As a child, I went through a phase of experimenting with the idea of things happening or not happening because you believed or did not believe in them. Maybe our pet rabbit wouldn’t die after being bitten by the next-door neighbor’s germ-riddled cat. I tried refusing to believe it. I tried willing a recovery into reality. I wondered about the power of the mind and what would be possible if I could just concentrate hard enough. I knew it was stupid, but there was nothing else to do. The tiny thing was just a baby; of course it died.
When I was even younger, I thought that if you went to the hospital, you came out better. That was how it worked. Hospitals fixed you. You didn’t go there to get worse or even die. But when I was six, the doctors sent my grandmother home from the hospital because nothing else could be done for her. I thought someone had messed up. Being sent home to die, being sent away from the hospital still sick, did not fit with my six-year-old logic. The stories I’d been told had turned out to be only that -- convenient tales with convenient endings.
More than that, though, I thought about what it meant to hope for something even though you knew it couldn't happen, no matter what you did. I don’t mean asking some higher power to bestow me with millions of dollars. I mean not knowing what to hope for when I was told my 50-year-old neighbor would die of cancer. I knew he could not be cured because he and his wife came to our house one evening for my father’s opinion. My father is a surgeon and my mother is a nurse, and they sat with our neighbors in the living room, talking for hours. I have a memory of hearing my father tell our neighbor that he was sorry, but yes, our neighbor was going to die from his disease and he only had so much time. As his sickness progressed our neighbor turned into an old man, his black hair almost white, his skin pale, as if his body had to hurry up and finish its living.
I remember once he helped me with details crucial to a detective story I was writing, that one night he rid our yard of a prowling possum, and that another time he scared off a pack of coyotes roaming down our street after a brush fire. I remember also that I was afraid when I saw him sick and that what I'd been taught of prayers seemed useless. It seemed foolish to allow myself to hope he would recover; I didn’t want to ask for something only to be refused.
But before he'd been diagnosed, he and his wife had bought a motor home and drove all around the country. I held on to the idea of how much they had enjoyed themselves, that he'd had an adventure before passing away. I imagined them driving across Mississippi along the Gulf of Mexico. His wife's foot had become swollen from all the driving, but it seemed proof to me that they had seen and done as much as they possibly could have. It seemed complete somehow.
So this is what is on my mind tonight: When is it right to be a realist, even a pessimist, and when is it right to be an optimist? If you refuse to give yourself false hope, you will be hurt less in the end. But if you never embrace possibilities, even those seemingly far-fetched, what will you gain? Everyone dies, miracles are rare, and if you set yourself up with false hope it is going to be even worse when the inevitable bad thing happens.
I wonder where the line is.
This is where I usually turn to books. Didion on the stories we tell ourselves, that give us order. Camus on the absurd. Nietzsche on the death of God. Thich Nhat Hanh on seeing our emotions as a river.
Tonight, though, how about Kerouac:
When I was even younger, I thought that if you went to the hospital, you came out better. That was how it worked. Hospitals fixed you. You didn’t go there to get worse or even die. But when I was six, the doctors sent my grandmother home from the hospital because nothing else could be done for her. I thought someone had messed up. Being sent home to die, being sent away from the hospital still sick, did not fit with my six-year-old logic. The stories I’d been told had turned out to be only that -- convenient tales with convenient endings.
More than that, though, I thought about what it meant to hope for something even though you knew it couldn't happen, no matter what you did. I don’t mean asking some higher power to bestow me with millions of dollars. I mean not knowing what to hope for when I was told my 50-year-old neighbor would die of cancer. I knew he could not be cured because he and his wife came to our house one evening for my father’s opinion. My father is a surgeon and my mother is a nurse, and they sat with our neighbors in the living room, talking for hours. I have a memory of hearing my father tell our neighbor that he was sorry, but yes, our neighbor was going to die from his disease and he only had so much time. As his sickness progressed our neighbor turned into an old man, his black hair almost white, his skin pale, as if his body had to hurry up and finish its living.
I remember once he helped me with details crucial to a detective story I was writing, that one night he rid our yard of a prowling possum, and that another time he scared off a pack of coyotes roaming down our street after a brush fire. I remember also that I was afraid when I saw him sick and that what I'd been taught of prayers seemed useless. It seemed foolish to allow myself to hope he would recover; I didn’t want to ask for something only to be refused.
But before he'd been diagnosed, he and his wife had bought a motor home and drove all around the country. I held on to the idea of how much they had enjoyed themselves, that he'd had an adventure before passing away. I imagined them driving across Mississippi along the Gulf of Mexico. His wife's foot had become swollen from all the driving, but it seemed proof to me that they had seen and done as much as they possibly could have. It seemed complete somehow.
So this is what is on my mind tonight: When is it right to be a realist, even a pessimist, and when is it right to be an optimist? If you refuse to give yourself false hope, you will be hurt less in the end. But if you never embrace possibilities, even those seemingly far-fetched, what will you gain? Everyone dies, miracles are rare, and if you set yourself up with false hope it is going to be even worse when the inevitable bad thing happens.
I wonder where the line is.
This is where I usually turn to books. Didion on the stories we tell ourselves, that give us order. Camus on the absurd. Nietzsche on the death of God. Thich Nhat Hanh on seeing our emotions as a river.
Tonight, though, how about Kerouac:
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
--C.
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