If We're Lucky, We Live in Two Worlds
Joe Donsky, my father-in-law, often said that "I don't like the system." He was talking not about politics but the fact that we all have to die. While I first took this view as reflective of a rather naive view of things, over time I came to see it as a more complex outlook on life than my own. To see "the system," you have to be able to step outside it. One of his greatest strengths was to have his feet buried deep in reality while his head could, at the same time, see a much more benign world. As a man who lived through the Depression, fought in two wars and had a child (my wife) born with a heart defect that was supposed to kill her by age twelve, he certainly knew life was precarious. At the same time, he never doubted things would work out. Optimism was his antidote to the sting of life.
I think of him now even more as I age. Raised to see the world as it is, enmeshed in a daily news-storm of negativity, and awaiting the results of several biopsies that will determine whether a skin condition is rather minor and can be treated with radiation or more serious, requiring surgery, his ability to balance data with dreams beckons.
We all, I suspect, live in these two worlds. It is how we manage their geography and moving between them that defines us and constrains or deepens our happiness. As I think about his life, I know he confronted its difficulties head-on. How else could he have survived its dangers? Yet his arsenal included a sense of humor, the capacity to find something funny in the worst of times. As life closed in on him, due to a burst colon and failing kidney, he emerged from a coma only briefly. Able to barely eat some vanilla pudding, he licked his lips and said, softly with a sly wink just to us, that his room-mate's hard coughing was "ruining my breakfast!"
His toolkit also included the capacity to shut out the world. He wasn't ignorant of what was happening around him. He was well-read on many topics and saw clearly to the center of things, but he could choose to let go of what he could do little about. He chose instead to trade the energy of worry for life-saving and life-affirming acts for his family, which was to him always at his heart's center.
In doing all this, he made it appear effortless. No existential angst, no depressive cynicism, and no overarching sadness accompanied him, though I cannot help but believe he was confronted by those sirens in his life. Instead, he smiled, joked with his daughters and grandchildren, ran his jazz-infused fingers (still nimble in his mid-eighties) across the piano keys, and ate his favorite little candy nibs, a stash of which he kept in his nightstand.
If I am honest with myself, I know I have never approached life with such equanimity, even as I benefitted greatly by watching his. In that sense, as I await my test results and whatever follows, his life is a model for me. I know, given my age, that life's challenges will grow. That is as it should and must be. Those who want to extend life indefinitely have always seemed to me to lack the understanding of how precious life is precisely because it is short. They would live in just one world, as if the earth and the sun could be as majestically glorious without each other.
As my father-in-law lay in hospice, unconscious and lost to us in everything but the final way, we spent an hour at his house, looking through his papers. His was meticulous about his record-keeping, a fact which no doubt made him such an outstanding hospital administrator in his healthier days. It was in doing this that we come across his will, packed neatly in a brown envelope, on which he had written in his large block print style "In Case of the Inevitable." I think it would be hard to find a better example of his ability to live in the two worlds of his life. We went back to the hospital. As we sat at his bedside, we noticed that his feet were moving to the sound of some of his favorite music that we had brought into his hospital room. The inevitable would come, but that reality would be accompanied by the always-present beat of his life.
Photo Credit: Carol Donsky Newell
