Category: on my mind

My best friend is dying.

It’s strange, seeing the statement written down. For one, its tautological properties are taunting: everyone, by virtue of being alive, eventually dies. For another, I’ve refused to stack rank my friends since at least middle school, so even the thought of a “best” friend is foreign to me. But alas, for all its perniciousness, the spectre of death does tend to bring about clarity.

He was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer a few months ago. Despite world-class treatment, the prognosis is not good.

At this point in my life, it’s not like I still retain the immortal conceptions of youth. Death isn’t a mere abstraction to any of us. Alcohol took its toll on a few friends and acquaintances in high school and college, and grandparents have passed away. Friends have lost family to terrorist attacks, acquaintances have died in war, or murdered their family, or taken their own lives. But brain cancer, at our age, against one of the most keen and ambitious people I know, only confirms that fate is a motherfucker.

We all know that we’ll die at some point, but I think it’s among the most instinctively repulsive things to conceive of one’s own death. And we try, consciously or not, to push it down, brush it away. We’ve read about the ways that the great intellectuals of the past viewed it:

Epicurus: “Death means nothing to us…when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist.”

Tolstoy: “The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter’s logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.”

Donne:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

It’s funny: both of us were in a freshman college class called “Visions of Mortality”, where we read those texts above. That class, I think, had a pretty direct link to my emotional depression throughout college, but I still consider it as one of the most worthwhile courses I’ve taken. Yet no matter how much you twist and turn it in an intellectual exercise, when finally you stare at it, you can’t help but feel that rationality is toothless against death. What good are the quotes and experiences of others when we confront this fear for ourselves? These impregnable logical barriers are houses of straw.

He and his wife are among the most strong and resilient people I know, so it’s taken with a bit of grim irony that it’s been he who has been trying to comfort me about his situation. I’ve never been so much at a loss for words.

He recommended me to read Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a short, powerful memoir of a neurosurgeon who succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 36. As a fellow Stanford alum, the book resonated with me in expected and unexpected ways. Here was a work written by someone whom I felt an intellectual peer, someone who thought through the same complex issues, approached life with the same driving philosophy. Someone who — just like my best friend — by mere contrast illuminates all the deficiencies of my own life. And anyone who uses T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” as the recitation text for determining sanity of mind: that’s a “you had me at hello” sort of moment. (Incidentally, I was gifted “The Wasteland” by my teaching assistant for “Visions of Mortality”, a gesture which to this day I still ponder.)

Kalanithi describes the maddening uncertainty of cancer. Before, you knew you would die at some unknown point in the future; after, you still know you will die at some unknown point in the future, but that point is just closer. Yes, you can look at the probabilities, the Kaplan-Meier survival curves, but each observation is a life, unique among the rest. If you knew with certainty how long you had to live, you could plan things out. And how do you live a meaningful life? What actions would be different if it’s 2 months vs. 2 years (or 20 or 200 years)?

What consolation is it to a dying man that he has lived a meaningful, fulfilling life? We learn such hard lessons about how to live our lives, but so little about how to accept our deaths.

I very recently watched through the Harry Potter films. There, too, the faintest glimmers of answers, here and gone.

For the past few months, I’ve been trying in vain to craft a letter to my friend. Each time I try to start writing again, I cry and stop. All I have is this:

I’m sorry that even if you lived to 133, I may still not have found someone to reciprocate the favor of having you as my best man.

I don’t know if there is an afterlife, but I do know this: that any heaven will welcome you with open arms.

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for the past few years: I don’t know if you ever drew space-time diagrams in physics, usually with the speed of light being a 45-degree line. I’ve been thinking about how all our lives are these slow, sinuous lines that weave along space and time. Even though all our lines are finite, we all are woven into this fabric of the universe. Yours has touched people more than you know.

I love you, man.

Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when you let your guard down, life has a way of sneaking up on you unawares, and before you know it, you’ve become exactly that which you promised so long ago to never be.

I recently started reading Wind, Sand, and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exepury’s memoir. Being the author of what has come to be my favorite and most-read book (The Little Prince, which only in the past few years has edged out Brave New World for number of times read), I figured it was nigh time to read another of his works. His life is a fascinating one, for sure: just see his wikipedia entry. Anyway, WSS has not disappointed, hitting me early with this gem of a paragraph:

No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man…. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

I’d be lying if said loneliness isn’t a part of this. It seems like all my friends are getting married these days, which really isn’t surprising, given how old we are now. But maybe it should surprise me that I, the perpetual laggard, just never seemed to have grown up and gotten with the program. Am I still not the same teenager who was scared of girls, who couldn’t convey his emotions, who defiantly defended loneliness because it was the easy way out, but now am at an age where it’s changed from pathetic to absurd? I hide under thicker and thicker layers of metaphysical confusion, asking large but ultimately futile questions. Somehow, the easiest person for me to fool is myself.

At this point, my life is cruising on autopilot when it really needs a hard shove. It’s so easy to hide behind the untouchable beauty of ballet, and say that this is all I need. But doesn’t it still feel a little hollow? Partnering isn’t love, and the stage isn’t real life. I know that I am improving little by little, but am I truly growing? Of course, in the beginning, it was a big step and a worthy challenge; but now even the difficulties of trying to improve or stay in shape aren’t true challenges because they have fallen into the routine.

I say I’m getting too complacent at work, but do I do anything about it? Maybe little things like taking on more responsibility, but the fundamental problem remains, and I’m too comfortable and lazy to do what I need. It’s hard to argue that my job isn’t great and I get paid more than I probably deserve or need, yet I find myself in the trap of wondering if I make enough to ever be able to afford a house in the area. And it takes a little more effort each year to convince myself that we’re doing something meaningful to change the world, and not just driving to increase revenue and growth.

It takes new blood to reinvigorate, but perhaps I’ve grown too old to hunt. Maybe it’s time to blow everything up and start anew. Or maybe I’ll just hide behind these words.