The Upsides of Death

My family and I are currently working through a sudden death of someone central to all of us.  Anne Octavia Jay, my ex-wife, suddenly died.  For months, she was working through some medical issues that seemed surmountable, but then there was some extra-bad news. Then, about two weeks ago it started pouring bad news. This deluge included a sudden diagnosis of stage four cancer.  On Christmas Eve, she suffered cardiac arrest, which led to forty minutes of CPR. In the ICU we learned what kind of damage can happen to a person's brain after forty minutes of CPR.

On the day after Christmas, my two young adult daughters and I gathered around Anne in the ICU to say our goodbyes. I learned that for a patient who has suffered this sort of damage, the fact that she occasionally opened her eyes means nothing at all.   I learned what "comfort care" means. I am learning what it means to be the only surviving parent.  I am learning how hard it can be to lose a parent.  I am learning the awkwardness of being an ex-spouse who loses one's ex-spouse. What am I to be called?  An "ex-widower"? What is the proper name for a person in my position, someone who still cared deeply for my deceased ex but who feels awkward because our marriage fell apart and we divorced each other?

I don't really have an end in mind for this post. Mostly, I'm emoting, but I wanted to share that I was particularly right about one thing. I've always assumed that one can use most "bad" events as good experiences, not just as good learning experiences. We the survivors have learned a lot together.  I now know how to be a better friend to other people who have lost their loved ones.  I now know better how to appreciate the complexity of the human body.  We shouldn't be surprised when our bodies don't work; rather, we should be more more surprised that they ever actually work, given their mind-boggling complexity.  I've learned to appreciate the human heart.  Anne's heart faithfully beat for 59 years, which is a stunning achievement regularly exceeded by the heart-beating streaks of countless other people such as me (I'm in my 60's).

Mostly, I've learned to appreciate the importance of community.  I've seen many dozens of people come out of the woodwork to offer comfort and assistance for my daughters and me in many major and minor ways.  I now have increased respect for the way healthcare workers treat the family of dying patients. I've learned to appreciate straight talk from these professionals.  I've learned to appreciate the patience and kindness of all the people at the cremation service we are using.  We are surrounded by good-hearted people, including countless friends and relatives.  They are everywhere.  They are constantly bringing us flowers and soup and snacks and offers of ever-more help. It has been humbling.

We are in our George Bailey moment and people are running to our rescue in droves to tell us that we are not alone. It feels wonderful.  I know that the hard part will be when all of the adrenaline is gone and when my daughters and I will experience unrelenting emptiness.  That leads me to also appreciate the many friends and professionals who offer grief counseling individually and in groups.

Death in one's family can be one of the better ways to learn what it means to live a good life.  And to paraphrase Tim McGraw, I have better learned to live like I am dying.

I'll end with a Facebook tribute I created for Anne. More than anything else, she wanted to make sure her children were OK. This was her prime directive.  My daughters are working through this with me and I am strongly convinced that we will be ultimately be OK as we continue our life journeys stronger and wiser. Thanks for reading through to the end.

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Meditations on the Remaining Time in our Lives

“The trouble is, you think you have time.” Jack Kornfield, in Buddha’s Little Instruction Book.

I have found that I can better feel my remaining time on Earth by calculating it in terms of months rather than the years. That number is easy to calculate. Merely consult a mortality calculator such as this one. And then, once you see that number, you might ask yourself whether that number is a threat or whether it is a challenge and an opportunity.  My age is 64, which means that I have roughly 18.6 more years before I die.  Multiplying by 12, I can see that I have only 223 months remaining and I don't know whether I will be in good health for most of those months.  I don't know whether those will be months that streak by or whether they will be slowly-passing months like the ones many of us are experiencing during COVID.

When a friend of mine was 30, he told me that he had been accepted to a medical school, but was having second thoughts. He decided to talk with the school counselor, saying: "If I proceed, it will involve 4 years of medical school, one year of internship and 3 years of residency. By the time I am a doctor, I'll be 38 years old!"  The counselor replied, "How old will you be in 8 years if you don't go to medical school?"

“The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.” Seneca

“You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire." Seneca. On The Shortness of Life

How often do you sternly ask yourself this question: "Why are you here?" Do you have an answer that you actually believe? Or are you living a life based on "I don't know"?

What if there really were pearly gates and you really were judged after you were died. What if you were judged by a jury of the 50 people you most admire.  How would you fare?

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Rediscovering Connection at your Local Park

The Internet is an amazing tool that offers us easy ways to connect with each other with very little effort. This magic technology also allows social media sites to pummel us with videos of people bullying each other and physically fighting each other in public places. The triggering "excuses" for these flare-ups are countless. It's often about masks, but many of these videos focus on the bizarre propensity of many people have to divide others into political and “racial” tribes.

In some of these videos people violently assault each other. I recently viewed a video of two families arguing on a store parking lot. Somebody apparently accidentally bumped somebody else, then the situation quickly and needlessly escalated to the point where guns were drawn. I cringe when I see this insanity. A couple of these disheartening videos show up on my feeds every week, posted by people whose motives are often unclear. Some of these videos involve police officers but the great majority do not. Often, every one of the people featured in the video is ill-behaved. Other videos involve unprovoked violence, however, and many of those incidents culminate in physical injuries to an innocent person. Watching too many of these videos plants a false intuition that we are watching typical human beings doing typical things.

Is there a silver lining to these displays of anger and violence? Is it important to sometimes document our human frailties and cruelties? Should we occasionally hold some of these videos up like mirrors to force ourselves to acknowledge the risk that our anger can dangerously escalate into brutality? Can we use some of these videos as teachable moments, showing what can happen when we fail to show restraint and kindness?

Even if there is such a silver lining, it can’t be healthy to watch a steady stream of these videos showing so many people being so shitty to each other. It seems to me that too much exposure to these videos numbs us to the pain and suffering of others. At some point, our in-group tendencies can completely anesthetize our empathy for "the other." Once we cross that line where we no longer care about the pain of others, these videos serve mostly as conflict pornography. For years, Hollywood has been peddling gratuitous violence as entertainment. Movie and TV studios too often stoop to the lowest level of profitable "entertainment." The proliferation of smartphone camera social media videos suggests that there’s no longer any need for Hollywood to continue paying highly trained writers substantial money to concoct their stylized ballets of violence.

In this age of COVID-19, many people are feeling trapped in their homes. Many of us are also transfixed to our screens on which we exposed to far too many videos of people acting badly. Slouching on the couch to watch strangers being mean to each other can’t be harmless. Aren’t these videos causing permanent social damage? And aren’t there better things to do with one's time?

Almost every day, I walk through glorious Tower Grove Park, near my home in St. Louis. On almost every walk I see people from many different demographic and ethnic groups. They show up in the park with their own styles of clothing, music, food, games and language, even now as the weather is turning colder. It is an especially beautiful thing to behold the families at play, parents and their little children. [More . . .]

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