R.I.P.

We took Bonnie to the vet today to be euthanized. Because we got to the clinic ten minutes before they closed for the weekend, we had to use a vet we didn’t know. She asked if we wanted to be present, and we were taken aback because we’re not the kind of people who avoid the presence of death. As the vet administered the fatal injection, Peggy lay on the floor hugging Bonnie and sobbing while I jabbered on about unrelated things, so you might say that I wasn’t any too present for death myself.

When we got home, the first thing Peggy wanted to do was to cuddle, but the first thing I wanted to do was to bury Bonnie. We waited overnight to bury Baxter when he died three years ago, and by that time, he was cold, stiff, and looked pitiful, so I wanted to get Bonnie in the ground while she was still warm and looked like she was asleep. I’ve been in so much physical pain that I worried that digging a grave would leave me worse-off, so Peggy helped.

Before the burial, I took Bonnie indoors and showed her to our cat because I wanted him to know why she went away. Maybe it didn’t help, but I’ve done that with other pets, and never saw any reason to think it was harmful. While Brewsky smelled Bonnie, I wondered if I could ever love him the way I’ve loved so many dogs. I can tell that there’s a lot going on in that little head of his, but I can’t usually tell what it is, and that leaves a gulf between us.

After the burial, I felt like I was in a movie in which happy images of Bonnie’s life ran before my eyes one after another. Things I hadn’t thought of in years came back like a vivid dream in resplendent color, and I beat them down as best I could. I wanted to be alone, so while I did yard work, Peggy called friends and relatives for support. I was surprised because Peggy usually avoids talking on the phone. After thinking about it for two hours, I took 25 mgs of oxycodone, and it cheered me considerably.

Some people don’t understand how anyone can grieve for a dog, but I’ve grieved more for dogs than for any of the people I’ve lost, probably because my dogs were with me all day everyday and were innocent and dependent.

Peggy won’t want another dog for years, if ever, but I already want one. On the other hand, the last three years of Bonnie’s life were tough on Peggy and me because Bonnie became blind, fearful, arthritic, and started to lose her hearing. People say that dogs adjust well to blindness, but Bonnie spent those years walking into walls and furniture, and it really got to me until I started taking Cymbalta and marijuana.

It’s also true that I started thinking of dogs differently after I had my shoulder surgeries. After two of those surgeries, Peggy was out of town for a week or more during the early stages of my recovery and, it being winter, I found it really, really hard to take two dogs (Baxter was still alive after the first surgery) walking in the seasonal drizzle everyday. I couldn’t dry them and clean their feet adequately with one hand; I worried constantly that they would trip me; and I had a hell of a time just keeping myself from getting wet. One day, a pit bull attacked Baxter, and I had to beat it off with one arm. Luckily, it was a young female and not too aggressive. 

After my third surgery, Peggy was out of town again, and Bonnie became ill with autoimmume hemolytic anemia. For at least a week, she was so sick that I expected her to die at any moment. She needed medicine every eight hours, but this meant having to shove the pills so far down her throat that she couldn’t spit them out, and I couldn’t do it with one arm, so my friends Ellie and Josh came over every eight hours. It was then that I started to think of dogs as a liability that I would be better off without. I also resented Bonnie because throwing tennis balls to her hundreds of times a week for years was probably what ruined my shoulders.

For the last two years of her 15 years and 7 months, not a day went by but what I wished she would die sooner rather than later because her infirmities were so upsetting, especially listening to her bump into things, which made me cringe every time she did it. Dogs need far more from us humans than most of us are able—or even willing—to give them, and I found this especially true of a blue heeler because blue heelers want to be on the move every waking moment. If she hadn’t been my dog, I wouldn’t have believed how much exercise she needed, and when she went blind, I couldn’t satisfy her need except by taking her walking, and my arthritic knees made even that difficult. I was afraid that when she did die, I wouldn’t enjoy remembering her because her last few years were so hard for me (they seemed harder for Peggy and me than they did for her), but I don’t think that’s going to be true. I think I’m going to remember her whole life.

Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, time stays, we go*

I imagine myself standing on a conveyer belt like the ones people walk on at airports, only I can neither hasten nor retard the progress of this belt for it is carrying me through time. I wave goodbye forever to the passing moments: to my 64^th birthday last Friday; to the sad face of my beloved neighbor who left a half hour ago for a new home in another state; and to the newness of a baby girl named Sidney who was born less than two days ago. As I held Sidney, I thought back to 1949 when I was born, to the people who were in their sixties then who saw me as I was seeing her, knowing that they would die as I was coming into maturity. So does each generation watch its successor enter the world helpless, and its successor watch it leave the world helpless. If only the helplessness of the old could be as cherished as the helplessness of the young. But even for the young there is the foreboding of sorrow, for who can contemplate the pain that they will know and not grieve for them and wish in vain to protect them? 

*Henry Austin Dobson

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced." Keats

I was in the kitchen last night when I was suddenly so overcome by the fear of death that I couldn't have felt much worse had I been on the threshold of being violently murdered. I forgot that I ever felt any differently, and I wondered why I hadn't long since killed myself simply to escape my terror of dying. I recalled that before Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun, he had tried to throw himself into an airplane propeller, and I imagined that I was experiencing a taste of that same desperation. 

A few minutes later, I put on a Czechoslovakian film called The Cremator, which turned out to be the darkest, scariest movie I had ever seen, and the fact that it was also brilliantly funny only made the horror worse. Indeed, I had to steel myself to remain in my chair. Then, I remembered that I had eaten some marijuana an hour before the fear started, and I realized that my emotion had been drug-inspired and wasn't really the totality of my life. Marijuana exacts a price for its insights, and if I use it when I'm already upset, as I did last night, the result can be such that I wouldn't hesitate to call it insanity. I survive such times simply by riding them out. I was afterwards exhausted but couldn't sleep so I took an Ambien. It is now the next afternoon, and I've been weak, dizzy, and anxious, all day. I just took a large dose of marijuana because I want to see where it will take me when I am already in such a state. 

You probably read that last sentence in horror and with the question Why?! in your mind. My answer is that I am on a quest in the realm of ultimate reality, and marijuana untethers my consciousness so that I can free associate a hundred times more effectively than usual, and the result of this free association is oftentimes new insights. As you might imagine, given that I'm an atheist, I hesitate to use the word quest because many are sure to assume that such adventured are spiritually inspired and, if successful, will lead to God. My conclusion has been just the opposite. 

Why is this, do you think?

People usually undertake spiritual quests with a pretty good idea of what they're going to experience, and this determines what they do experience. I came at my quest from the opposite direction, that is I started with faith and lost it. That's the thing about spiritual quests, once you give up your preconceptions regarding the nature of ultimate reality, you don't know where you're going to exit the rabbit hole. I know where I exited, and it is here that I will make my stand unless something unexpected happens. What I mean by this is that I try to be open to what many of you call spiritual realities, but the only reason I see to think they exist is that so many people believe in them. 

Why doesn't the firm belief of millions of people over thousands of years lead you too to believe? 

I suspect that people believe for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with external reality. The first is that they are raised to believe as they do, and the second is that they are probably, to some extent, evolutionarily programmed to believe in a spiritual realm.

But, if your conclusion is that the spiritual realm is imaginary, why are you still on a quest? 

The fact that spirits don't exist doesn't make reality less profound or the search for the best ways to live and think less meaningful. In fact, I think the opposite could be true, and here is why. For those who believe in a wise, powerful, and benevolent spiritual realm, the goal is to live in consistency with the desires of that realm just as a child lives in consistency with the desires of its parents. This usually results in a high degree of conformity among those who put their trust in a particular book or teacher. By contrast, I am alone in the darkness with no one to guide me. I say that I am alone because it truly is my road to travel, and the fact that others have traveled it hasn't proven to be of much benefit to me. I can only have confidence in that which I experience because it is only experience that seems real, although I can never be sure that it is real. I just know that it's the only light that I have to go by. As I live it, atheism is stark and bleak, but it is hardly shallow. However dismal the lessons, the quest itself is its own reward.

A troubled man’s re-conversion and death

I’ve only known one person who had serious and prolonged doubts about religion who ever permanently returned to it, and that person was my father. He didn’t regain his religion because he finally found answers to the questions that had plagued him, but because his wife died and this left him alone, feeble, in failing health. His only help came from his daughter who found little time for him despite the fact that she lived in a house that he had built for her next to his own.

After his re-conversion, Dad and God conversed at length every night. God invariably monopolized the conversation, but Dad never complained. One of God’s messages was that Dad was about to win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, so he no longer needed his life savings. Dad told everyone at church that he had already won because in his mind, the fact that his number hadn’t actually been drawn was a technicality. His brothers and sisters in the Lord (Church of Christ people call one another brother and sister) were so delighted that they stopped treating him like a disheveled old eccentric who ranted during services, but like a beloved elder whom they were very glad to see. I called his preacher, and told him that my Dad had very little in the way of life savings, and that he hadn’t won a damn thing. The preacher suggested that I just wanted the money for myself.

A few months later, Dad left Mississippi and moved to Oregon to live with Peggy and me. Each morning over breakfast, he would stare at us through Ancient Mariner eyes as he conveyed God’s latest message. We comforted ourselves with the knowledge that he at least hadn’t brought his yard sign to Oregon, the one announcing that he was a “Prophet of God.” He did bring his habit of standing up in church and rebuking the congregation because, as God told him, they sinned by not using the King James Bible. The people in the two churches he attended here were as obstinate in their sins as the ones in Mississippi (living prophets are usually considered insane), so he eventually stayed home on Sundays.

His next brainstorm was to order business-size cards containing his name followed by the word “prophet,” our address, and the sentence, “Come see me if you need help.” He planned to give these cards to homeless mean and anyone else who looked down and out. Peggy and I stopped laughing about the hellfire sermons he was inflicting upon churches now that he represented a threat to our own lair. It was tough knowing that we simply had to impose our will upon this man who had been mentally ill since childhood and who valued independence above life itself. Indeed, Dad’s drive for independence was such that he would permanently balk if he even suspected that someone might be trying to persuade him to do something.

Peggy and I were the only people I ever knew who had an intuitive understanding of how to present a proposal to him in such a way that he wouldn’t lower his head like a bull and start building toward an explosion. On his worse days, a person needed tact to ask my father if he wanted a cup of coffee (“I don’t have to beg!”). On his best days, we could come right out and ask him to do almost anything as long as we made it clear that it would be a tremendous favor for which we would be eternally grateful. So it was that we picked a good day to ask him to cancel his card distribution program, and he agreed. We weren’t always so lucky, and there were two occasions on which one or the other of us simply had to say, “I’m sorry, Tom [Peggy called him Tom; I called him Dad], but such-and-such just isn’t going to happen.”

Peggy’s turn to confront him came when we told him that we were going to build a room for him at the other end of the house because we were a married couple and needed our privacy, Dad said he would go live under the bridge across the street if we didn’t want him with us anymore. Peggy responded, “I’m awfully sorry to hear that, Tom. We’ll really miss you, and if you ever want to move into the room we’re going to build, you’ll be welcome. Then, she asked if he would like to go shopping for furnishings for the new room, and he said he would. My father’s love for Peggy was one of the thing that touched me most about him.

My father said that his time with Peggy and me was the happiest of his life, yet he realized that his deteriorating condition posed a threat to his independence, and for this and other reasons, he decided to die by not taking his Lasix (a diuretic that he used for congestive heart failure). Other reasons that he wanted to stop his medicine were: he felt it beneath his dignity to take pills for a chronic ailment (“I’d rather be dead than to know that my life’s in that bottle,”); he believed God wanted him to go off his medicine as a test of faith, and would save him at the last minute; and he said that drug companies were greedy, and he had rather die, “…than to let the sons-of-bitches cheat me.”

I experimented with sneaking his pills into his food and found that I could get away with it indefinitely. I couldn’t justify it though. I had to think about the matter long and hard because I wanted to be sure that I was deciding on the basis of fairness and compassion rather than my desire to be free of the stress of being his caregiver. I talked the situation over with Peggy and several friends, and they validated my decision. That was important to me because my own feelings were so ambivalent. The crux of the matter was whether Dad was sane enough to make such a choice, but since he had always been insane, the distinction seemed less important than it would with someone who was acting out of character.

Nine days before his death, Dad apparently lost hope that God would save him because he said to me, “I want you to promise that you won’t let me suffer, even if you have to ease me out.” I promised, although I felt annoyed that he was willing to put me in possible legal jeopardy when he had already endured so much suffering without ever once thinking to ease himself out. I had grown up listening to this man threaten suicide so often that it got boring, and now he wanted me to kill him! Still, I considered it my duty. Death is no stranger to me, and I know I could euthanize someone. If you’re horrified by this, let me inform you that I’m no less horrified to live in a country that thinks it’s God’s will to let people suffer to any extreme, no matter how hopeless their condition. 

Drowning over a period of days or weeks isn’t the worst possible death, but it’s plenty bad enough.  In fact, it’s so bad that my father needed many attempts before he was able to pull it off.  A day after he would stop his Lasix, he would look puffy, and his breathing would become labored. A few days after that, he would be too weak and uncoordinated to walk, and it would take him considerable effort just to lift a spoon to his mouth. His skin would turn the color of burgundy; and he would gasp for air like a fish out of water, his whole body swollen. He might stick it out for a week or more before he would go back to the Lasix. By the next day, he would be a new man.

The good part about dying of congestive heart failure is that when you’re pretty far gone, you fall into a coma. After that, you don’t appear to suffer, but the people who are sitting there listening to you drown on the green slime that bubbles continuously from your nose and mouth are doing plenty of suffering for you. Against his wishes, I saved my father the first time he came close enough to death to pass out, but after the cursing he gave the doctors, the nurses, and me when he awakened in the ER, I knew he was ready to die and that I was ready to let him. That was two years before the end, and as bad as those two years were, I’m proud that I didn’t ship him off to some waiting room for the grave like my sister wanted to do, and I’m proud that I married a woman who treated my father as lovingly as if he had been her own. Without Peggy, who knows what my father’s last years would have been like.

To be a brother to the insensible rock...the sluggish clod…*

I meditate on death and little but death. In every face, I see the eyes of a corpse, but it’s also my own corpse that I see. My body becomes cold and rigid, my skin bloodless and waxy. My eyes glaze and liquefy. My back mottles with coagulated blood. I stink and bloat until I burst. Nowhere in the universe does there exist the being that was me. After a few years, it’s as if I never lived.

I tell myself: “Death is the way of things, and is only fearful for thinking it so. Besides, death has its advantages. No more wiping my ass, going to the dentist, catching colds, cleaning dog vomit out of carpets, or a thousand other chores and maladies. And then there are the big things that death transcends, things like war, crime, cancer, accidents.”

At sixteen, death seemed mysterious and exotic, a merging of God, sex, Satan, angels, heroism, white marble, moldy crypts, dying kisses, and last words. When I was even younger, my inability to imagine my own death led me to believe I would never die. When I asked myself why others and not me, I concluded that I was the sine qua non of reality. In essence, I was God. At 63, I no longer see my death as one link in an endless chain of experiences but as a dissolution of the chain into insensate matter and insensate energy.

We are all made according to the same shabby design. Likewise, we all came from the same cold ground, and it is to this ground that we all return. That which is euphemistically called faith when the word is applied to religion is but a person’s terror of death subtracted from the ignorance and pretense needed to assuage that terror. The maintenance of this ignorance and pretense is why the suppression of dissent is characteristic of religion.

Hell would be to lie on my deathbed and look back at a life that was mean, petty, or mercenary. How odd that, given the brevity of life, our species places so much importance upon wealth, fame, power, and sensuous experiences, all things that are ultimately meaningless. What, then, can give us the strength to face death with equanimity? I believe that the best way—if not the only way other than delusion—is to practice equanimity in every situation, that and to live a life devoted to honesty, kindness, courage, wisdom, and rationality. I fail continually in all of these things, yet they remain my only salvation.

I tried to push thoughts of death away, but resistance made the nightmare stronger. Now, I say to death, “I can’t fight you. I can’t even make my body stop hurting. The ugly brown spots on my upper body continue to multiply, as do the white spots on my legs. My teeth, my vision, my hearing, my memory, my strength, my attractiveness, my ability to sleep, and a hundred other things are dying by inches even while my physical pain increases. Truly, you reign supreme.”

*from “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant.

Nollyposh 1963-2011

When a blogger friend dies, it’s abrupt even when it’s expected. Where you had a loving friend, you now, if you’re lucky, have one of her family members who you hope will update you on what happened, what arrangements were made, and maybe even provide information about how her survivors are doing. I wrote to Nollyposh’s email address to ask for permission to use some of her words and her photo on my blog as a memorial. I received the following:

"This is Patrick (Vicki's husband). I have been checking Vicki’s emails each day since her passing. I am sure Vicki is happy that you use her words and main photo as a tribute.

"Today is one week since Vicki’s funeral which I must say was overwhelming with more than 300 people attending. The hardest part was entering the chapel and looking into the eyes of all the people that turned up to farewell Vicki. Our children were amazing on the day, both daughters spoke about their love for their Mum and our son stayed up all night to finish the DVD presentation for the service.

"Vicki’s blog was all her creation from the first day she told us all she wanted to set one up. Normally, she would call on help for someone to set it all up, but she really insisted that she had to create it herself - which she did spending hours on the computer and calling on our son only to adjust some of the graphics.

"Vicki’s blog gave her the chance to write and to share it with all her bloggy friends, as she called them. I know how well Vicki can write and the blog enabled her to share her thoughts, her wisdom and ultimately her love with a lot of people. She told me about your conversation and how that you will probably never get to meet face to face, and she nodded and it made her cry. Even though you haven't met, she counted you as a close friend - she said that maybe you were not meant to meet, but I always hoped that maybe you would. I cannot tell you how much the blog kept Vicki strong and the joy and inspiration it gave her. She told me that she could not believe that she found people just like her all around the world - spirit sisters."

The following is from Nollyposh’s final tribute to her "bloggy friends":

"i have learned most importantly that ~Love~ is everything and that it can come in many small and mysterious ways... Most wondrously it can reach me from all corners of the worlde and wrap me like a blanket... And for all these wonderful gifts i am most grateful from the bottom of my Heart and send it back to ~You All~ ten-fold X:-)"

Nollyposh and I regularly disagreed—with her taking a spiritual perspective and me a materialistic view—yet there remained a transcendent closeness between us. I feel a similar bond to others of you. One of my blogger friends wrote that he can only be my friend because we live 2,000 miles apart. I think he meant that our differences would get in the way if we were closer, yet I recalled Thoreau’s words:

“You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port…. If we would enjoy the most intimate society…we must…commonly [be] so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice…”

Nollyposh and I were separated by an ocean and a hemisphere, and if such a distance was necessary for us to be friends, I am glad we had it. The last thing she wrote to me was: “You mean just as much to me as if i met you in the flesh xox”

Nolly, I grieve less for your death than for my loss of you. If you were here, you would tell me that whatever I am feeling is okay, but you are not here, and nothing seems okay. I would that I could believe your final words of hope to the people you loved, but I cannot. May I be wrong, and may your love be with me even now.

“I won’t be far away for life goes on
So if you need me call and I will come
Though you can’t see or touch me, I’ll be near
And if you listen with your heart, you’ll hear
All my love around you soft and clear
And then when you must come this way alone
I’ll greet you with a smile and a welcome home.”


Nollyposh's blog is at: http://nollyposh.blogspot.com/

When my mother died

My mother would become infuriated when I smoked marijuana, so I did it in front of her every chance I got. I was that way about everything that infuriated my mother. My sister was the opposite. She too did all kinds of things that seriously displeased our mother (our father didn’t care what we did), but she would lie her way out of them whenever she could.

When my mother died—in 1988—they brought the body to the house, and I sat beside her, smoking pot, in a one-person wake. I didn’t think I could bear letting her go, so I hoped I could rise to some plane where she still existed, or at least hallucinate her, but the closest I got was when I heard her gasp for air. At that moment, I thought I had done it. I thought she was going to open her eyes and talk to me, but she just lay there, not really looking much like herself.

The men in my life part 1: Matt

Matt’s daughter killed herself last week. When I listened to him on the phone today, I felt such terror that I had to monitor my breathing so I wouldn’t hyperventilate. My terror came from my awareness that there was next to nothing I could offer that would make things even a tiny bit better.

Matt is my opposite in many ways. Most notably, he’s Christian and ultraconservative. Yet, he’s also a gentle and patient man who is out somewhere, helping someone, everyday.

I had a big tree cut down recently, and I decided to give it to two friends. One of those friends was Matt. He had been splitting wood for hours before he mentioned that he didn’t really want any; he just wanted to help me out by splitting it. I informed him that the ten cords he had in his shed would only last him a couple of years, and so he was jolly well going to take some wood home. He said he would give it to his daughter. She died the next day.

I feel so very small right now, and Matt’s grief is so very big. I haven’t known him that long or that well, but I like and respect him, and I’ve learned from experience that it’s not necessarily our closest friends who stand by us the best through hard times. Also, grief is something that I’ve always felt both honored and honor bound to embrace despite the times I’ve given even less than the little that I had to give.

Given my atheism—and assuming that you know something of the Bible—you might guess that my favorite book is Ecclesiastes. I sometimes wonder how it got into the Bible because the author’s conviction that life lacks objective meaning—that is, a god-given meaning—is completely out of harmony with the rest. This is Chapter 7, Verse 12:

“It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.”

Fifty years after I first read Ecclesiastes, it occurred to me that I would like to change that verse to:

“It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for the house of mourning is where you’re most needed.”

If I were to make a list of things that I would like for believers to know about atheists, the first one would be: “To deny god is not to deny the possibility of meaning. Kindness, patience, nobility, a passion for truth, and every other virtue are no less important to atheists than they are to theists. The difference between them is simply that the one attributes our knowledge of right and wrong to god, and the other to the social evolution of the species to which we owe our existence.”

Dad

My father quit school in the eighth grade rather than let a teacher whip him for fighting. The next day he left Route 4, Bogue Chitto, Mississippi for Galveston, Texas, where he took a job as an apprentice roofer. Next came the Merchant Marines where he volunteered for hazardous duty (it paid better), and had two ships shot out from under him by German U-Boats. The entire load on one ship was Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, and Dad never got over seeing men die for beer.

Dad was a transsexual before he knew there was a word for it or that anyone else felt as he did. I only learned that he wore a bra and panties under his striped overalls when he fell off a ladder (he and I remodeled homes and businesses), and knocked himself out. Soon after that, he told me that he learned about there being a name for his condition from Life Magazine during the 1960s. He would have been in his mid-fifties at the time. Even when he was in his seventies, he said he wished he had money for a sex change operation. About the time he hit eighty, he got religion and didn’t talk about his gender problem anymore. Instead, he moved on to telling Peggy and me about his nightly conversations with God. Mostly what God had in mind for my father was to arrange for him to win the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. As I watched my father waste thousands of dollars buying magazines for those sweepstakes, I developed an intense hatred for Ed McMahon and the deceptive mail that came in his name.

Dad would cuss people out over minor things, and he even “enjoyed” getting into fistfights when another man showed an interest, yet he was too shy to order a meal or ask a clerk a question. I knew that something was “wrong with him” (that was how I expressed it to myself) from the time I was a small child. I could see it in the fear that other people showed when they were around him. Yet, he never beat me—or even touched me—and he never beat my mother or sister either. We were all still afraid of him though. When he told me about his transexualism, I wondered how much of his behavior was an attempt to compensate for the manhood that he lacked. He even married several times—five, I think it was.

He died in 1994 after spending his last two years with Peggy and me. I got over his death without a tear. Unlike the 18 months I spent having anguished dreams after my mother died, I never had a bad dream about my father. He appeared in my dreams for years after his death, but he was always old and feeble, and just kind of hanging out in the background, which was pretty much how he spent his last two years. He died here in this house, and that was good because—through hospice—Peggy and I were able to obtain a bottle of liquid morphine so we could do whatever it took to control his pain without having to worry about whether we were giving him a fatal dose the way they would if he had died in a hospital. The last thing my father ever asked me to do was to keep him out of pain even if it meant, as he put it, “easing me out.” I told him I would.

The manner of his death was this. He needed pills to keep his congestive heart failure in check, only he thought that “living out of a pill bottle” was beneath his dignity, so he repeatedly stopped taking them over his last few years. Each time, he would become so bloated and short of breath that he would always go back after a week or so. These continual flirtations with death were a very hard thing for me to witness, and they also put me into a moral dilemma once I discovered that I could sneak the pills into his food. I thought a lot about whether I had the right to do that, and I finally decided that I didn’t. I figured that if he was rational, he had the right to end his own life, but if he was irrational, his life wasn’t worth preserving. I never could make up my mind for sure which it was because my father had always seemed insane. He finally stayed off his pills long enough that he died. He took to his bed on a Sunday and died that Tuesday without me ever having to change a diaper. For that, I was grateful. Either your parents die more or less cleanly, or they deteriorate enough to become a horrendous burden to themselves and to you—and then they die—so it’s not all bad when they die sooner rather than later.

“…existence…monstrous masses all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.” Sartre

I see wisdom in approaching life as I would a drug trip, that is to enjoy the good times despite their fleeting nature, and to survive the bad times by remembering that they too will soon end.

Life is absurd, my species deeply and irredeemably flawed. On the one hand, life seems only too real at times both in terms of joy and sadness, but on the other, the accidental nature of our existence makes a joke of any claim to objective meaning.

All that most of us are and all that we do will be forgotten within five decades of our deaths, but even if we’re remembered for ten thousand years, we’ll be no less dead. In his old age, Benjamin Franklin wrote a sketch entitled “The Ephemera” in which he portrayed himself as the senior member of a species whose lifespan was measured in hours rather than decades. His point was that we would do well to take ourselves less seriously. Against the backdrop of eternity, the difference between a millisecond and a million years is inconsequential, and our lives are infinitely less than that.

I often remember bloggers who are now dead, and others who are fighting diseases that might very well kill them. Even as I write, one friend is in the hospital for what is likely to be her death. You and I will join her in a very few years. We can’t hold onto our loved ones, our possessions, or our achievements, and starting in our forties, we begin to observe the disintegration of our own bodies. If that’s not a trip, I don’t know what is.

The painting goes poorly with the title of this post, but I liked it anyway. It's entitled Pleiades and was done by Elihu Vedder in 1885. At the moment, it makes me feel as if I’m swimming atop ocean swells. Because I’m not a swimmer, this is a decentering experience, yet so very beautiful. Maybe tomorrow, the painting will make me feel as if I’m floating through infinite darkness while Simon and Garfunkel sing “Dangling Conversation.” What does it make you feel?