The Most Depressing Thing I Heard All Week

A much-respected public figure and member of my community died suddenly on Monday. He was only 51, and he left four children, the youngest of whom is only nine years old. It's a flags-at-half-staff kind of death, and it has sent a shudder through the close-knit town I live in.

This death marked an unwelcome, but inevitable change in my perspective, too. More than any other death that has touched my life, and this includes close friends dying in their (and my) teens and early twenties, this was the first time I felt sharply, if it happened to him, it can happen to me. It isn't as though I just found out I was mortal, but I have clearly moved from worrying about what would happen to me if this person or that person died, to worrying about what would happen to them if I died. And this week's news was all the evidence I needed that it can happen. It does happen.

But none of this was the most depressing news I heard all week. I also recently, though not this week, got news that a friend of mine has eight inoperable brain tumors. She is not yet 32. Devastating, but still not the most depressing thing.

And I learned that a little girl I know and love who is in kindergarten has a tumor. Chemo once a week indefinitely. She may have a good prognosis, but this has wrecked her childhood, at least for now. Sickening. Heart-rending. Not the most depressing thing.

The most depressing thing I heard all week happened in a casual conversation with a couple of other men who are 40-ish. We were talking about the sudden death, and how awful it was, when one of them inadvertently dropped the bomb. We were saying that it makes you think about how you live, and wonder whether you should behave differently, make some sweeping changes. Make your life what you want it to be, and what your wife and kids need it to be. Then he nailed us all. He said, the thing is, none of us will do any of that. We'll be upset by this news for a while, and then we will just forget about it and go back to the way things were. And he's right.

Naturally this brought me back to last summer, watching my dad waste away by the minute. As I stood vigil, I promised myself I would make something positive out of this loss. I wasn't sure what, but I would take the energy and the frustrated feelings of helplessness, and do... something. Maybe it would be small. I'd be more patient with my kids. Maybe it would be large. I'd start the family business Dad always said he would want to invest in. Maybe I would start that novel already. Take a trip. In some way mark the time before the bad experience and the time since.

Have I made significant enough changes to satisfy my need to make my father's loss mean something? That conversation made me review the scorecard. I said in my Spring Renewal post that I had set some personal goals, and had been making progress toward them. It's true, but I have stalled out lately. I need to re-light that fire. And I said in the Patience post that kids deserve patient adults, and that I was struggling to get some mastery over that. Also true, but not nearly enough. It is still too easy to raise my voice, and too easy to forget that they need me to be patient, even when I have always known that my kids deserve kindness and patience. What else? No novel, no business, no life-altering moves.

While I hope there is still time to create something positive from the ashes, you can never really know. I've got a good life, and one that I'd be envious of if I were outside looking in. But there is a lot I more want to accomplish - a lot more work I have to do if I am going to make this life, as I said, what I want it to be and what my wife and kids need it to be. What the hell am I waiting for?

The More You Know, The More You Know Can Go Wrong

I'm reading the book Manhood for Amateurs at the moment. It's a collection of essays by Michael Chabon. Among many poignant exchanges between brothers, parents and children, spouses, one stands out to me. The narrator and his adolescent son are using an extremely high-powered telescope to explore the night sky. The son is swept away by the enormity of the universe, especially vis a vis the smallness of our planet, and our corner of this galaxy, which is one of likely a few hundred billion galaxies out there. The son remarks that given how small Earth is, we mean nothing. The father replies, "Except to each other."

As a reader, I love the scene. As a dad, I admire Chabon's quick thinking and sensitivity. There is so much in those four words. He let his son know he loved him, and he gave him a little to chew on about the meaning of life.

While we may enjoy (fiercely guard) our periods of solitude, so much of life comes from what other people mean to us. And no matter where love for others falls on your own ranking of sources of the meaning of life, it is surely one of your biggest vulnerabilities. Mine too. Everybody's. We put everything we have into our children, our partners, even our pets. But there are no sure bets, and if you allow yourself to see far enough into the future, one way or another it all disappears. The more people you let in, the more you invest in them, the richer your life, and the greater the risk of tragic loss.  

I don't often paralyze myself thinking about all the different ways I could lose people I love, but sometimes you get hit hard with news about people you know and care about, and it makes you wonder when your turn for devastation will come. By the way, my dad getting sick and dying was sad and feels unfair to him and to those of us who love him, but I would not term it a tragedy. Sickeningly sad, yes. Tragedy, no. Once in a while I have to remember that. Keep perspective. But watch the news any given day, read the paper, just talk with people, and you will learn about real tragedy. In fact, the chance that you and yours will have long, healthy, happy lives starts to seem like a near-impossibility. Kids get sick, violent crime happens, car accidents, natural disasters of course...

So how can we deal with the knowledge that risk and danger are everywhere? For one thing, we can live like they aren't everywhere. Otherwise we'd never make a move. For another thing, we can keep maybe one percent of that notion and use it to inform our thoughts and actions. It may lead us to broaden our circles, collect more people, care about them, love them. Spread the risk around a little. And it may help us remember to be careful out there. Not "wear a helmet for no reason" careful, but reasonable stuff. Seatbelts, no smoking, etc.

Then with any luck, as we float through our galaxy (one of hundreds of billions, remember) and through a sea of 200 sextillion stars (a legitimate estimate), maybe we will give meaning to other people's time here. We can set aside whether any of this means anything in some grand scheme, and make it meaningful ourselves.

Fridays with Kenny

Tonight, in the unlikeliest of kitchens under quite unlikely circumstances, a warm and funny acquaintance of mine started singing the novelty song "National Brotherhood Week" by Tom Lehrer. The song is at least fifty years old, and so is the acquaintance, but he was shocked when I joined in singing. How could someone my age know it? My dad is how. By the way, when you are done reading this post, check out the song here, http://t.co/LtAMYkz.

Of all the things imprinted on me nature- and nurture-wise by my dad, the most direct link I have with him, and with his dad for that matter, is a deep appreciation for humor. And on many a Friday night while I was growing up, we took time to work on it. I can't look back and pretend that either of us had any agenda beyond sharing some laughs together, but it does seem like he opened an avenue of literacy for me. These are some of the most important and best memories I have of my growing up years.

Late on Friday nights over games of Scrabble and Monopoly in his den - it wasn't THE den, it was DAD's den - we would get into all kinds of TV shows and comedy albums. The Honeymooners, Carson's Comedy Classics, Carol Burnett, every George Carlin record from the 60s and 70s, Lenny Bruce, Stiller and Meara, and albums by guys I didn't know even had stand-up careers. People like Gabe Kaplan, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen, and more. Some of the material flew over my pre-adolescent head, and some was wildly inappropriate, but he trusted me to handle it, and I did.

More special to me now than was the comedy itself, was that he shared it with me. He let me discover it. It was our time together even if he was tired from a long week or had other things he needed to do.

And while I remember it as an endless string of Friday nights stretching out over a few years, I am sure he would tell me that it all ended too soon. At some point, in accordance with the same stupid narrative convention that will rob me of time with my kids, I grew to feel like it would be dorky to sit home on a Friday and hang out with my dad. Like so many things we do and do until we don't, I can't remember the last Friday night we spent together like that, and I am sure neither of us realized at the time that it would be the last.

Crappy Anniversary / Happy Anniversary

I have a mind for numbers, dates especially. I used to have a very sharp memory before I had kids. In the pre-Facebook era it was very handy to remember everybody's birthdays, anniversaries, and other milestones. In the post-cancer chapter of my life, I sometimes have to work to purposely forget the dates when certain things happened, because there is plenty I do not want to commemorate. In some ways I am grateful that parenting has turned portions of my brain into mush. And really, there are only so many dates on the calendar. Live long enough and almost every day could be the anniversary of something.

I've got dates on the brain because one unfortunate anniversary is looming and there is no escaping it. This Sunday will be March 13, which marks five years to the day that my dad - and the rest of us - first learned he had cancer. Though I can remember every detail about the day we got the call, the date itself wasn't important to my dad. I reminded him once or twice of passing that date and he seemed surprised each time that we had marked another year.

This year the date was to have incredible significance. For one thing, at the beginning of his cancer journey, his oncologist predicted he could live with his disease about five years. I hated that he was given an expiration date. Furthermore, epidemiologists record cancer survival rates by those who have lived five years after being diagnosed, even if they are in active treatment. As I addressed in a previous post, only one percent of those who have the kind of cancer he had ever make it to that milestone. I never doubted he would be one of those longterm survivors.

Instead of celebrating a huge victory against cancer this year, we will be missing my dad. But March 13 won't live in infamy. We're already taking it back. This year we celebrate the most special thing any family can gain: new life. My daughter will celebrate her first birthday on the 12th, and have her first birthday party on the 13th. If that doesn't make the 13th a day worth feeling good about, nothing ever could.

Where do we go from here?

What do you believe happens when a person dies? Where do you think we go from here? There is no point asking what you know about it, because we all know exactly the same: zilch. And anyway, I would bet that for most people, what they believe is really more like what they want to happen.

With all the things happening in my life and in the lives of my kids, and with my constant frustration at not being able to have a simple conversation with my dad, you would probably think I want him to be, in the classic vision, "up there smiling down". You would be wrong. I don't intend to demean anybody's beliefs, or deny comfort to those who find it in their faith, but the older I get, the harder it has become to force myself to believe in heaven or any afterlife, really. If you believe that our souls go somewhere else, or that we become something different after this life, I envy the comfort you derive from it.

That is what I believe, but here is what I want: Of course I want there to be something after this, and paradise would be nice. But failing that, I would love to know that wherever our souls go, beyond being happy, I hope we aren't concerned in the least with earthly affairs. Imagine how frustrating it would be to be able to see your loved ones go on with their lives without you, to witness, but not be able to influence, their worst experiences along with their best ones. No thanks.

I hope I will somehow have time with my dad again in the distant future, after my lifetime, but in the mean time, I hope he has no emotional attachment to anything going on "down here".

Just to show you I am not made of stone, here is a funny clip about this topic from the immortal George Carlin. The needle on the irony meter broke when Mr. Carlin died only a few weeks after this HBO special aired. I can only assume he is smiling down on this blog post. And I think he's pleased.

WARNING: If you watch this at work or around kids, keep the sound low. Some of the language isn't safe for work.

Silver Linings

Did my dad die while still in his prime from a terrible disease that struck at random? Or did he stave off a killer for much longer than most anybody does, and manage to have a good few years of enjoying his hobbies and his family? If he were here to answer, unquestionably he would say simply, "Yes."

Pick up two different newspapers some time and read their coverage of the same event. What exactly happened? Perspective matters. Attitude matters.

Even though I had my dad for 31 years before cancer, and only four and a half with it, life before we entered the cancer universe is hard to separate in my memory. Earlier today I flipped through some pictures of a long ago visit to my parents' house. At the time we had "only" two kids, and the older one was not yet three. The baby was all of three months old. There are some great photos of my dad holding the baby, and as I tried getting into my memories of 2006-2007 it dawned on me that we weren't sure these two would ever get the chance to meet. He is the second of my parents' five grandchildren, and my dad got his diagnosis a couple of weeks before we even got to tell everyone that my wife was pregnant with him. As it turned out, they did have time together. The few years they got to enjoy each other's company was entirely too short, yes, but it was all borrowed time. When I think about it, I am grateful that there was any time at all.

Terminal illness forces you to mark time that you might have let slip by without a second thought. It makes a lot of first times that much more important, because they might be "only times". This was exactly the case with my baby daughter and my sister's baby son meeting my dad last spring. But instead of crushing myself with the thought that the grandchildren won't have their papa as they grow up, I try to focus on the silver lining: He got to see them all in the flesh - even the two who were weeks old when they lost him. He held them and kissed them and played with their tiny baby fingers and toes, heard them cry in the same room. Posed for more pictures than he probably wanted to, but that he knew we needed to have.

You can't squeeze a lifetime into a long weekend, but for the babies and for my dad, at least we had the long weekend.

It Takes a Village

Stand-up comic Steven Wright (suggested motto, "I was much funnier in the 80s") had a one-liner about what it's like to reminisce with strangers. I won't bore you with the whole thing, but my dad always loved that dumb joke. As it turns out, when I was mourning his loss, I sort of did end up doing a version of that. Just another one of those things that have happened since I've been cut off from him that he would have found amusing. I could fill a whole separate blog with those.

The day after the funeral I flew back home. I hadn't seen my kids in ten days, and I needed to be home.  We live in the town where my wife grew up. She's got roots here, so we've got roots. Take it from a guy who in the span of fifteen weeks became a dad for the third time and lost a parent: roots are everything.

I've lived in my adopted home town for several years now, but my dad was only ever a visitor here. His home was a thousand miles away. But our house was very crowded all three nights of shiva. One of the nights there were so many kids running around that we thought they would come crashing through the ceiling from upstairs. Joyful noise indeed. Most of the visitors had never met the man, which made the gesture all the more meaningful to me. All these months later I am still deeply touched when I think about it. In the aftermath, my wife and I said to each other that we need to make more of an effort to be there for everyone the way everyone was there for us.

Cancer is horrible. Losing a loved one is horrible. But if you are lucky, even those experiences will afford you a chance to see some of the good things about your life that you didn't know were there. I already was well aware that my town is not like most other places, but the way my friends and neighbors came together to be with me showed me beyond any doubt that this place truly has become my home.