Another Close Call

The idea was that, if I had the cataracts pulled from each eye, I’d not need to remember where I left my glasses this time. For reasons I can’t quite understand, my glasses are always missing – not a crisis, but a constant irritant.

The physician I consulted said the cataracts that had formed on each of my eyes constituted a “fairly normal problem for a person of your age.” Thank you.

Fortunately, the surgical removal would be simple -- no reason to think otherwise. They would lift the cataract from one eye first and then, two weeks later, take care of the other. By doing them one at a time, I’d never be reduced to total blindness. That made sense.

Of course, things didn’t go as expected. For whatever reason, the body to which my cataract was attached rebelled. I’ve been told that my breathing stopped and my heart rate hovered between 10-20 beats per minute. I don’t remember the ambulance ride or follow-up confusion. The whole thing is a totally unhappy blur.

I’m doing alright now, well on my way to recovery. I still can’t find my glasses. But in perspective, my cataracts didn’t make last week’s headlines. The news was all about Autocrat Trump’s friend Autocrat Putin and the incredible courage on display in the Ukraine. My cataracts, and my near-death moment, didn’t even merit a footnote – not in the week when innocents are being slaughtered and the magnificent Paul Farmer, MD, died too young.

If I were telling my life story, against the background of AIDS and cancer and the night my heart stopped in Denver midway through a keynote address, I don’t know if last week’s surgical drama would play a prominent role. It was a frightening experience mostly in retrospect, and another close call in a life that seems to have seen more than its share of them.

All in all, I’d like to live which is why I prefer the “near” part of a near-death experience. It reminds me that medical science remains an imperfect art. The late George Carlin used to ask, “Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do ‘practice’?” Yes, George, it is.

I emerged from anesthesia’s fog with a dim memory of where I was and what had happened. I didn’t know the details but was pretty sure the main theme wasn’t what had been promised. When I was adequately conscious to understand what was being said, I learned that I’d almost died. Taking that in, I said the first thing that came to mind: “I didn’t finish the will.” And it’s true. The will’s still not done, and that worried me.

I have an enormous stockpile of reasons for gratitude. My life has been, and still is, full and satisfying. I’m keenly aware that having a matched pair of cataracts is not uncommon for someone of my age. Much greater is a world filled with pain, injustice, poverty, bloodshed and the arrogance of autocrats.

If there’s a lasting lesson that I’ve taken from the Emergency Room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where I was deposited in the post-surgical scramble, it’s that life is uncertain. We don’t really know over breakfast what lies in wait before dinner. Things may be “routine” but they aren’t guaranteed. We cannot predict what risk will suddenly become reality, what worry will be translated into reality. We know life will end. We don’t, as a rule, know when – but we prefer that it not end now.

The lesson I took home from the hospital this time isn’t complicated. Failure to touch up the will can be fixed; failure to tell someone we love how deeply they’ve mattered to us – such things cannot be fixed.

So hold tightly to those you love. Treasure friends who value you. Waste no time on arrogant tyrants. Accept life as a delicate gift. Take no one who loves you for granted; their lives are as fragile as yours.

And when the evening’s dusk slides over your day, find someone to whom you want to say “thank you for caring,” or “sleep with the angels,” or “know that I love you.”

About This Thing Called Love

Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone and, once again, I’ve successfully ignored another commercial and contrived Hallmark holiday. This year, the hearts and roses were largely overshadowed at least in my Los Angeles neighborhood by America’s more meaningful holiday, the NFL Super Bowl.

Let’s face it, Americans: You can get red roses any time but getting a Super Bowl win is magic performed only on the occasional decade.

I confess that there’s a sweetness to Valentine’s Day that I don’t dismiss lightly. When my boys were little, they never failed to make me a card and deliver it with expectant eyes, knowing I would be thrilled beyond words with their scrawled artwork and indecipherable words. I loved the cards because I loved the boys, not the other way around. I had the love before I held the cards.

But if there’s something sweet about Valentine’s Day, there are also reasons for sadness. While some mates and lovers exchange gifts “just because,” there appear to be at least as many seekers as there are lovers. I’m not much cheered by the fact that dating apps nearly crashed with the overload of people seeking someone to date, potentially someone to love and, even more probably, someone to love them. And the irritably practical side of me is saddened to recognize that this year Americans invested $24 billion in Valentine cards, roses and meals while putting $170 million into the search to cure childhood cancers; c’mon, America, that’s sad.

Like everyone else, I’ve become conditioned to see love in Hollywood images and hear it in romantic music. It’s all as light and airy as confection. Am I just being grouchy and old when I protest that falling in and out of love isn’t love; it’s just waves of hormonally driven affection and come and go? Revolving-door romance is about as nourishing to our souls (and social structures like marriage) as the frosting on my favorite carrot cake.

Perhaps I should keep these thoughts to myself. I have children, after all, and a grandchild. They may some time want to make me a Valentine and I wouldn’t want to miss it. I’m just a sap for children’s expressions of love. Give me a sloppy kiss from a two-year-old whose face is lathered with peanut butter and I’ll tell you this is about as good as life gets.

But then comes adulthood. Valentines go into the drawer. And, by now, it’d be good if we knew something about love that isn’t the plot of a romcom or the subject of one more misty photograph of hands being held by candlelight. Of course I’m not talking about romance any more. Now I’m leaning into love. Real love. The kind of love that doesn’t fade when our hair thins and greys, when our energy fades at four in the afternoon and we wonder if we’ll outlive this or the next pandemic.

Let me warn you: I’m going to quote C.S. Lewis which means I’m going to get serious. Lewis both thought and wrote brilliantly. And, germane to this moment, Lewis loved deeply. As his love for his bride, Joy, exploded into a wonderful marriage, he almost immediately began to lose her. Joy was sick through much of their marriage. Just short of their fifth anniversary, she slipped away.

In the shadow of a loss he could not contain, Lewis wrote: “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” If you wonder what he meant, very slowly read the way he described how we avoid that vulnerability:

“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. Because to love is to be vulnerable.”

If I love my child, I am vulnerable to the pain that may one day come with rejection. Loving a grandchild or a great friend is taking a risk with one’s heart. Lewis, for all his brilliance, could  find no easy comfort in the wake of Joy’s passing. His heart was broken, ripped apart by an illness he could not stop and a death he could not prevent. He knew love, knew it intensely, and fully understood his reference to caskets and coffins. He knew the selfish desire to spare ourselves pain and he knew, oh how he knew, the cost of vulnerability.  

So…have I loved and been loved? Yes.

Has love hurt? Of course.

Has my heart been broken? More than once, for a time.

To be fully human is, in fact, to be vulnerable, as Kate Bowler reminds us with the title of her newest book, “No Cure to Being Human.” The best we can do is accept our vulnerability, seek out those we trust to deal gently with us, and care for one another until we or they, like Lewis, feel the awful weight of loss.

I admit I’m skeptical when a pundit or a hippie tells me that the resolution of all injustice, the answer to racism, the proper response to White Nationalism – the “fix” for all these evils – is love. It’s too simple. It doesn’t work. It can’t be right. Then comes another Valentine’s Day sparking another round of thoughts about love, and I wonder. It may be that there’s no cure to being human. But it’s also true that there’s no insight deeper than that of C.S. Lewis.

Let us go bravely toward next year’s Valentine’s Day, being vulnerable with courage. Let us love without holding back.

intimacy in a Pandemic

Whatever else we say of the COVID pandemic, we can safely say this: It’s changed us.

Two years ago we showered in the morning and rinsed our hands before eating. Now we wash our hands maniacally, as if we’ve committed some blood-soaked crime to be scrubbed away with soap and water.

If we dare step outside our homes, we stay six feet from other human beings. Social distancing, once imagined as a neurotic fear of nearness to others, is now a mandate.

Face masks in banks are no longer signs of a robbery in progress. They represent our desire to stay well, and our willingness to protect others from us. The idea of “school” has been reinvented with “virtual” and “in-person,” and our assumptions about work have made the same move.  

For some the overwhelming feature of the pandemic has been isolation. For two years, I’ve been home, and almost nowhere else save for critical healthcare appointments and the occasional moment with my toddler granddaughter. My days begin with a cup of “Joe” and end with “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Polio survivors in the 1950s often endured life in so-called “iron lungs.” For these wretched folk, television was redemptive, bringing a connection to the larger world beyond their six-by-three-foot life-saving tomb. I’d never have identified with this experience had it not been for the past 23 months. While I’m not suffering as they did, I’m finding my interchange with the world where they found theirs: television. It takes me into the world and, more importantly, it comes into mine with a power and intimacy I’m only now recognizing.

Take Rachel Maddow, for example. She comes into the homes of millions of Americans nightly. Her voice is as familiar as what we’d hear at a family dinner. Her smile is infectious. When we say “Rachel,” everyone knows who we mean. She’s my companion every weekday evening.

No wonder that I felt a tinge of panic when, earlier this week, she announced a brief (2-month) hiatus to focus on some projects that are wilting for lack of her time. I understand. But I’m not sure I approve. Who’s going to fill her place in my evenings? Who else can analyze America’s political landscape with her genius? With her bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and her doctorate in political science from Oxford University, she knows whereof she speaks. I can’t imagine understanding the world without her nightly visits.

Besides, I have three personal connections to Rachel. First, we met once.  She was incredibly gracious. If I was a little awe-struck, she immediately put me at ease. She asked about my experience in the AIDS community as someone who had studied AIDS in-depth (she did, for her doctoral thesis). I was grateful to be in her presence; she spoke as if the honor were hers. Amazing.

Second, we share a political legacy. Asked once what it meant to be a “liberal” she said it was simple: “It means I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform.” Me too.

And, third, she’s stepping away from her nightly visits to my home in part to work on a film adapted from “Bag Man,” a podcast she hosted about the 1970s scandal and resignation of then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. It was Agnew who unwittingly changed my life.

Agnew was Nixon’s vice president, and he was found to be accepting bribes and cash influence while in the vice president’s office. Literally. Men came by with bags full of cash to support Agnew’s causes and candidates and lavish lifestyle. Then the truth slithered out, and he was offered a choice between prison and resignation. He took resignation, thereby opening a position that Nixon filled by plucking Congressman Gerald R. Ford from the House of Representatives and having him confirmed in December of 1973. (Stay with me here.)

Then came Nixon’s own scandal (Watergate), and eight months after he had been chosen as Vice President – August 8, 1974 – Ford became President. He’d come from Michigan, my home state. He knew our family. He knew I’d organized some events. And before the winter holidays of 1974, I had been named the first woman “advanceman” in White House history. Thanks to Spiro T. Agnew, I had become a footnote in history.

I don’t expect to show up in Rachel’s “Bag Man” film. But I’m counting on her to show up in my home each weeknight evening come April. I can endure two months of isolation while waiting for her return but, like the pandemic itself, her hiatus needs to come to an end.

Besides, what Rachel has brought to me, and to so many, isn’t merely a casual intimacy in her conversational style. Its genuine insight based on knowledge. She sees the immorality of the Moral Majority in historic perspective. She saw the seeds of White Nationalism and the violence of January 6 long before others. She’s wise, and I will miss her wisdom.

I totally understand the need to have a break, to re-sort priorities, to chase deferred dreams, to make a difference in new ways. I get it, and I support it. No one deserves it more than her.

But evenings at home are going to be a bit lonely without house calls from Dr. Maddow.