It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (21 page)

That’s not to completely dismiss what we did. I feel bad about it. Allowing the situation to happen was a mistake, and one from which we’ll never completely recover. But when viewed on the universal scale of sin, I believe ours was a small one, and one for which I hope to be forgiven. If not by higher powers, then at least by other people. If not forgiven by every one of them, at least forgiven by myself.

Bereft. That word could pretty much serve as the caption for any snapshot taken of me in my thirties. A decade entered as a traumatized refugee, who’d already experienced old age and dying, though somehow managed to escape death itself. I lived like a man on the run, and in nearly every respect – romantically, financially, psychically – I exited the decade on a lower plane than that on which I’d entered. But as the alcoholic in recovery will tell you, the bottom is the blessing. Because the only place to go from there is up.

Things are different now. Regret has been replaced by contentment. It used to be that the urge to go back and redo, or correct, was stronger than the urge to be wherever I was. It’s not that I don’t ever have the desire to revisit anything anymore. Only that the pleasure I get from being exactly where I am is now stronger than the desire for whatever was, or whatever might have been. That, to me, is contentment. And that, for me, is new.

Which makes me wonder whether any of my perceptions, or any of the stories I’ve told, from earlier eras were accurate. I don’t mean to take anything back, or to suggest it’s not the way things were at the time. Only that they’re no longer so. As I have changed, my perceptions of nearly every event from earlier in my life has changed. Reality, it seems, alters as we do. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those “create your own reality” people. We don’t change the truth of what once was. But time does.

The new perspective I’ve gained hasn’t just added meaning to events from my past. It’s altered their meaning. It’s clear to me now that none of the relationships I obsessed over in the past were meant to work beyond the time they did. They were learning experiences. Some were necessary as stepping-stones toward the better days that have come. Some were nonessential. None were relationships that stood a chance of enduring. But there was no way I could have known that back then, before my perspective changed (though things would have been a whole lot easier if I had).

My progress toward maturity was certainly lethargic. But, in looking back, I think my earlier acceptance of full fault in any situation was inaccurate. I definitely owed my ex-fiancée Patricia profuse apologies. But, I think we’ve both come to know that, ultimately, we failed together. The last time I saw her was years after our split, and over a very friendly lunch she agreed. She told me of the work she’d done to help her learn to communicate more openly than she’d previously been able. She even offered some apologies of her own.

In one of the more perfect metaphorical moments of my life, the red KitchenAid mixer I’d bought for Patricia, and that I featured earlier here, made a clunking sound and expired the first time my Italian wife and I used it together to make pasta. I think it knew its time had passed. Would that I’d had such a keen sense of timing in terms of my own relationships when I was younger.

I have a hard time these days connecting to many of the feelings I had in the past. I don’t find any of this volume’s “most proud moments,” and “best man I ever was”-es to still be accurate. I still feel embarrassed by plenty of my actions. But I don’t feel any of the pain, regret, or sadness that once consumed me. I certainly no longer have videotaped records of past relationships to torment myself with. I threw those out long ago. Not in a purging ceremony, or as an attempt to expunge their power. They no longer had any. They’d become relics whose potency had diminished to the point of being irretrievable. Imagine that. Being unable to conjure something I once couldn’t escape. Without medication. Which I no longer view as “The best thing that ever happened to me.” Elisa is. The reality of those events, from that time, has changed into a different reality today.

I look back in amazement at how much I tortured myself, over even casual dates. Now I just think how much more fun I could have had with all those crazy encounters if I’d known my wife was destined to appear. I wouldn’t have felt bad when any particular evening was a disaster, or even when a full-fledged relationship fell apart. I would have just thought, Hey, on to the next. Because I would have known. I would have trusted that eventually, the one that I want will come along.

Faith. A pretty handy item.

Ill-considered engagement rings, fury at missionary physicians, less than perfect sperm banks. Badly timed kisses, bad behavior in relationships, badly run races.  It’s not that I can’t remember how I felt through all those events. It’s just that the feelings are no longer alive. They’re memories. I make the distinction here because the distinction, for me, wasn’t always clear.

The red car I wrote of as being the only one I’d ever owned, has since become merely my “first.” My ten-year-old nephew who exhibited such insight when things with Patricia fell apart is now a full-grown man. Even the celebrity status that suddenly appeared will, itself, eventually expire.
Everything
has changed, or else will soon enough. In what’s probably the most profound adjustment to my existence, loneliness – which had seeped into my bones and informed every choice in every story I’ve told – has vanished from my life. It’s as difficult for me to remember its ache now, as it was to escape it some years ago. Nothing now feels the way it once did. And that sentence contains the happiest facts of my life.

I do wonder whether time is the only ingredient that alters perception, and whether its passage alters every one. Eight months after the termination of a pregnancy, Elisa Atti and I were married, in a non-religious two-language ceremony at our favorite restaurant in New York. Her bewildered Italian parents sat next to my East Coast American Jewish parents in a circular
red-leather booth. The day before, in the same room, they’d watched as their daughter was photographed with her television star fiancé for
O, The Oprah Magazine
.

The wedding meant we’d succeeded in preserving our union. Whether we’d have remained together, or as happy, having made other choices we’ll never know. I still feel regret over what we decided was necessary then. That regret will grow or fade depending on what the future holds. There’s no way to know from here. Because you don’t know where you are, you never know where you are, until you’re somewhere else.

The years since our wedding have been like a fairy tale filled with comedic collisions between cultures. We moved from New York, where wealth is relatively hidden from view, and rich and poor swirl together in a roiling mix, to Santa Monica, California, where wealth is flaunted by those who have it, and the classes are as segregated as anywhere I’ve ever been. We’re not always happy with every detail of our lives, but we are happy with each other. I am happy, finally, to be exactly where I am.

I know there’s no guarantee my newfound happiness will be permanent. I’m better equipped to maintain healthy perspectives. But I’m smart enough to know that the universe could lay me down with the most casual of blows. “Faith,” as traditionally defined, still lies beyond my grasp. I wonder if that’s contradictory when I expose the most contradictory fact: I pray, nearly every day. To whom, I’m not sure. I stand by my statement of “I Don’t Know.” But I do send requests. I give thanks. Just in case. Like “thank you” cards. I’ve yet to have an important plea denied.

I wonder, now that my relationship to trust has changed, if I could ever go through an ordeal as serious as my illness and simply trust that everything will be all right. The experiences that could be proof that I should feel safe and protected are the same experiences that prove what danger lies all around. Those same experiences also indicate how much can be overcome. What am I to conclude?

Simplistic conclusions, like absolute faith and trust, are still beyond my capabilities. But I have learned that whatever threats might still be lurking are only landmarks on trails to be traveled until a new path appears. There is no arrival point. Only a journey, then a passage from which no one’s ever sent back any reports. My philosophy these days is summed up best by what my friend Jackie once told me. She was trying to ease my pain over one of my many overblown heartbreaks.

“It’s only temporary, Ev,” Jackie said.

“Yeah, so is everything,” I responded.

“Well, that’s the good news and the bad news, then, isn’t it?”

And so it is.

My wife, Elisa, and I were strolling in Santa Monica’s Palisades Park recently, looking out over the Pacific Ocean. The park is a narrow strip of green grass and shade, with towering palm trees, that stretches for two miles or so along Ocean Avenue. The Pacific Coast Highway buzzes next to the ocean a couple of hundred feet below the cliffs that line the park’s western edge. The park is filled with well-to-do, intimidatingly (or inspirationally, depending on your perspective) fit people walking dogs, performing Tai Chi, practicing yoga, or lying together on blankets having some form of fully clothed public sex. The views are spectacular, whether of the multi-million-dollar apartments that line the avenue, the glittering ocean, the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu, or – on the days when the air is clear enough – Catalina Island smoldering in the mist off the coast of Long Beach. It’s a nice place to take a walk, and one of the more significant reasons we relocated from New York City.

On this particular evening, while taking in the sights we depend on to relax and inspire us, we were talking about death. My wife and I talk about death a lot. We also talk about illness, disaster, war, and calamities of widely assorted natures. But they all really add up to the same thing. It’s death we’re always talking about, or referring to, however obliquely. Either that, or the only thing worse: unrelenting suffering.

These conversations aren’t confined to our walks in the park. The ease and luxury of a fabulous dinner with my wife is often followed by a chat about…what? The sadness of sex for those who are HIV positive, the aftermath of earthquakes, the heartbreak to come for whichever of us dies last. Or first. What it will feel like as we slip away, realizing we’re doomed and are forced to say goodbye. Or we’ll discuss a story about someone else who’s fallen into whatever horrifying state frightens us the most, and we’ll say: “Oh, no. That’s the worst. That’s really one of the worst things that can happen to you.” Yes, it’s a serene picnic as Elisa and I lounge around the house.

That’s just our conversation. As much as I’ve succeeded in distancing myself from my past, my private thoughts are even worse. People ask me all the time whether living under threat for so long still affects me, and the answer is yes. I fantasize about my own death constantly. Every day I think I’m having a heart attack. Every day. Every time I cross a street I imagine an approaching car smashing into me, tearing me apart. Every time. Cancer. Every day. Aortic aneurysm. A steel beam from above, if I’m walking under one. Melanoma. Neuroblastoma. I imagine what it’ll feel like when my heart explodes. My brain hemorrhages. Blood spews from my mouth. Strokes, heart attacks, car crashes, stabbings, shootings, impalings, eviscerations. A doctor tells me my life is over. Again. Which in my case means for the third or fourth time.

And those are just the momentary images I’m flooded with repeatedly each day. Worse are the slightly less frequent, but extended, daydreams in which my mind indulges. These usually involve a concrete diagnosis, followed by a period of informing a selection of close friends. Then come fruitless interventions, ultimately resulting in deterioration, disfigurement, and a varied assortment of final moments. Usually, I’ll concentrate on the reaction of one friend at a time when I do this. Occasionally it’ll be my wife. Sometimes my mood in these reveries is stoically resigned, other times my anger burns hot and white. Always, though, the emotion outside the dream is unadulterated terror.

When I’m conversing with an acquaintance on the street and I feel a wisp of a breeze on my upper lip, I imagine blood is leaking from my nose. Really, I do. My ears. My eyes. An audition. Job interview. I feel my intestines rupture, my appendix burst. When I go to the gym to exercise, when I’m riding the stationary bike, should a trickle of sweat tickle my thigh, I think shit is leaking out of my ass. I have to go into the bathroom, lock the door, and check to make sure. It’s always a false alarm. Still, ten minutes later, I go back to check again.

People wonder why I seem distracted, or why I don’t remember their names after we’ve met. I want to tell them, “Because I was having a heart attack while we spoke.” Would that excuse my lack of concentration? “An aneurysm, a stroke, a bowel movement. You didn’t know it was happening, but that’s what was going on with me. In the privacy of my mind. I’m terribly sorry. Could you tell me your story again?”

It wouldn’t make any difference. Not if there was a thunderstorm I could imagine electrocuting me, an airplane passing that might land on me, or anyone, anywhere, I cared about that I could conceive of being murdered in some horrible fashion. It’s not that I don’t want to listen. It’s just that, sometimes, it’s hard. Like, every day. Every instant, of every single day.

Even more debilitating than those residual effects of distant traumas are the more legitimate health scares that continue to occur. In the eighteen years since my bone marrow transplant, at least once or twice a year, one or several physicians has become concerned about some possibly life-threatening development or complication from past treatments. Bladder cancer, lymphoma (Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s both, thank you very much), colon cancer, testicular cancer, brain matter crystallization. I have, under a concerned physician’s care, been investigated for them all. Once I used up most of the specifically male and/or gender neutral diseases, I started having scares resembling traditionally female disorders. Yes, I have submitted to a breast needle biopsy, out of concern on the parts of several physicians over an ovoid lump near my left nipple. It turned out to consist of – brace yourselves – fat.

Panic is what I experience during these episodes. And that’s
after
the four years of living that way every day, with good reason and concrete justification. Compared to those days, the concerns over the last decade and a half have been quaint. But I am tired, man.

The requirements for soothing such distress have become increasingly stringent over the years. It used to require only a doctor visit or a blood test to lay my fears to rest. Now, it’s reached a point where only a biopsy of suspect tissues, or a detailed computer tomography scan, will reassure me. The time might not be far off when it’ll take an autopsy to calm me down.

Every so often I apologize to my wife for my expectation that I’m going to die young and leave her alone. Actually, I don’t apologize for the expectation. I apologize to her, in advance, for what I see as the inevitability that I’ll come down with an incurable illness, or die suddenly, leaving her alone, or with whatever children we might have. I vacillate between grieving over how costly these apprehensions have been in terms of time, dollars, and psychic energy, and marveling at how much I’ve been able to accomplish in spite of them.

If I’m this crazy, I sometimes wonder, how crazy are real crazy people? I consider my own level of anxiety to be substantial (and wouldn’t you?), yet thoughts of suicide never cross my mind. My anxieties are all centered on the overwhelming desire to hold onto life. But is there a point where anxiety over, and fear of, death makes some people choose to hasten it? Do some people kill themselves not because they don’t want to live, but because they can no longer take the suspense of not knowing when or how they’re going to die?

If so, there’s good news at last. I haven’t gotten there. Not yet. What I want is more
.
More life. Just like when I was clawing and clutching to preserve my existence. Only now, because my life is so much better, I want more even more than I used to.

It’s nice to have found someone in Elisa who understands, or at least can tolerate my obsessions. My insanity’s got hers beat by about a hundred thousand kilometers, but she’s got enough of the bug to empathize. She’s even got a sense of humor about it. After reading a book that suggests people can sense, and hasten, the approach of their own deaths, I told Elisa, “Reading this makes me afraid I’m going to die soon.”

“No, no, no,” Elisa said reassuringly. “If your thoughts could kill you, you’d be dead a long time already.”

I imagine I’d feel differently now about losing a battle to stay alive than I would have in my mid-twenties. My relationship to suffering hasn’t changed in the years since my illness, but my relationship to the notion of death has. It wasn’t altered by my close encounters with it. It’s been altered by my wife.

When I was sick, I spent a lot of time imagining what my response might be were I to learn that my battle was lost, and that my life was coming to an end. I wondered whether I’d be able to release the anger I carried (and that carried me) through. Would I be able to come to some degree of acceptance? I always concluded that the question was either irrelevant or poorly phrased. It wasn’t so much that I wouldn’t be able to attain such an unburdened state, but that I wouldn’t want to. If I was going to go at twenty-four, twenty-five, or twenty-six years old, I thought, I’m going to go out kicking and screaming. I’m going to die in a full-blown temper tantrum. I’ll never accept, or cooperate with, the travesty being committed upon me. Talk about a sense of entitlement.

Now, at forty-five, my inclinations are different. Not because I’d be any less terrified. Because I feel more fulfilled.

First, there would be the obvious sense that, having barely escaped what was represented as an almost certain death well before reaching thirty, I’ve been lucky just to get the extra fifteen or twenty years that have allowed me to reach forty-five. Middle age isn’t old age, and it’s still most often viewed as tragic when someone under fifty dies. But it sure beats the hell out of dying at twenty-five.

There’s also a more complete sense of accomplishment. On a deep and intensely personal level, having had my opinions in regard to illness and healthcare seriously considered has been gratifying. On a shallower level, I have been fortunate enough to take part in one or more professional projects that have allowed me to experience some degree of recognition and acclaim. I can imagine letting go being easier having at least had a taste of each.

Ultimately, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter one bit when we die. We’re all going to. It’s what we’re supposed to do. If you’ve got a hot date scheduled, or maybe reservations at a restaurant that’s really hard to get into, you’ll probably want to put it off for a week or two. But beyond that, is tomorrow so much better than today? In the full sweep of history, is next year better than the current one? (Parents of young children are given full license to disagree.)

But none of those thoughts address what’s really changed in my life and in my spirit. The critical factor is that I’ve found a mate. I have formed, and been fused into, a fulfilling partnership. The sense of completion that’s given me has altered my emotional makeup and my relationship to my own mortality. It’s given me a sense of a life well lived, and the feeling I’d be able to depart with less rancor than I ever would have before.

I’m more willing to face the end of my life having finally found pleasure in it. There’s a hint of incongruity there, to say the least. And the thought prompts another fear. If I don’t feel that death would be so terrible anymore, I worry I’m doing something nearly as dangerous as inviting it in. Analyze that, and you can see why someone like me might be invested in not enjoying himself very much. As long as I’m miserable about leaving a life in which I haven’t yet found fulfillment, I’ll fight hard enough to get to keep living the life that’s not giving me what I want. On the other hand, if I get too happy and content, and don’t fear death anymore due to a sense of fulfillment, I might be more likely to let it reach out and grab me. So I’d better stay miserable. That’s the mixed-up form of common sense I’ve lived with, and have had to learn to talk myself out of on a regular basis.

No longer feeling deprived, I can, at long last, experience gratitude. I am grateful. I am grateful for the time Elisa and I have spent together. I’m grateful simply for the miraculous experience of having found each other. I’m grateful for the years I’ve had, and for the shifts in perspective they’ve allowed that, in turn, have allowed me to see so many past events in less painful, regretful ways. I am deeply grateful, sincerely grateful, and purely grateful. As a result, I find I could now, as they say in some sentimental movies, die a happy man.

I sometimes wonder whether children would adjust the equation again. What if Elisa and I now had a two-month-old? A two-year-old? Or a child who was twelve? Would my feelings be different?

Of course the answer is yes. Because everything changes everything. Even as I write these words, I know they’ll be at least somewhat inaccurate upon publication. If you want to know exactly how I feel about anything right now, give me a call. Better yet, show up at a bookstore appearance, and bring along twelve or thirteen of your closest friends.

A fact that’s lost within my private debate is that
I’m not actually dying right now
(at least not any more rapidly than anyone else). Unless someone has some test results I’m not aware of. I say to Elisa on our Palisades Park “death walks” all the time, “Not everyone spends so much time thinking about these things.” I’m pretty sure most of the people around us overlooking the Pacific Ocean are floating more calmly through their days. It’s true, at least half of them have had cosmetic surgery, and they’re exercising with the demonic energy of those who want to stay twenty-one forever. They must sense something chasing them. But I think they’re channeling their fears in more constructive ways. Or maybe they just stayed on their antidepressants longer.

I have met some people who went through trials like I did back in my mid-twenties, but few of them admit to still being consumed by them. I’ve even heard some say, “I don’t really think about those things anymore. That was then, this is now.”

I used to be suspicious, finding those explanations less than credible. Then I met my wife, a woman who’s got no reason to feel the specter of death and disaster as vividly as I do. The fact that she does, without any apparent provocation, indicates to me that the people who should, but don’t, might be telling the truth.