Life's debt, circa 2009

Life's debt, circa 2009

 

Real life began for me the day my first child was born and the second child, two years later, multiplied the joy. We (wife Donna) had two daughters and the youngest will turn forty this year. As a twentieth century man born to the fortunate circumstances of a middle class American, I have lived a life of many blessings. My two children and their five offspring are healthy, and so my mantra, “As long as your children are healthy, you have all of the world’s blessings,” applies to me daily. My other stock phrase is, “All we ask for is health. Then we have a fighting chance.” 

 

So as far as real problems go, I have none.

Still it would be foolish to think that somehow I have been specially blessed.  I am reminded of a call, a few years back from my daughter Brett who was working as a nurse at a hospital in Los Angles. She had worked a 12 hr. shift on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and toward the end of her shift she was called upon to draw blood from an eleven year old child who was suffering from cancer and was in the Pediatrics ICU. The blood work had to be done every hour so she had to wake the child if he was asleep, as was the case this time. Groggy and in constant pain the young boy moaned faintly to Brett as she awakened him to take his blood for the umpteenth time , “Oh,” he said weakly, “I’ve got so many problems.”

She said that nurses are taught to work focusing on the tasks at hand but at this moment the soft anguish of this young boy broke her heart into a thousand pieces right there. I listened to the story, and immediately was struck with the comparison of this boy’s life to my own and to my daughters. Sadly, the story of the suffering child is not unique or unusual. Thousands of similar pleas are sounded all over the earth each new day. And yet, I wander about this earth, forgetting the very dumb luck that somehow has applied to me.

   

And so it is with the reminder of the small boy in the Los Angeles hospital that I begin again my daily effort to live an undistracted life. I am not sure what this means, except that the concept feels right, even sacred. To me it means don’t waste a healthy life. In other words, any good that I may do let me do it now …. Nice words. Essentially, to clarify, Do unto others ... period. 

Susan Sontag was said to have felt that she was somehow “special” when it came to beating the cancer that had ravaged her body over the course of a decade. She fought on gallantly, but ultimately succumbed. I don’t know why there are those of us that are allowed to avoid the many acute and unspeakable sufferings of the world. I cannot believe that it is because we have been singled out, as special, but I do know this: that living as best one can is the least one can do, to honor those that have had so much less. In my case I will think of that young boy in the hospital, and try again, and again.

And so, what to do in the face of so much suffering and so many lives cut short? The one thing that surfaces is that although you may escape severe pain, your own life will be short as well?  Do not squander your good fortune, I tell myself. Even ninety years, a respectable, but largely unreasonable, outer limit, is well within my own view now, at age seventy.

Must our destiny be like that felt by Joan Didion’s husband quoted by the author from her book, “The Year of Magical Thinking”? I refer to John Dunne’s remarks to Joan upon returning from the hospital where his daughter was critically ill, “Everything [he had done] was worthless," wrote Didion, "a novel he had written, a review for the New Yorker, all worthless.”

Dunne is not alone. The “everything is worthless” notion has risen to the top of practically every thinking head, at one time or another. Me? I am left with only this: that this life of freedom, freedom from pain and suffering, however fleeting, comes with a debt. And to live honorably, that debt must be paid.

While I may fail miserably at this, I vow to forever try, to remember, "Do onto others" - again and again.   

"Vow to forever try?" Sounds a bit less than candid. 

The reason is that, sadly, I've found that  … to actually "do that" … well … many things get it the way. Life, for one thing. Turns out that, though, objectively, do unto others was easy to do – well not really: forgiveness, for one thing was not easy. The point is, the easy version of “do unto others” was also easy to forget about. Not that there were obstacles, but acting on the golden rule wasn't built into my automatic pilot mentality. My auto-pilot, that which I acted upon on a daily basis, was ego gratification, pure and simple: trying to make others think highly of me. And living on that “automatic pilot” was a hard habit to break.

I can only say, "Keep trying."