Old Man Baby

      Baby again, he told my brother, this on reaching the age of 98.  The higher dependence on others, the bodily controls diminished, the balance and senses destined to continue their decline as well.  And nowhere was this similar scenario more evident than in the ending of the book by Steve Gleason, the star NFL player who came down with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and painstakingly wrote his life story down letter by letter using only an eye-recognition program.  Imagine yourself "talking" but only capable of doing that at 1/10 your normal speed because you have to "type" each letter of a single word, add a space, then type another word, a slow version of texting on your phone with one finger (Gleason long ago lost the ability to physically talk --or breathe-- on his own).  But by the end of the book, his only means left of communicating, his eyes, were now being affected.  He could no longer blink (a serious problem which required constant monitoring, including often taping his eyes closed for extended periods), and of course, his eye movements were now also failing, bringing down his talking "ability" to an even slower pace (picture yourself texting with one finger only now you don't know how to type, so you need to constantly search for each letter). His story was heartbreaking and yet uplifting if, and that's a big if, you took away his overall message: live life and live it now.

     Another reminder of this came when I began a book Gleason recommended, one by Sebastian Unger.  I had read a similar book, Waiting for the Monsoon by Rod Nordland, a war correspondent like Unger, and likewise questioning his good fortune in dodging death despite years of reporting in war-torn countries; and like Nordland, author Unger seemed to have challenged death from an early age.  One on occasion in his 20s, Unger stood in his wetsuit on a wintery and icy beach, one still showing the remnants of a nor'easter from the day before.  He was the only person on the beach.  As he wrote in his recent book, he gauges the churning, muddy-looking waters, then grabs his surfboard and heads out: I had been out there half an hour when I saw a huge wave starting to shoal outside of the bar.  It darkened as it came, advancing with the slow determination of something designed to kill you.  More peaks were lined up behind it like the ranks of an advancing army.  If the waves were starting to steepen that far out, they were true monsters, and I didn't know whether to paddle like crazy and try to get over them before they broke or just stay put and take my beating.  I stopped paddling and sat on my board to calm myself before they hit.  On the lead wave came, towering, reaching, and finally detonating right in front of me -- the worst possible place.  I was beyond all human intervention.  I took one last breath, slipped off my board, and dove for the bottom.  The force was so shocking that I caught myself thinking, There must be some mistake.  My board leash snapped immediately.  Vortices heaved me up, changed their mind, slid me down, somersaulted me, stripped off my hood, stuffed my wetsuit full of sand, and thrashed me with what felt like actual malice.  I had no idea which way was up, which was a problem because I ran out of air almost immediately.  Ordinarily, the hydraulics of even a large wave dissipate in a few seconds, but this was different -- it went on and on.  The wave wanted me and was going to keep thrashing me in the darkness until I finally gave up and breathed in.  What amazed me was how malevolent the whole thing seemed -- Me?  Why do you want me?  I was young and had no idea the world killed people so casually.  His book is titled: In My Time of Dying (How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of An Afterlife). 

Photo: Ted Grambeau/Red Bulletin

     Reading that intro brought back vivid memories of my own time bodysurfing.  I was younger than Unger at the time, still in high school and full of that of feeling of immortality that one has when young.  My friend and I had puffed ourselves up with bravado, especially since we had bodysurfed for ages, but this was all nearly twenty years before bodysurfing became big time, before the "elites" would wear diving-like fins or ride on boogie boards and do spins and flips.  At the time, we were simply two bodysurfers who just swam in bare feet to catch waves, often to the ire of surfers who did their best to dodge us (truth be told, all was quite civil then with the board surfers often in a separate area from the body surfers so "conflicts" were almost nonexistent).  But like Unger, we soon found ourselves alone with the set, and now captured by a rip tide.  I spotted the set first, way out there as Unger did, and realized those waves were going to be monsters and that we had only a limited time to swim as hard as we could with the rip tide because coming up almost equally fast was the pier.  Get trapped and tossed in those pilings, each now the home of razor-sharp mussels, and you may emerge beaten and bleeding on the beach as if hit by shrapnel.  I yelled to my friend that I was going to swim through the pier before than set came (unfortunately, he didn't hear me and did get trapped in those pilings, although he had the presence of mind to dive deep behind one and let the piling take the force of the passing wave).  Me?  I made it through, only to be caught almost exactly as Unger, taking the brunt of the large first wave, losing all orientation but eventually making it up through the foam, only to see the second wave breaking atop me.  Repeat only me with far less air.  Make it to the top again and see the third wave breaking on me, with me futilely diving deep enough to touch sand on my chest but finding the wave pulling me out of the bottom like a rag doll and sending me almost laughingly "over the falls."  I was done.  I yelled for a lifeguard but was way too far out, and like Unger, this wasn't an area that even had lifeguards.  I was choking on salt water and gasping for air, which is when I turned to see yet another monster wave coming at me.  And like Unger, I felt that this was it.  No white light or life review, but a sense of utter calm.  No choking,  No panic.  Just calm as if I were ready to face whatever was to come...

    So with Unger, faced with his own resignation that his "time" may have arrived (he faced a vision of his father calling to him from a black pit), he goes on to ask something a bit more sobering: The overwhelming likelihood is that our sense of another reality is just a comforting illusion that helps us live our lives.  But what appears to be likely or unlikely is a terrible strategy for finding out what is true.  Our understanding of reality might be as limited as a dog's understanding of television.  So, abandoning likelihood for a moment, one might try out the idea that death is simply where the veil of belief gets a peek in the tent to reveal a greater system beyond.  "Reality" may just be a boundary we can't see past...It's not remotely likely, but then neither is anything.  If the force of gravity were even slightly weaker, stars wouldn't be strong enough to cross the Coulomb barrier and start thermonuclear fusion.  It would be a completely dark universe.  If gravity were slightly stronger, stars would burn too hot and fast, and there would be no life.  If the attractive force between electrons and atomic nuclei were too weak, electrons couldn't orbit; if it were too strong, atoms couldn't bond with each other.  Either way, there would be no molecules.  There are more than thirty parameters that must have almost the precise value that they do in order to permit a universe with life.  The odds of that happening have been calculated to be one to the negative 230 -- that is to say, one chance in a number that has 229 zeros after it.  Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains in earth would be millions of millions of times more likely than the universe existing.  And yet here we are. 

     Indeed, here we are, or perhaps at least we perceive that here we are.  Jumbled-speak or not, the reality is that we must work to put food on the table, we must eat, we must breathe, and that the random fall or car accident will likely hurt for a while (and maybe a long while).  But what happens if you're suddenly separated from life?  Perhaps not the end of life itself as in dying but that lost-at-sea feeling?  Another rather interesting book came from Rebecca Boyle titled Our Moon.  And at first, one may be tempted to wonder what would make that object in the sky, the one like the sun which we see all the time and yet often don't see, how long would it take before we realized it was no longer in the sky?  She points out that looking up at a full moon is something most of us will do an average of 100 times, a new timetable for our lives.  Here's a bit of what she wrote: How many times in your life have you felt a sort of sixth sense?  It is indefinable but unmistakable; you just know when the car in the next lane is about to merge, you can feel the presence of an animal behind you or a bird above you, you sense when you are not the only person in a quiet library.  This feeling is not one you would experience on the Moon.  The feeling, instead, is a profound awareness that there is nothing, and there is no one.  Everyone who has ever existed is up above, on Earth.  Every being that ever lived and died and breathed and loved is distant from the Moon, instead sailing above you, appearing to go around you just like the Sun and the stars.  Collins, on Apollo 11, was the first to experience this displacement.  As he sailed around the far side of the Moon, out of touch with Aldrin, Armstrong, and Earth, he experienced a deep sense of solitude.  "I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life.  I am it.  If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the Moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side," he wrote.  "I feel powerfully --not as fear or loneliness-- but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation.  I like the feeling."

     That aloneness doesn't have to be just on the moon.  Surveys tend to show that the dining room is a disappearing feature in more and more homes.  Gathering at the "table" is now done by fewer and fewer families, as noted in articles by Dwell, The Atlantic and others.  It's nothing new.  Back in 2019 PR NewsWire had listed several trends it was noticing: --"Dinner time" is any time: Thirty-five percent of respondents had a set dinner time growing up, while only 22% of respondents have a set dinner time now, supporting the fact that consumers are busier today than they've ever been before.  --Social channels beat out family recipes: While 63% of people learned to cook from family members growing up, 40% of people today get their recipes from Pinterest, IG, or another social channel, versus family (20%) or cookbooks (13%). --Holiday meals are still big deals: There's an even greater divide when it comes to Thanksgiving: 48% of respondents 60 years and older are confident cooking this big holiday meal, while only 24% of Gen X and 16% of millennials are confident.  And in our world, whether we're homeless or sitting alone in an apartment, we can feel as alone as astronaut Michael Collins,, elated or empowered or content, but alone.  

     My identity has evolved throughout my life, wrote Gleason about his progressing ALS..  In the the NFL, I identified as a counterculture athlete, but after i retired, feeling like a failure, that story was shattered.  When I was diagnosed, I identified as an active father and husband.  Sorry shattered too.  What am I really?  After all the stories have been shattered, what remains?  The ultimate spiritual growth seems for us to have no identity, but I'm inspired by the oak tree.  Silent.  Ancient.  Present.  Wise.  Constant.  Rooted in the earth and reaching to the sun.  My body will one day fuel the growth of an oak.  Put another way, Sloane Crosley in her book Grief Is for People, wrote: Denial is humankind's specialty, our handy aversion.  We are allergic to our own mortality, we'll do anything to make it not so.  Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity.  But it can't be helped.  I can't be helped.  I am holding these losses as an aunt might, as if they are familiar but not quite mine.  As if they are books I will be allowed to return to some centralize sadness library.

    We should appreciate what we have, to Don Quixote our way forward and along the path of Unger and Gleason.  Maybe we're not randomly picking a grain of sand here, but being alive and and alive on this planet is pretty special in itself.  Again, from Rebecca Boyle's book: There are other rocky planets, but none are like Earth.  Mars is also a slowly spinning terrestrial world, titled on its side almost exactly as much as Earth is.  But it lost its water and its atmosphere.  And it has no moon, just dinky captured asteroids.  Venus is a faster-spinning rocky world with a dense atmosphere, but its cloak of clouds grew too thick over time, and choked the planet to death.  If Venus ever had water, it's gone now.  Mercury, too close to the Sun, somehow still harbors tiny amounts of water in the dark shadows of its deepest craters.  But it is blasted by solar rays.  Neither Venus nor Mercury has moons.  Why do we?  What was it about Theia, the original Earth, and their mutual destruction that would give rise to this planet?  Why did we end up with a huge moon, one-fourth of Earth's own heft?  What happened in that cataclysm that resulted in a paired system of worlds, one dry and completely dead, and one drenched in water and life? 

     There's a lot to being alone, lost in your thoughts.  And whether young or old, that alone time may be both good and bad, sometimes bringing awareness and other times letting your age "prepare" you for the finish line...and that's if you're lucky.  Just as with those random grains of sand, there are likely random explanations for those whose lives end within days or years or even only a few decades, just as there are likely explanations for those who live healthy lives regardless of their lifestyle, and those who develop something as tragic as ALS.  There must be a random explanation, but as Unger noted: ...what appears to be likely or unlikely is a terrible strategy for finding out what is true.  So I end with a letter written by Katherine Schuler to the editor of The Sun, this in response to her reading an interview with Lynn Casteel Harper on dementia and its affect on our senses, traits which hit Schuler's mother: My mom was vibrant and a gifted writer of short stories and poetry.  As she grew older, her short-term memory declined, and she struggled with basic life skills.  After my father's death she became bitter and angry, and her health deteriorated.  Assisted living was the best fit for her, but while the care was excellent and the facilities were beautiful, she was utterly lonely.  The other residents would appear only during mealtimes; then they'd retreat to their rooms and close their doors.  Once the funds ran out, she was moved to a nursing home, where she had a roommate and the residents' doors were left open.  After a period of adjustment she settled in.  The last time I visited her, I brought a good friend of mine.  My mom explained that she was living in a castle, the other residents were her lifelong friends and the staff were their servants.  I can't help but think that her writer's mind was at work crafting this world for her.  As we were leaving, my friend turned to me and said,  "That's the happiest I've ever seen your mom."  I couldn't agree more.  Baby again...