The Greatest Gift

I have some wonderful friends. A few are relatively new but some have been close for decades.

Among my friends are the people who go unnamed but know I am writing of and to them. We’ve been together, you and I, through births and miscarriages, splendid weddings and broken marriages, growing children and dying parents. We’ve wept together in hard times and found ways to support each other. We’ve giggled together at moments of ridiculous joy, even marched together when we believed in the cause.  

Friends like you have become more rare with time. A hundred years ago, most people lived in a single community from early-adulthood to old age. They didn’t change jobs, mates, congregations or neighborhoods. They were near each other physically, making it easier (and sometimes harder) to build intimate, sustained relationships.

Not so now. Although I’ve spent much of my adulthood in-and-out of Florida, since leaving Michigan I’ve spent chunks of time in New York, Maryland, Arizona and (now) California. I changed houses and communities. With time, my interests shifted from one form of art to another, each with its own heroes and practitioners and, thus, each with its own community. Although I never intended it, I moved from one group to another, sometimes losing touch with dear people along the way. My children grew into adults, and my interests grew with them especially when I first held my granddaughter.

I haven’t been as faithful in my friendships as I wish I had. For months and, in some instances, years I’ve owed you a card or letter, a thank-you or I’m-sorry. I wonder why someone has grown silent but I haven’t broken the silence with a call or even an email. I love many of you more than you know, I really do. But I haven’t reached out enough to express that love and I wish I had. 

To the good friends who’ve been in my life through all the ups and downs, know this: You are still very much in my life now. I wonder and worry about how you’re doing in dealing with cancer, in living with dementia, in looking for purpose and meaning beyond your extraordinary careers. Is your family intact? Are your dreams still alive? Have I failed you in any way?

Seeing you now in my mind’s eye I’m grateful for you, My Friend. I would not be who I am were it not for you.

Although I might have doubted the political stance of The Happy Warrior, Hubert H. Humphrey, I’ve never doubted the truth of his reflection when he knew his own life was nearing its end: “The greatest gift of life is friendship,” he said, “and I have received it.”

Me too.

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.