not so subtle foreshadowing...

from Robert Fulghum's All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten

In the early dry dark of an October's Saturday evening, the neighborhood children are playing hide-and-seek. How long since I played hide-and-seek? Thirty years; maybe more. I remember how. I could become part of the game in a moment, if invited. Adults don't play hide-and-seek. Not for fun, anyway. Too bad.

Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn't keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn't playing the game the way it was supposed to be played. There's hiding and there's finding, we'd say. And he'd say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we'd all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn't play with him anymore if he didn't get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He's probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know.

As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, "GET FOUND, KID!" out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It's real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.

A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn't want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn't need them, didn't trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn't say good-bye.

He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. "I don't want anyone to know." "What will people think?" "I don't want to bother anyone."

Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.

Medieval theologians even described God in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.

"Olly-olly-oxen-free." The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says "Come on in, wherever you are. It's a new game." And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.

- Robert Fulghum, "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten"

return to what?

     School?  Oh yeah, I'm a med student.  School starts next Monday?  Really?  Huh, I guess I should show up.  To most participants of this mad, fantastic journey, med school would seem a dream come true.  So few get a shot at getting a chance at running the gauntlet and many work so hard for so long to make it happen.  I should be grateful.  And at some level I am, I guess I am.  But for me, it's so much more complicated.  Before I ever even got to my hospital training (happens next summer, by the way), my mom pointed out to me that the FIRST person I ever pronounced dead, so to speak, was my brother.  One can never, ever unlive that.  And now my dad faces his own gauntlet of stem cell transplant.  Yes, it's a hope that my brother didn't have.  But it's not without it's own cost.  Ten to fifteen percent of the patients die right off the bat.  Infection or rejection, not that it matters so much as to the cause.  Nevermind the psychological toll of exchanging a year or more of one's life to the medical establishment for the hopes of a long remission.  Now do that on top of grieving the loss of your son/brother to that same foul, loathsome and damnable disease.  So, yeah, add the concept of medical school to that and it becomes more than just a little bit ridiculous.  Med school is notoriously rigorous and stressful in it's own right, and deservedly so.  But it can't help taking a back seat to the more personal issues at hand.  Emotion trumps reason every time.

return

     Well, I'm back.  I took a break and went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.  Notice that I/Thoreau didn't say 'happily' or 'cheerfully'.  Deliberately.  There's a difference.  To take life (and death) and "reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world."  I took my son, as usual, for our annual summer trip to the backcountry mountains of Colorado.  But this time I also took my nephew.  I was not expecting a light and easy trip.  He just lost his dad.  I just lost my brother.  How could it be anything but reducing life to the genuine meanness of it?  What did I bring back from it?  I'm not sure.  Honestly, it's still day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute for me.  Of what I'm not sure could fill an ocean at this point.  The anger is gone but an aimless malaise has set in its place. 
     Beyond that, I'm now ready to put up the video from my brother's memorial service.  His wife and son put it together.  Tragically beautiful.  At the memorial, I wasn't able to see much of it because I was sobbing uncontrollably.  At least now, I can pause it to recover.  I don't know that I'll ever be able to get through it without breaking down.  And to be honest, I don't think that I want to be able to get through this without breaking down.  The day that happens is the day my heart hardens just a wee bit too much for my comfort.  Damn, I miss my brother.

break

I'm going to be taking a small break from blogging for about a week and a half.  Just need a little break.

happy birthday

     My brother should be turning 40 years old today.  Could've, should've, would've....didn't.  I've thought a lot about what would be an appropriate way of honoring his birthday?  And by what criteria is something 'appropriate'?  It will feel right, is my answer.  So I'll tell a story....

     Once upon a time, there was a young lad.  His father a preacher, and his mother an employee at a bookstore, they were not exactly financially well to do.  So it came with great surprise that one day for his 12th birthday, the boy received a shiny new bike.  By his standards, it was quite an expensive bike.  I'm sure it was by standards of the wallet of my parents, too.  The boy was young and impetuous, as many a young boy is.  He went riding his bike with several of his friends.  They stopped inside a shop for no more than five minutes.  While his bike was a wonder by his mind, it was surrounded by bikes that were two- to three-fold more expensive.  Ironically, the thief who walked by couldn't tell the difference either and stole the shiny new one.  Devastated and heartbroken, insult was added to injury by necessitating a long, arduous walk home.  Embarrassed and ashamed, he recounted the tale to his parents.
     The boy had a brother who was four years his senior.  Being older in age and more responsible, the older brother had saved up some of his earnings from his menial job of tending to the lawns of more affluent people.  Seeing his younger sibling suffer so moved his easily movable heart.  So he offered up his own hard-earned currency to purchase his younger brother another bike, shiny and pretty as the previous one.  And a lock. 

Happy birthday, brother.

the endless knot

     For about a week, the clouds parted and the curiousness of life pulled me in.  The anger that hung thick like a fog was nowhere to be seen.  Finally, a break!  Surely, the grief would be felt again but it would manifest in different forms.  What naivete.  The fog of anger settles once again in the valley of my mind, thick as it ever was.  Nothing much catches my attention.  I wake up.  I spend half the day battling the fog of anger.  As it begins to slowly burn off, I am left exhausted by the struggle.  Once the anger is placated, nothing fills the emotional void.  Barren emptiness.  I go to sleep numb, wake up and greet the fog again the next morning.  I am Sisyphus, doomed to roll a boulder up the hill only to watch it roll down again.  Repeat ad nauseum.
     The Kubler-Ross model of grief seems to imply some linearity to it.  I am not feeling that.  It's cyclical to me.  Endlessly so.  So it was with some comfort that I came across this passage from Facing Death and Finding Hope:

      Within a few weeks, the "full awareness" of my loss cycled around again, and the heart-wrenching pain and despair were just as intense as they had been the previous month. I was shocked. Why had the pain returned, as fresh and deep as before?
      "All right," I bargained, "maybe I didn't full experience and express all my grief, so this time I will, and then it will be finished."...A month later, the intense life-disrupting pain returned, along with my "full awareness" of the death.  The following month, again.  And the next month, again, with the same depth of intensity as the very first time.

      For two years, she went through this repeating cycle of grief - shock and disbelief, full awareness of the loss, and recovery - over the loss of her husband to cancer.  As she describes it, each trough was just as painful and just as raw as in the beginning.  Stages don't even begin to describe what I'm experiencing.  It's a chaotic labyrinth with no beginning and no end.  More of an endless knot, really.  A relatively recent study empirically tracked the emotions following a loss.  In this study, anger peaked at ~5.5 months followed by depression peaking at 6 months post loss.  And the downward slope after the peak wasn't exactly steep.  You mean this shit gets worse?

the needs of the dying

You know, the pain can be unbearable sometimes.  On other days, the pain is just there, like a bad toothache, and I get tense and irritable.  Please forgive me when I am in a bad mood; you may not know what it is like to live with constant pain and discomfort.  What is hardest is when no one believes the amount of pain I am having; that makes me feel crazy.  I need to be believed and I need to have my pain relieved.  But please don't knock me unconscious to do it.  I would rather experience a little pain, and still be conscious - to enjoy my life and my family, and to do my spiritual practice - while I am in the last few weeks of my life.

     My first reaction?  No comment, I'm not going to touch that one.  But that's not facing up to the situation.  Pain was an everpresent battle, and that's an understatement.  At times, my brother came down on the side of experiencing pain and still being conscious.  But towards the end, he told me, "make the pain go away."  This battle caused me to bear a still raw wound.  I did the best I could....but the doubt still gnaws at my guts, "what if it wasn't good enough?  What if he felt more pain than was necessary?  What if I failed him?"  When it will begin to heal is anyone's guess.  Probably not until I have more experience in managing the pain of more patients.