Category: Living

Pierre passed away on April 2^nd, 2019.  He died like he always lived – by his own will.  When he was first diagnosed with lung cancer, he expressed his intentions to forgo chemo-therapy, surgery and radiation.  He didn’t want to exchange one sickness for another.  But sickness came nonetheless and in the end, in constant respiratory distress, he refused supplementary oxygen.  Amid the warm hug of morphine, he peacefully suffocated.  As he took his last barely audible breath, we could almost hear him say:  

-I had One Life to live and I have no regrets.

My mother and I were present by his side for merely five minutes – even the nurses had been surprised at how fast he had declined.  Between sobs, I reassured him: “We understand and respect your choice.”  Holding his limp hand in mine, with my mother’s head over his chest, we both told him how much we loved him.  

I’ll always remember the moment his One Life left him.  It is the most tragic of magic to witness how something so ethereal as a Life – as a Soul – can be so noticeable when it goes…    

With his diagnostic, he knew that his end was near.  All he asked was to live a few more months in peace with my mother.  For Pierre didn’t fear death.  What he most feared was to be disabled, to lose his dignity, to be a burden on my mother, dependent on her for his basic needs.  Arguably, he had increasingly relied on her for the entirety of their relationship, ever since he lost an important share of his eyesight in January 1996.  Still, autonomy comes in various degrees and he warned us – quite forcefully – that he’d depart this world when his body would finally fail him.  

– What’s the point to live when there is no quality of life?, he’d ask rhetorically.  

For two years, he kept his mobility – now motorized – and peacefully co-existed with his cancer.  He did less and less, went to bed earlier, but still led life to the fullest of his capacity.  He spent both winters in his condo in Florida.  Pragmatic, I enquired about his health insurance.  Pierre pointed that: “One can’t get insurance when their house is already on fire!”  Touché.  Anyway, he could afford a trip to the emergency room or even a private plane to bring him home.  

Throughout his decline, he maintained a brave face and an unwavering strength – what mattered most was to live as with as much resolve as ever!  He settled his affairs.  I wrote this book.  He shared with me: “I never thought that I’d so successful, so fulfilled.”  By questioning him, I discovered how he became the man I met almost twenty-five ago.  In his answers, I could hear how much I tested him over the years.   Quickly, my writing revealed how profoundly my fate had always been interwoven with his.

Only in the last month of his life was his respiratory distress such that he couldn’t function normally.  Still, he lived with complete acceptance of his eventual demise.  He wanted us to be stoic him.  He wanted us to behave as if he wasn’t dying – not in denial of reality but total acceptance of it.  Pierre wanted us to celebrate his life instead of despairing!  For my mother, this request was the hardest to accept – she wanted to cry in her husband’s arms, to be comforted by his touch.  Even if she genuinely supported his decisions to die as pain-free as possible, she hated to see him disintegrate before her eyes.

When I could be alone with Pierre, I sometimes scolded him to be so stiff with my mom.  I reminded him:

– It’s not because we do not like to talk about feelings that we do not have them!  We talk about our emotions not because they can solve anything but simply to feel close.  

We experienced an intimacy we rarely shared before.  Even in his matter-of-factness, in all his rationality and meticulous planning of his estate, I obviously knew that my mother was the love of his life, his joy and jewel.  Everyone could plainly see their devotion to each other!  She had given her life to him and thus, waves of sadness were bound to wash over her.  But all he could muster to say was:  

– I had One Amazing Life!  

In his gaze, we discerned the unspoken: “It was amazing because you shared it with me!”  He really was a man of a few words.

Eventually, the day came when he felt himself becoming a burden.  My mother, now his nurse as well as his wife, called me to tell me how both of them could no longer sleep.  He had fallen and broken his nose, which further hampered his breathing.  He couldn’t walk to the washroom on his own.  He was losing his grip on reality and slurred his speech.  Because he always led the way, made decisions and demanded them to be respected, it was hard for my mother to convince him that he needed to be in a hospital.  He was always a stubborn man but now, his lung capacity was so low that he was asphyxiated.  He could no longer think.  

Since our last major conflict, my relationship with Pierre had evolved to the point where he trusted my judgement like his own.  Thus in his last day, I was to be his mirror, his pillar, the voice of his conscience.  

I arrived by his side on Monday night.  At first sight, I felt horrified – with my fresh eyes I could see him already in the process of dying.  I tried to relieve my mother from her nursing duties for a night but he preferred her.  Still at home the next morning, he finally sleep while I held his hand and read Aristotle’s Ethics.  

The home-care palliative nurse arrived at 11am.  I translated her concerns in clear terms: “Yes, he should go to the hospital”, though one could see in her hesitation that she was concerned with Pierre’s consent.  

He was reluctant.  I deciphered in his grunts and one word answers that he didn’t want any more tests, just to talk to his doctor.  I could hear him wonder: “Is it time already?”  My intuition was clear: he needed his doctor’ reassurance that indeed, it only went downhill from here.  We do not know if his doctor visited him that last night, precipitating his choice to refuse oxygen.  Either way, he died in peace.  

In the aftermath of someone’s demise, it is tempting to be revisionist of their lives.  As friends and family warmly hug my mother or me, they exclaim: “Pierre was such a good man!”  My sole reply is to embrace them tighter.  He certainly was a loving, generous, most of the time patient person.  But he was also rough and demanding.  He was often silent when he should have spoken from the heart.  Yet in his actions and choices, he was transparent.  If I had the strength to be honest, I’d answer: “Pierre was more great than good.”  He was as complex as a man can be.  

Pierre was an epic hero – a nobleman of a bygone era – and yet, the modern antihero of my own life.  Just like Odysseus, he ruled and vanquished.  He navigated the challenges of his time with his wit and sheer strength of will.  Since he spent everyday of his life self-actualizing – simultaneously being and becoming increasingly more himself – his life exemplifies the most complete paradoxes of humanity…

For the better part of seven hours, I tossed and turned in the upper bunk of an Amtrak “roomette”, their quaint term for attempting the impossible of putting two people in a six foot three inch by two foot six inch space and allowing both of them to get a good night’s sleep.  One of us did: my son, who at six years old and three feet eight inches high is perfectly sized for such a space, slept the sleep of the gods.  He also had the bottom bunk; despite efforts at dinner, from both me and from the random couple from Chicago who sat with us, to convince him how much fun the top bunk is, he called the bottom bunk.

Making it worse was the fact that he wanted the night light on.  The night light is a low-wattage bulb in a five inch by three inch blue plastic enclosure.  If it were glowing faintly across a room – or, say, you only saw the indirect shine coming from above the bunk directly above you – it would probably be soft and lulling.  If the bulb is a foot from your eyes, however, even the low wattage is enough to be an impediment.  I kept thinking about all the press recently about limiting the “blue light” from screens in the hours before bed as even with my eyes closed tightly I could sense the glow.

I finished a book while my son read Busy Busy World by Richard Scarry.  I looked down at one point and he looked up and said “Hug?” but getting down would have roused him a bit too much, so instead I asked for one of his stuffed bears, gave it a big hug, and told him to give my son an even bigger hug back.  He caught the bear and snuggled him tightly as he nestled into the covers, yawning below me and eventually falling still.

At dinner he ordered the steak, but not the salad, as he announced loudly to one and all.  He also asked for bacon bits on his baked potato, and said he wasn’t going to eat any green beans.  I told him that he needed to eat at least two.  During the meal the couple from Chicago convinced him to eat some more beans in the same forkful as a bit of bacony, sour creamy potato. That worked too.

He’s made friends with another young boy, a bit older but who’s a bit… special.  The boy carries around a stuffed bear which is slightly larger than my son, and despite being probably two or three years older, his eyes and his speech reveal a sense of wonder, a sense of absolute joy, that even now in my almost-seven year old son I can see being pushed out by a sensation that the world isn’t quite fair, that not everyone is getting the same good things as everyone else, that maybe life is going to be a lot harder than train rides with Dad and a really good teacher and a Mom who loves him makes it seem like on the surface right now.  The other boy, though, having kept a sense of unadulterated joy and love and life in his eyes for even a few more years than six, is marking himself out as someone different.

My son has been so designated, by a child psychologist three and a half years ago roughly seven months after his parents split up and he moved away from his dad and back to a Seattle that he didn’t know.  In the intervening time it’s obvious to almost everyone except my ex-wife that our son is really pretty normal – a bit bookish and not interested in sports, but given his parents and their families, that surprises no one.  He’s a bit ungainly in social situations but having observed him with his friends in first grade, it seems to be about the norm for boys.

I volunteer at his school, which is a nice thing to do I suppose but it’s also an opportunity to see what being a six year old is like.  I was not normal at age six and I could even articulate that fact: I knew I was having conversations in my head, and with adults, that other kids weren’t having, and mostly they didn’t understand them and didn’t care.  A friend of mine, who is also a single parent, has said that her goal is to let her child have fun, to just see world in terms of the beauty of Maine and a dog and snow and laughter, for as long as possible. For me, that all wrapped up around four years old when I started to read books without pictures.  I haven’t looked back, but I’m intruigued now to see how my son and his friends are doing.  I didn’t have enough objectivity when I was his age to see what “childhood” was like; I was busy guarding my incipient adulthood, too busy trying to make sense of self-awareness at an age when most kids were blissfully unaware.

The boys are ungainly: their sentences carrying their own weird cadence of incorrect emphasis, poor word choice, and neck-snapping changes of topic.  Their bodies are all a bit strange too: some lean and wiry with big heads, like my son, some already building a kind of linebacker dominance to them, out of scale with the rest of the room.  There’s a few dreamy eyed kids, a few social butterflies – my son is one of them – and a few burly types who are embarrased by their strength, and one or two pre-bullies, kids who insert themselves in front of others, demanding attention, demanding respect but not doing anything to earn it.  I vaguely remember those dynamics but mostly I remembered finding the quiet corner with the books and reading as much as I possibly could, and sitting in the back of group time and trying not to be noticed.  My son sits in the middle.  He’s occasionally reminded not to talk to his neighbor.  I’m sort of proud of that.

The girls at age six and seven are confident and happy, although you can already see signs of cliquishness and coquettery, the girl with the not-quite-perfect leggings being shunned at choice time, for example, the same four girls always sitting together despite the teacher’s best efforts to break them up.  Some are already wearing clothing that would be viewed as “sexualized” – they’re definitely dressed more thoughtfully than the boys, but there’s also a bit of preening, hair done up nicely and clothing that’s coordinated.  They also want to be noticed, especially by a father volunteer: one girl stood up during story time, locked eyes with me, and started to pirouette.  The teacher asked her nicely to stop, and without breaking the stare, she sat down in front of me.

The only coordinated outfit among the boys is for the only African-American kid, who’s also the strongest and fastest kid in the class.  I have a sense that all of that is a lot of burden for a seven year old kid in first grade.

The boys neither shun nor do much in the way of self-identification.  They sort of form random groupings, coming together into little groups or teams and dissolving again in the course of a few minutes.

I thought about all of this while drifting on the outer edges of being awake, between Klamath Falls in Oregon and Sacramento.  Although the cities didn’t matter, really, except as markers on the timetable, benchmarks for determining whether we’re time or not.

I thought of my ex-wife, after having our quarterly divorce coaching session on Friday with a lot to talk about.  I thought about the ex-girlfriend, and girlfriends before her, and I thought about it in a spiralling way back to when I was little, when I was my son’s age, searching for the thread that tied everything together.  It’s not there, but part of the mystery of not sleeping in an enclosed space it that your mind dangles out the hope of that thread as a means of both getting you to sleep and of keeping your consciousness alive.

I thought about a dozen things I should be writing, a dozen work things I should get done in the next few days.  We pulled out of Chico and my body started warming up for the day, despite it being barely past three thirty in the morning.  I stayed in the bunk, staring and looking away from the blue night light. Finally I got up, fished out some clothes, got dressed – thankfully yoga has given me enough flexibility to get dressed even in a bunk – and kissing my son on forehead, went out to the observation car and started to write.

Good morning.  He’s up now… he just ran down the hallway.  Maybe there is a thread in there somewhere.

It was a warm night in June, or perhaps July.  I was very conscious of the time, because you were late.  We had asked you to come home by a certain time, but your curfew-hour had passed, and you were still out.  I left the house and walked around aimlessly, for fifteen to twenty minutes, up and down the local streets.   I knew that the chances of meeting you were low; negligible; greater than zero, but not by much.  What else could I do?  Sitting at home waiting for you was a torment.  By walking, at least I could slowly impose upon myself a diminution of my anger.   I would almost certainly not find you, but I would be kinder to you when you eventually came home from wherever you had been hiding.

You had a phone; a very nice phone; a BlackBerry to be precise.  In those days, when Nokia and Erikson had fallen behind, and before Apple and Samsung were ubiquitous, BlackBerry was the phone of choice for teenage girls in Hackney.  Forget the efficiency with which they delivered email, which made them beloved of employees of the financial services industry, for you it was only about the free-to-use messaging service:  BlackBerry Messenger allowed you and your friends to communicate endlessly and pointlessly – securely too, although you cared less about that – without incurring any cost.

Tonight, my smart daughter had her smart phone turned-off.  Or you were just ignoring my messages, pretending that, despite being a member of the most “connected” generation in history, somehow you were unavailable to take my call, enquiring why you were not home at the agreed time.  You were on the grid but pretending not to be.

You were late, very late, and I was furious.  This was not the first time: it felt as if it was every time.  You asked if you could go out and we agreed a time by which you must be home.  You invariably came home an hour or more later than we had agreed and then played hurt and aggrieved when we chided you for tardiness.  You were at fault, but your body language quickly made us feel ourselves to be the problem: frowning mouth, eyes rolling upwards, tension in your shoulders and fists.

One of my worst experiences of fatherhood was catching myself while offering you some form of admonition or cautionary advice, realising half way through that I was starting to sound exactly like my parents addressing me when I was your age.  And I remembered – immediately and urgently – how little regard I had for what they said to me when I was in your shoes.  I didn’t want to repeat that mistake but, mid-sentence it was hard to re-phrase my nugget of parental guidance in a way that might be of some beneficial use to you.

The repetition of fool’s wisdom, from one generation to the next – and the next and the next, onwards unto perpetuity – was not my idea of responsible parenting.  Just stop talking, I told myself, before you say something even more stupid.

When I was a teenager, I thought school uniform was an authoritarian imposition, and wholly pointless; I thought it not unreasonable that I should go out with my friends without being obliged to return home at some arbitrarily agreed hour; and I thought that the formal rituals of family life – eating together, taking an interest in the day-to-day worries of kith and kin, showing respect to each other’s values and property – were insubstantial and should be subordinated to the genuine demands of peer friendship.   Mostly, I still think these things.

How I struggled to make the case for the other side of those arguments, when you told me, with exasperation, exactly what I had tried to explain to my parents a generation previously.  I could have said, “yes, of course, you are right”, but I doubted that it would be helpful for you, as you matured into adulthood, and was certain that it would not be helpful for me, as I clung on, reluctantly, to my paternal role as enforcer of household law.

Looking back, I realise that there is a modicum of truth in the wisdom of parents.  There is virtue in shared daily routines, of demonstrating solidarity with the joys and tears of other family members, in learning to be diplomatic, in respecting agreements and trying to meet expectations that have been collective agreed.  An important part of growing up is learning how to modulate the desire for sincerity – for authenticity, as we existentialists like to say – with the social value of compromise and peace.  Some things, albeit true, do not need to be said; some hypocrisies do not need to be called out; some family traditions, rules, mores, do not need to be transgressed, just for the sake of demonstrating the ego’s autonomy.

That said, an equally important part of growing up is knowing when civility is demeaning, when home-truths demand to be told, when double-standards exposed, when tradition should be abandoned and when innovation embraced.  I am even now learning how best to judge the appropriateness of these actions; back then I found myself trying to teach you what I had yet to master.  Parenting is error-strewn; learning by doing badly; being unable to find the right balance; laying paving in the wrong direction but with good intentions.

What did you need from me during those difficult teenage years – from fourteen to seventeen – when you felt the need to rebel against me and my values, to challenge my authority, to overturn the order of the home, just as I had felt that need when I was your age?  But – I wanted to say to you – but don’t you see that the order I have imposed is reasonable?  I have not established my authority upon unjustified and unaccountable power.  I am not an unthinking dictator.  Each request I make, each limit I set, each boundary I draw for you is based on a thoughtful and sincere assessment of your right to independence, blended with our right for the integrity of our family life to be respected.

Of course, you needed to rebel.  When you are a teenager, the specific character of authority is not the point.  It is not the details but the essence of authority that needs to be challenged.  Thereby, you forced me to realise that my own rebellion, a generation earlier, was less to do with the righteousness of my case than my need to have a case – any case – to sustain my emergent sense of independence.  The James Dean film is right: being a rebel is what matters, the precise nature of the cause a minor detail.

If the essence of adolescence is rebellion, then the burden of parenthood is the erosion of fraudulent authority.  I longed for my part in this drama to be over quickly, but that making it too easy – for me as well as you – would have been a great disservice to us both.  You needed to learn that you have to fight to be free; which meant that I, your father, had to resist, to try to keep you imprisoned in your childhood cocoon, despite my not wanting to.

And then – mirabile dictu –some evenings you would come home from school and talk about a lesson you had found interesting, a piece of work that you had enjoyed doing, a problem with a friend to which you had discovered a solution, a challenging incident in the playground or the street that you had responded to with maturity, an item on the news that had awoken your curiosity, an inappropriate remark or insult to one of your classmates that you had challenged.   From time to time, hope springs.

I’m guessing that a frictionless path from childhood to maturity makes for a weak person in later life.  The battles of my teenage years have surely held me in good stead during adulthood.  I hope that I made your adolescence hard enough for you to nurture your strength.  But I am so very happy that time is now in our shared past. Truly: the sign of failed parenting is not that your children break the house rules; it’s when they don’t.

 

My father taught me the finer points of people watching when I was in my late pre-teen years, those strange years from age 10 to 12 where young boys are truly not yet men but nevertheless we start showing signs of what we will eventually become.  For me, I was preternaturally aware, too conscious to be really a boy but still naive and blissfully unaware of the dominant, painful superabundance of sexuality.  I could understand myself and could see the moral nature of others but too much was still hidden, and in many ways I’m still that young man.  Despite being aware of the physical cravings of being human, I’m still caught in that unformed body but superaware mind that made me such a perfect student for my father as we travelled around Maine and the east coast.

The first time I really remember him teaching me the bright colorful arts of people watching, we were on our way back from a business meeting that he brought me on for some reason down east, I think in Rockland or Rockport – two separate towns, but Rockland has the ferry terminal and the fish processing plant and thus is a bit working class, or was thirty five years ago; Rockport just had lovely scenery and old farmhouses and thus was probably a bit more stuck up and definitely more Protestant; my guess is Rockport veered Trump, while Rockland was solidly Hilary.  Draw your own conclusions, but I don’t remember lingering in either place.  My father had his meeting, I read a book – probably a few books – in a poorly furnished waiting room, and then we headed back towards Portland and home.  On the way, though, we stopped at Moody’s, a popular diner about an hour and a half from Portland, and had a late supper.  I don’t remember what we had for the meal proper but over the pie, my dad noticed a table a few booths down which consisted of two local police officers and a Maine state trooper, the trooper being obvious from his large wide straight brimmed trooper hat, his three-inch fascist black patent leather belt, and the diagonal leather stripe over his shoulder.

“I wonder what they’re talking about,” he said.  And Dad quickly began spinning a tale about what they were likely talking about – something about pulling over drunk drivers and speeding moms, something benign and silly and pointless.  I started giggling and adding my own thoughts over the pie – I know I had blueberry, I always had blueberry pie at Moody’s – and after a few minutes the trooper came over, said hello to each of us, and let me wear his hat.  It was far too large for me but it didn’t matter; I was in heaven.  Maine state troopers were the closest things to the archangels that I would encounter in my youth, and wearing one’s hat was akin to Gabriel letting you blow his horn.

On subsequent trips – including one very fun trip to Washington DC for a convention – my father would take me to old dark wooded restaurants, and truck stops, and airport lounges, and hotel lobbies, and everywhere he’d point at some person, or couple, or group of people, and say “what do you think they are talking about” or “why do you think they are here” or something similar.  As I got used to the drill, I got better at thinking about what people might be actually there for – not predictively, of course, but creatively, coming up with better and more interesting reasons for why, say, an older man and a younger woman were bickering at a table across the aisle, or why a man looked so angry while he was writing in a journal, or why a family was so studiously disinterested in one another.  My father always had better stories – he still does – but it wasn’t about coming up with something better than him: it was about practicing the art of inhabiting another person’s body and situation, in a place of transit, in a place that all of us would soon, and happily, abandon.

Tonight I was killing time at a restaurant across the street from Sea-Tac Airport, having spent a lovely weekend with my son and having worked all day on phone and laptop for the job in Texas.  I’ll increasingly just work on phone and laptop: the Texas people have acknowledged that I have no desire to live in south Texas, at all, and have granted me permission – more than that – to work from Maine, so phone and laptop will increasingly be my office.  The restaurant is a bit of a throwback to the early 70s, with high-backed leather swivel chairs around the counter and deep mahogany booths in an otherwise nondescript ten story office block housing mostly the small local offices of foreign flag carriers and somewhat dodgy import-export specialty firms.  I had a salad and the Hangtown Fry, a West Coast classic consisting of oysters, bacon, onions, and eggs, whipped into a scramble, with toast.  I nursed a drink and next to me sat a couple in their late 20s, she was maybe a bit younger.

He was dressed, I guess in his best, in a clean and recently severely folded black T-shirt advertising some sort of music festival.  He was pale, with reddish hair, the type of guy who doesn’t have freckles but can only burn, not tan, and he was overweight in the pudgy way of videogame afficiandos, pudgy not from overeating but from eating normally and not moving enough.  He ordered a Sprite.  He found it difficult to smile or show emotion.  I kept thinking “gamer” but waited.

She was a bit overweight but nonetheless very attractive, with dark hair tightly braided and then wrapped up into a kind of bunnish do, wearing a lacy black blouse that was a kind of ideal mix of transparent and opaque, in that it wasn’t see-through at all, but the laciness of it made you imagine it maybe was, and that added to the allure of her stark white but almond-shaped eyes.  She ordered tap water.  Then the guy said they’d have a calamari starter and she looked at him oddly, and he said she’d like it.  Then he ordered bacon and eggs, eggs medium, and she ordered the buttermilk chicken salad.  The waiter looked at them for a second, first him, then her, and thanked them and went to put in the order.

I looked more closely at the guy as the two of them settled into awkwardly looking at their place settings, not talking at all.  He had a lousy beard – what the hell has happened to this country that beards now seem de rigueur – and I now noticed the tattoos on his arms, Gothic lettering that I couldn’t decipher wrapped around some kind of Celtic cross or sword-like thing, lacing up his arm until disappearing under his sleeve.  Then I looked at her, noticed how she didn’t really want to be there but she kept flashing a smile, kept flashing interest in him to him, kept reassuring him with her glance and her demeanor and her body that she wanted to be there, was enjoying being with him, even though it was clearly an act.  Only someone who wanted to be deceived, who needed to believe in the act, would fall for it, and it wasn’t entirely clear he wanted to be deceived but then he wasn’t checking his phone, he was nervous and fumbling, he was trying to figure out what to do before the food came.

The waiter came with a refill of water for her and the guy ordered another Sprite, and the waiter, sensing the awkwardness, told both of them that the calamari would be out in less than a minute.  He caught my eye and asked if I needed anything and I made something up – “could I get some more cocktail sauce” – and I think the waiter knew I was just making time.  All of us were uneasy.

I shouldn’t say that.

The woman was uneasy; as a black woman with a pale white, possible ex-convict white guy, clearly either (charitably) on a first Tinder date or more likely on not so much a date as the first part of transactional evening, she wasn’t sure what was to come and she was trying to find her way.  The man was uneasy; he had probably “ordered” a woman on the website or via the back page of a free newspaper and he wasn’t suave about it, this was either new to him or he was aware of the feebleness of being in this situation, and he was struggling.  The waiter, clearly not unaccustomed to dealing with these situations in the only decent restaurant on the cheap hotel strip across the street from a large airport, didn’t want to dwell on the situation and wanted it over quickly.  I wasn’t sure what my role was in this little drama and while, as a student of my father’s, was interested in the human drama, was also slightly too involved for comfort.

But the core relationship – the pale pudgy man and the buxom young woman – was comfortable with itself.  Whatever it was – first date, transactional, future slasher film fodder, or just heartbreakingly awkward time kill – was appropriate in and of itself.  It was unfolding on its own terms, and somehow – despite crossed racial boundaries and the amazing inability of either person to maintain more than four sentences of conversation at a stretch over the course of an hour – it was all it needed to be.

I came up with a dozen different potential narrative, potential answers to Dad’s old questions.  But much stranger, much more challenging, was to watch the non-conversation that emerged.  They had their calamari – she had never had calamari before but seemed to enjoy it, and both were stymied when they asked the waiter what the white sauce was and he said “it’s aoili”, which required explanation and even after that, the idea of a garlicky mayonnaise didn’t quite register.  Then the meals came quickly and they ate in silence, but a couple of times looked at one another and smiled and made those eye gestures indicating “this is pretty good” or “gee, this is better than I expected”.  He ordered more Sprite, she stuck to ice water.

I ate my Hangtown fry and read the news on my phone until, about ten minutes after I finished the eggs, I realized one of the oysters was, er, not good.  I removed myself to the gents in short order and when I emerged again, ten minutes later, quite a bit paler, they were gone.

I don’t imagine they registered me, but I wonder what they would have said about the guy sitting next to them, reading, checking his phone, eating an omlette and then hurrying off.  Single diners don’t make for stories that are quite as interesting, I’ve found, but then again, who could come up with the tale that got me there, across the street from the airport, on a rainy and dark Monday night?  Why do you think I was there?

 

Emotions are pesty things.  As undercurrents within our souls, they sway our mood and shape our attitude to our daily lives.  Feelings affect how we perceive what is happening and how we react. They can tell us what feel right, and hence, what we ought to do.  In that sense, emotions are a key input to live the good, moral life.  Yet, like undercurrents, emotions can be so strong as to submerge us.  Many people resist strong emotions and try to repress them – especially if they dare to contradict our finely ordered lives.  But a burst of emotion – like in a panic attack – can still drown us.

Apparently, emotions live in the limbic system of our brains, somewhere more primitive than our acclaimed cerebral cortex.  Jonathan Haidt, in his book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’, describes how our lymbic system is like an elephant that our cortex, its rider, is trying to ride. Sometimes, rider and elephant appear in communion.  But does it mean that the rider has control of the elephant?  Or simply that the elephant just wants to go in the same direction as the rider?  I like the ambivalence in the analogy.  Can we actually control our emotions?  Or are they just what they are?  And what should we do when emotions threaten our current reality?

I recently faced these questions vicariously, as my family was rocked by some strong emotional winds.  A death, a terminal illness, suicidal thoughts – “Heavy S***, if you ask me!”  I don’t think that my family is extraordinary in attempting ‘denial’ as their preferred approach to emotional unrest.  It is certainly a favorite first impulse!  What is particularly hard is that I cannot stomach the hypocrisy of it – so I often end up being ‘the canary in the coal mine’, the one who calls “Bullshit!”.   In the most respectful way, I express what others and I feel – but my ability to read the elephant’s mind is really tiring.

 

January ended with my uncle dying without even allowing us to say goodbye.  He did so because he didn’t want to face unresolved conflicts with a brother and sister.  I suspect that he simply  – selfishly – avoided his own shame for past mistakes.  “Fine!” I empathized, “it’s hard enough to have to face death.”  As the cancer overtook his breathing capacity, I felt compassion.  But then he died and forbade a celebration of his life, my heart switched to anger.  I vented: “His life might be his ownuntil his last breath!  But he cannot deny, beyond the grave, that his life affected us all!”  It’s harder to grieve when you fundamentally disagree with the deceased last wishes.

February started with my niece completely paralyzed by her emotions.  She had repressed so many traumas that she threatened her life. Again, I had spoken up.  Over Christmas, I shook her.  “All the tension you shove inside – trying to look like you are ok – it will explode one day if you do not deal with it!”  As her mental health progressed from bad to worst, I felt guilty.  Of course, once her emotions started to resurface, she didn’t know how to deal with them.  She couldn’t work, couldn’t think – it’s been a bumpy ride even if I’m convinced that I gave her a soft(er) landing instead of a full-frontal crash to the bottom.

And my step-dad’s illness progressed. He was already on the clock but now, it’s ticking louder.  He doesn’t fear his death – he is actually facing it with saintly stoicism.  But he doesn’t want us to be sad of his eventual passing, which is of course ludicrous.  So my mom has to hide to shed a tear and everyone must maintain the ‘life-as-usual’ facade.

 

But life is not as usual!  When I exclaimed: “Wake up!  It’s time to be honest!”, my mom dared to defend him: “You know that it’s not everyone who likes to express emotions.”

– Maybe so, I said, but we all HAVE emotions, so let’s stop pretending like we don’t!

There, I spoke out loud the ultimate taboo: we have these pesty things call feelings, that don’t agree to stand by idly while life unfolds.  Out of the blue, the elephant refuses to be tamed.  Emotions, previously manageable, can no longer be controlled.  A gloomy wave takes over our limbic system.  Even the most contained of rational mind can slip and fall into the abyss.  Maybe – in fact – the most rational of us are actually more vulnerable to systemic shifts in emotions – having denied them in their infancy.

Why do we fight so hard to keep emotions at bay?  In some ways, emotions are the signposts of our lives, telling us what feels right and what doesn’t.  We should welcome them, accept them with open heart, and act on their insights.  But sometimes, feelings contradict what we rationally wish. Then what is more real?  Our decisions or our feelings?