of individual subjective passion. Faith is a paradox, according to Kierkegaard. It is immersed in doubt. There is a subjective certainty about our belief in God; however, there is an objective uncertainty as we cannot subject this belief to reason: we cannot prove God’s existence. We can never rationally defend it and so faith is a leap into the absurd: we have faith in God, but we cannot believe in God. It’s the existential equivalent of the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment.
Kierkegaard noted that there are problems with both the aesthetic and the ethical paths. The problem with the aesthetic life is that eventually boredom will set in, and we will have to find something else to distract us. Inevitably the question of our mortality will return. For one on the ethical path, the problem is that “reason shipwrecks.” Reason fails to find universal reason for life, for all humanity.
The religious path, which Kierkegaard considered the highest plane of existence, is a perpetual struggle, not a single leap of faith. There is a constant struggle between our personal belief and our inability to prove it. Kierkegaard explained that a “knight of faith” has placed total faith in God but remains silent about his faith because he cannot rationalize it.
I mostly agree with Kierkegaard’s existential views regarding these three paths. I agree to the extent that I see them as means by which we cope with the struggle of our humanity and with the questions that plague us regarding the meaning of life and the uncertainty of death and what, if anything, comes after. But I don’t believe at any given time that we are necessarily on a single path; rather, I think the paths coalesce and divide fluidly throughout our lives and we walk sometimes solidly on one or another and at other times with our feet on more than one at a time.
The nature of humanity, I believe, precludes us from walking on any one path exclusively throughout our lives, or at least that’s the case for me. For me personally, the religious path is most dear as I rely on my faith to get me through so many of life’s hardships. I understand the absurdity of faith as I cannot rationalize my belief or relationship with God because I cannot provide empirical proof of His existence. Still, I have faith that He exists and that He walks with me through life, and sometimes He carries me. However, there are certainly times when my faith is shaken or life throws something at me that the intangibility of my faith will not allow me to immediately process. At those times, I know I have reverted to the aesthetic path in search of any distraction from the anguish that those moments bring with them.
Life is complex. Our response to it is complex. And while faith sustains us (me) through much of it, I maintain my view that we do not live in a vacuum and that we get through it by relying on one another.
Thank God I have a fierce tribe to turn to who will hold me up when I can’t stand (figuratively, but also quite literally). And thank God I am part of Cheryl’s tribe, and I will be there for her during this journey.
But God, it’s not easy. C.S. Lewis was right: grief is indeed the price we pay for love.
Rise Against ALS! 