When the people you love (or just like, or at least thought were always going to be there) start dying around you, as an adult, it starts to make it hard to deny that the world changes and that everything around us is temporary, even us. That sobering message has hit me yet again in the last week, as my father-in-law passes from here to the next, and I head off back to the midwest to be with my wife and her family.
The stoics believed that a person could be in terrible pain and torture but still be happy, because in the end it is your reaction to what happens around you that governs your life and trying to change things that are beyond your control is a fool’s errand (that’s my basic interpretation). In this instance, I am struggling to believe truly that he’s gone. Instead, I have only spoken to my wife and family over the phone and been kept abreast. I didn’t see the downward decline myself. It’s easy to imagine it’s all just a dream, that when I return to Chicago he will be there. I can hear his voice, see his face, nothing has changed—and yet everything has. And so, to focus on my reaction, how I respond to this is the one thing that I can truly control. And yet, I would argue that I can also focus on helping and being there for those I love.
I remember several years ago, visiting my college in rural Ohio. It was years since I had graduated. I think perhaps I was there for my 10th-year reunion. Some things had changed, but many things were exactly the same (a lot more has changed since that time, so I’m curious what it will be like to return again). The school is tiny, and it was pretty much empty as the school year was over or it was break, I can’t remember. My wife and I (we went to the same college, but only started dating years later) walked the campus up and down and all around. We went to the college bookstore (one of the best in the nation, some magazine once declared!) and it was fun, but, something was missing. The people. Not just that there weren’t that many students there, but those that were there were strangers. It was the people I went to school with, who were there when I was there that made it what it was. The buildings, the trees, the glorious paths and architecture, and delicious bagels at the bookstore, all those things were just window dressing for the people who accompanied me on that journey. Especially as the school is so tiny and so far from a metro area (in fact it’s not, but it felt that way). Without the texture of faces, friends and those I didn’t even really know but who were part of my time there, the place felt empty and a little dead (a simulacrum of the place I once knew). To a student who was there during my visit, the place must have felt vibrant and alive as they were still experiencing it as an undergraduate. We were in the same place, but were having totally different experiences. I remember thinking to myself, how incredible it was that I spent four years in this place and loved it (even when I didn’t! Lots of drama, beautiful afternoons in Adirondack chairs, reading, talking, drinking in the sun). It was perhaps the most emotionally rich four years of my life, living in that Midwestern rural college town. It seemed exciting, engaging, challenging, wonderful—at the time.
That experience was one that showed me how context and the people who make up our lives are the true furniture upon which we structure and shape our own lives. Without them the world feels empty (something that persists after we have moved on, it creates a strange dissonance). And as you get older, you feel that more and more as those people upon whom you depend to give the world a sense of context and continuity (from moment to moment) begin to disappear. You (or I) begin to cling or want to cling to something more permanent, more “real” and yet ironically perhaps less real, more grounding. I’m not talking about religion, but a way of being in the world, a sense of larger meaning and perspective, a humility that offers some solace to your rather humble place in the universe. You’ll never have answers to your questions. No one will ever offer you an easy way through. And the people you love will be here one minute and then gone the next and you can’t do anything about it. Through it all, this momentary glimpse of a greater story is the only answer we may receive, but one that is bewildering, confusing, incomplete, and the memories of those who are here and those who are.
In India, I have heard, there is a time in the life of the elderly (exclusively men I think), where they renounce their lives and property (or at least for a while) and begin to think about more spiritual matters, traveling to holy sites, living the life of a poverty-stricken holy man (holy person?), preparing themselves for death. It is seen as a valuable and worthwhile pursuit. A time to reflect and distance oneself from the everyday. We in our society have nothing really similar to that. People fear retirement, obsolescence, and death. Rather than a time to reflect on life and prepare for the next, we run and try to hold on to something that will eventually fail us (plastic surgery, Lambos, etc.)
I guess where I am with all this right now is this. I want to nurture my relationships with the people in my life. I want to reach out to those people who I haven’t spoken to in some time and let the small slights and petty arguments that became distance fall away. I want to be grateful for every moment. The universe was here long before we arrived and will be long after we are gone (and perhaps we’ll still be kicking in some alternate reality of the metaverse?) Whatever that means, I take from some sense that there’s much more happening here than I/we’ll ever know or be aware of. Life is for living. So live it. Don’t focus on regrets.
That is all for now. See, not too negative. I’ll get there though.
A sheynem dank.
