“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” Woody Allen once said. “I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”
I’m with you, Wood-man, at least so far. But with every asthmatic wheeze of my lungs, every bump of my irregular heartbeat, every high blood-sugar reading I am reminded that I am not a permanent structure. For about ten minutes. Then I go back to my coffee. It is the human way, and my way.
Until I got my cancer-related diagnosis.
Like all good Americans, I go in for a colonoscopy every ten years. For complicated and uninteresting reasons, mine has to be virtual. It’s an unpleasant procedure, but has the benefit of being more thorough than the regular kind. It sees more things than a standard colonoscopy. Like compromised tissue on my appendix.
Compromised? We know what compromise is – we’re legal professionals! Compromise is a settlement to avoid difficult and uncertain litigation. Ideally, it is a tradeoff of desired objectives – win-win, right?
“We’ll cut out your appendix, and I’ll take out a couple of lymph nodes for testing.” My surgeon is a cheerful fellow, with the physique of a retired welterweight boxer. “I’ll take out roughly this much of your colon.” He holds his hands about six inches apart, and then mimes pulling carrots out of the ground to show how he would do it. “You won’t even notice it.”
There is something about a cancer diagnosis which inspires its recipient to look stuff up on the internet. I tried to stick to websites hosted by reputable medical professionals, and usually succeeded.
The colonoscopy had not identified the sort of cancer which was on my appendix, or even that it was cancer. But I prepared for the worst. Of the four varieties of appendix cancer, that was signet-ring cancer. The five-year survival rate is 67%
Wait a minute, I thought. I’m 72 years old. What’s my five-year survival rate if I don’t have cancer?
My dear bride spent her early years in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and now wishes to be buried there when her time comes. That’s O.K. with me. I have no desire to be buried in any particular place, other than next to Lorraine. I have no illusions that anyone will come to visit me. I haven’t visited my parents’ spot at the community mausoleum in suburban Buffalo where they are interred since my father died in 2012, even though I loved both of them to bits. Why bother? They’re not there.
But then, where are they? The religion I was raised in taught that if I, through faith and good works, earned salvation I would live in eternal bliss, in ecstatic celebration with God. If, on the other hand, I led a depraved life I would spend eternity in torment, with flames licking my fingers and toes long beyond the heat death of the universe.
It sounded reasonable to me – sort of like our criminal justice system on steroids. But after a while it occurred to me that if this was what eternity was like, we would never move. We would be in stasis. If, having lived a justified life, I was in a place of eternal bliss, any movement would necessarily diminish that bliss. If I am at the right hand of the Father, any movement I made – even an inch to my left – would redefine my eternal experience, and not for the better. Similarly, any movement I made in the fires of Hell would make Hell less – Hellish.
It didn’t seem very satisfactory.
Many years before I met Lorraine, I dated a woman who believed in reincarnation. She had been regressed, and had accordingly recalled several other lives. I knew she was sincere, and I don’t know that she was wrong. Eventually she became a spiritualist, and moved to the famed spiritualist community of Lily Dale, New York, where she helped to communicate with the dead. She is, alas, now on the other side of the veil, and perhaps in possession of the knowledge I fruitlessly seek.
I once saw the play Vincent, written by the actor Leonard Nimoy. It was the story of Van Gogh, narrated by his older brother Theo. Toward the end of the play, we see a medley of the great artist’s paintings, including his most famous – The Starry Night. The thing is, it is not a painting of a starry night anywhere on Earth. The gaudy yellow stars against the swirling deep blue of the sky are bigger than anything we can see – or ever could – on this planet. The peaceful village could be Arles – the town which housed the asylum from which he conceived the painting. But the sky seemed to be from some place near the center of the galaxy.
Admittedly, I was provoked to attend by the iconic television role the playwright played. But could Van Gogh have glimpsed, in this painting, our true home? Could we in fact be immortal (or near-immortal) creatures, living on a paradisical world near the galactic center, assigned to a rite of passage on this imperfect planet? Do we don these meat sandwiches in order to learn how to be worthy of our true selves? And if we fail, do we repeat the experience until we get it right? And do only the sanctified and the insane have any hint of who we really are?
Unsanctified and (I think) sane, I travelled up to Northeast Vermont with Lorraine and our daughter Nina. (She’s Lorraine’s daughter, but I make claims in order to get credit for how well she turned out).
Our destination is Brunswick, Vermont, population 88, where Lorraine spent her early days, and Island Pond, where we will stay. There is an enormous body of fresh water outside our motel, perfect for late-July swimming. As evening falls, we are serenaded by loons; in the early morning, we drink coffee as the mists come in over the Green Mountains. For two months of the year, there is no place more beautiful and congenial than Northeast Vermont.
The next morning we go to the Town Clerk’s office, in a one-story building about half the size of a typical suburban ranch home. The Clerk is a lively, energetic, pleasant woman about ten years younger than me (I’m guessing) and an encyclopedia of information – about the town (annual budget: $60,000) and about cemetery maintenance (cemeteries are financed through a stock-investment fund), among other things. She explained that we could buy a plot in the town cemetery because of Lorraine’s history; I was her plus-one. Nina could join us only if Lorraine and I used the same urn for our ashes since we had a two-urn plot. The Town Clerk also explained that if the ashes came up to Brunswick outside of burial season (i.e., when the ground was frozen) she would keep the urns on her home bookshelf until they could be buried.
A light rain had started by the time we set out to view our new real property. It was not far from the Clerk’s office but it was not well marked. We almost missed the entrance, which was two ruts in the ground leading into the woods. After a thousand feet or so I thought we had made a mistake, but we persevered (I wasn’t driving) until we got to the actual cemetery.
It was about an acre or so. About a quarter of it was the old cemetery, fully occupied, with no new customers since the mid-fifties. But recent land donations had swelled the graveyard’s capabilities. I went over and stood on our new property. To my left, mist like steam floated from the Green Mountains and over a gorgeous little valley. It was fantastic. And I realized that it was unlikely I would ever see it again.
Back in Maryland, I prepared for my operation. I confess that I was no more reconciled to my mortality than I was when I received my diagnosis, notwithstanding all the thinking I had done about it. “Have you ever lost a patient doing this operation?” I asked the surgeon artlessly.
“Why would you ask a question like that?” he snapped. Now I had done it – affronted the surgeon twenty minutes before my operation. I resolved to do something to improve his mood.
“Doctor Nabokov* is my favorite doctor!” I shouted as they wheeled me into the operating room. In fact, I didn’t know if he was there. Everyone was wearing masks.
The surgery was to be performed using the DaVinci system, and the surgeon would be assisted by the DaVinci machine. I glimpsed the DaVinci machine as I entered the room. It didn’t look a thing like Leonardo. Instead, it looked like a giant white spider, with knives or cameras at the end of each of its legs.
I assume they rendered me unconscious. The next thing I remember was Dr. Nabokov, face next to mine, shouting “it was tiny! I don’t think it’s cancerous!” He was so confident that he hadn’t removed anything more than my appendix. I was free to go home and resume my riotous lifestyle that very afternoon.
Later testing revealed the benign nature of my compromised tissue, and I was able to return to the comfortable state of denial I share with Woody Allen. But eventually I will have to come to more serious grips with the purpose of my real estate purchase.
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