Life Support
"Try our pumpkin spice," said the lady in the doughnut shop across from the hospital, handing me a napkin-wrapped chunk of something brown and moist, which I compulsively inserted into my mouth. It was not so much spicy as sweet, almost unbearably sweet––and that's the assessment of a person who can polish off a box of Good 'n Plenty in one sitting washed down with Seven-Up. I wanted to spit it out, but I swallowed it instead and sat down at the table to wait for my sister, who was getting coffee.
The truth is, I can't eat much of anything these days, sweet or otherwise. My insides are too churned up. I'm upset in a way I have only been a few times in my life, when terrible things have happened. I need to try to write about it, and this is my attempt, but I can't write too much because it's epic and awful but also personal and tragic. I guess I've alluded to it here and there, even while I was traveling in New York, because it has been in the background for two weeks, heavy on my heart. And yet I thought somehow it would be resolved by now, whatever that means.
It is hard to understand how cruel life can be. Hard to bear witness to terrible suffering, hard to accept there is nothing we can do but watch it unfold. A young man is hovering in between life and death right now, and I don't even know how to pray anymore. We need a miracle, but if a miracle cannot be granted, I have begun to think that nothing is worse than this ongoing agony for the people who love him most, who are clinging to hope but dissolving in anguish.I am thinking that each of us lives at the brink of a vast unknown, and by and large we avoid looking straight at it, finding comfort in relationships and activities, escaping into brief pleasures, making meaning somehow. We usually manage to avoid encountering the chilling sense of aloneness and fear that rears its head sometimes, and if we do, we fend it off, recognizing a bad moment but believing in a better one.
And I am thinking that it takes longer for some than others to figure out how that works, and they need to get through some very rough seas before they begin to acquire the knack of it, the innate compass, the steering skills, the ability to project beyond to calmer waters and good shores ahead. The unbearable tragedy is when someone is lost in this passage, unable to know how many ways there were of getting through, and how close they were.
My sister and I take a surreal break from the surreal hospital and walk across the street to the doughnut shop. So the pumpkin spice is far too sweet, and the sunlight is too bright, and there's awful music playing at the shopping center, where it seems like everyone is eating too much and buying too much and all of it is obnoxious. There isn't even the respite of a couple of trees. When, I wonder, did trees become optional in urban design? Would shady green spaces inspire pauses antithetical to mindless consumption? Use up too many parking spaces?
Forgive me. I can see myself becoming bitter and alienated. It's because I am sick with helplessly watching the lost chances and senseless suffering of people I care about, suffering no longer abstract, but up close and personal, overwhelmingly sad.
My friend Dan says that the lives of others can be so difficult for us because we really want to take on their sorrows for them, but we can't, we even know we can't. And somehow we need to learn how to say yes to life, exactly as it is, with all its beauty, joy, grief and sorrow. He writes of the need to "embrace the whole enchilada with no fingers crossed, exactly what you're dealing with right now, and how, in the face of it, to carry on our lives with joy and vigor.”
"We have to embrace the present” he says, “without requiring permission from the future, because the future gives no guarantees.”
I am trying..not so much to embrace this particular element of the present, because I cannot, but at least to accept it, because I cannot change it.
Similarly, I am trying not to replay the past or obsess about what I might have done to alter the course of events. One of the legacies of tragedy is all the guilt and torment and second-guessing. I need to accept that this had a trajectory of its own and it will unfold as it will and I cannot change fate.I am learning to prioritize, too. Suddenly things that would have upset me seem appallingly insignificant. I absolutely do not have the energy or life force to expend on black holes. Or pettiness. Or crazy people.
As Aunt Mary once told me, your life has value too, and there's only so much of you to go around, so choose well.Well, I don't like slash-your-wrist, exhibitionist, self-indulgent blog posts devoid of anything edifying, and I sure hope this is not one of them. I admit my capacity for joy is diminished right now, and my ability to hope is in neutral, but I want to have learned something, shared something. Writing is my default position.
Maybe what I want to say is that nothing matters more than the health and well-being of the people we love, or something like that, which most of us know anyway, but at the same time, we cannot own them or control them or keep them from harm. It's an awfully difficult balance, life is.