The Two Tournaments

Today, I want to follow up the perspective on aging and dying that I called “rising above decline.” As I promised, I will be using a tennis tournament to point to the differences that strike me.

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Now about the tennis tournament. To make this work, I am going to follow a particular player through a tournament. Since I was sure that Roger Federer was going to win Wimbledon this year (he didn’t: Jo-Wilfred Tsongas defeated him), I’m going to imagine that he gains, at each stage, what Erik Erikson says he would gain if “life” were a tennis tournament.

I’m going to come back to the tournament metaphor several times, I think All of them are going to imagine that Roger Federer won Wimbledon this year, which, alas, he did not do. I like the tournament metaphor, though, because it is familiar and graphic and goes in the general direction of my argument. I always consider that last one a plus.

Here are the two parts for today. If you distinguish, as I proposed in “Rising Above Decline,” the trajectories of the body and of the “self,” we see how different those trajectories are—or, rather, how different they might be. In the first application, I will trace a body through the tournament. It loses. Not to spoil the suspense. In the second application, I will trace a self through the tournament. You could win this one. The goal of the opponents you will face in this tournament isn’t to kill you; it is to defeat you. There is no reason why you have to be defeated. That’s what I think, anyway, and I have played enough really bad sets that I think you ought to listen to me.

If you imagine life as a tournament and your body as an entrant in the tournament, you can easily pick out opponents. Events and conditions that damage your body are opponents. Your body never recovers from having lost the use of arms and legs in a car crash. “You” might; there are perfectly happy quadriplegics; but your body doesn’t. You can survive measles with no adverse effects at all. You won that round. You can live with persistently high levels of stress. You win that round too, but you are disadvantaged by it in later rounds. But at some round or another, an enemy will defeat you (your body) and you will drop out of the tournament. Erickson has eight stages (about which, more later) and the tournament metaphor recognizes that you could lose at any of them.

The most substantial point to be made of the bodily tournament is that you will lose. No one wins this tournament. You can to better than expected, but eventually you will meet an opponent who is tougher than you are—cancer, say, or pneumonia, or heart attack—and you will drop from the bracket. In saying all that, I have used the tournament bracket to define “mortality;” nothing more.

If, on the other hand, you picture your “self,” rather than your body, as the entrant in the tournament, then everything is different. You still face opponents. One of the great values of Erikson’s system is that you know what opponents you are going to face. And you might lose to any of those opponents. If you come up against “role-confusion” as an opponent, for instance—and in Erikson’s Stage 5, you will—you could play a bad game and lose. The result of losing to that opponent is that you really don’t formulate a notion of who you are that you can accept and commit to. You don’t form, in words I have come to like a great deal, “an accurate and acceptable self-image.” On the other hand, you could beat all these opponents and face, in the finals, “despair.” That’s the last opponent, as Erikson conceives of it.

But you don’t have to lose even this final match. You can win and you can be undefeated even at the very last when your self goes away. So the trajectory of the tournament in which your self plays could be entirely different from the tournament in which your body plays. The body will inevitably decline, but “you” may rise above it. It will lose, but “you” need not.

Enough, probably too much, about mortality. It is the other tournament that will concern us from here on out. I’m in Stage 8. According to Erikson, the opponent I am currently battling is “stagnation.” I’m doing pretty well, but I got banged up some in several of the earlier rounds so we’ll have to see how it goes.

Rising Above Decline

Today, I want to think about dying and about not dying. It’s pretty simple in a way, but I have quite a few posts I would like to write about getting old and about people who have written persuasively about what is involved—B. F. Skinner and Erik Erikson are the ones I will be following—and I find myself blocked because I have not said the few simple things that need to be said first.

Let’s start with “self.” In my line of work, a self is a social construction: I have a work self and a running self and a punning self and so on. And when I say “my self,” that is what people ordinarily refer to. [Footnote 1 English has come to use person as the crucial word. There is an irony there because person once referred to the theater masks used in Greek drama, so that dramatis personae didn’t mean so much “cast of characters,” i.e., the actors and actresses, as it meant the range of masks to be used. The derivation per-, “through” + sonare, “to sound,” shows the dramatic origins of the term and also why an actor would “sound through” whatever mask he was wearing.]But when I say “myself,” I mean me. I mean all of me and my close identification with myself as someone who has a past and who has done some things and who is so substantial that it is legally liable. Since a self is socially required, “myself” is socially liable as well, of course.

Myself includes my body. My self does not. From the standpoint of my self, my body is “it.” I am still fully engaged in this conversation but “it” is exhausted and will go to sleep no matter what I want it to do.[Footnote 2 None of this is meant to imply that I believe the body and the other part (self, soul, essence) are independent entities. The body is the host to the neurons, the interaction of which generates the possibility of selfhood. I know this is controversial in some settings, but since I believe the self requires a supporting cast of connected neurons, I also believe that when the neurons go, I go. I am, in this sense, a psychosomatic unity and neither element works alone. Surprisingly, The Matrix is very good about this. As is The Bible, in a very different way.]

OK, that was the hard part. “It,” i.e., my body, is in a state of extended and predictable decline. Nothing works as well as it used to and things are going to keep on declining. Mostly, I’m fine with that. But I don’t think “I” need to follow along too closely. The analog of bodily death, it seems to me, is personal despair. I got that from Erikson and eventually, I’d like to write a little more about how I understand him and how I feel about it. I do need to die—or, to say it another way, “it” needs to—but I don’t need to despair.

The best summary of this I have ever seen was the title of an article about the kinds of economic uses schools could be put to when there were no children to put in them. The population of the district was declining and the business manager was looking for a way to turn a profit on the empty buildings. The article was called “Rising Above Decline.” So I think “it” will decline, but I think “I” can rise above it. [Footnote 3 I will still think that when I get to the question of pervasive dementia, but that isn’t the focus of today’s piece.] There is a good reason to die, but there is not a good reason to despair.

My body has a predictable arc of decline. About 60% of adult males, age 50, can do this; 40% at age 60; 20% at age 80, and so on. That’s a social assessment of who can do what. I have my own assessment as well and any number of metrics could be called into play here. I think I’ll use running times. I always wanted to run a 10K under 41 minutes. Never did. I got to 41:12 once and to 41:15 twice. After a while, I started just being sure that whatever the course was, I was in under 45 minutes. Then under an hour. My Wildwood Trail times for a mile have gone from 9:15/mile to 10 minutes. My standard time these days is about 13 minutes, although that includes some walking, and I do sometimes run the last mile or so under 12 minutes. Each.

I am illustrating “decline.” I’m perfectly contented with these times if they are all I am capable of. I keep pushing on the edges to see if bad things happen when I push. When they don’t, I push a little harder; when they do, I count myself satisfied. Sometimes more than satisfied, although I wouldn’t want to have to justify how good I feel when I have done what I am capable of. I call it “leaving it all on the trail,” a version of the “leave it all on the floor” of my early basketball days.

When I have pushed my body to do what it is capable of that day, I am really tired and entirely content at the end of the day. If it took me an hour and twenty minutes to run the six mile course and that’s the best I could do that day, I’m proud of myself. If I think I really could have run it in an hour and fifteen minutes and just didn’t have the guts to do it, I am disappointed in myself.
I win nearly all the time because I keep adjusting the goals down so that I have a decent chance at achieving them. I like winning, but I like to set the goals where they demand my best performance to reach them, so being disappointed today is the price I pay for really believing in my satisfaction the next time.

If this works out right, the next post in this series will imagine the “stages of life” (Erikson) as a tennis tournament, like Wimbledon, in which each victory gives you the opportunity to play someone better than the guy you just beat, but which also gives you additional tools for the next match. Now that I think of it, it is even more like the New Wilmington (Pennsylvania) summer tennis tournaments, where each player brought a new can of balls to the match and the winner got to keep the unopened can.

Owning Less

I own a lot of books and I own different ones for different reasons. I’m going to have to get rid of nearly all of them soon and I find myself stumbling over how different those reasons are from each other. That’s what this post is about.

The default date Bette and I have chosen for moving out of our home here in Southwest Portland and moving into a retirement center of some sort is 2017. That isn’t a hard date. It’s the time when we want to be ready to move—we’ve chosen a place and made some early payments and located ourselves at the top of whatever list we want to be on—not the time when we absolutely will move. Still, I am mindful of my father’s often-repeated maxim that it is good to “pre-think the inevitable.”

Wherever we move, we will have something like a fifth of the space for books that is currently occupied by books where we live now. We need to get rid of four fifths of our books. It’s hard to say it out loud and take it seriously.

That brings me to the question of why I have the books I have. Some of the books I have are biographically significant. I have the revised edition of Dolbeare and Edelman’s American government text, which has a nice little recognition of me in the acknowledgements and the substantially different treatment of the federal bureaucracy that I had asked for. That doesn’t seem like a book I should get rid of. I have the copy of Jim Davies’ Human Nature and Politics which I was reading when I called him at the University of Oregon and told him I was blown away by the book and wanted to do doctoral studies with him. That’s what got me to Oregon. I have my brother John’s signed copy of Galápagos, which, in addition to being a well-conceived, well-written, and beautiful book, acknowedges my contributions to its present form. I’m not going to give books like that to the Salvation Army.

I have reference books. I have a lot of reference books. Most of them are biblical commentaries or cribs of one kind or another. Some are etymological collections I couldn’t find elsewhere.. And there are some reference books that you really need to have within arm’s reach, even if you could go to the library and find them.

I have books I read over and over. If I designed a graphic like this Venn diagram, the red spot would be a great deal larger. I read The Lord of the Rings over and over. I read the four Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey books quite a bit. I read Ursula LeGuin's Hainish Trilogy and EarthSea books. And other, less respectable collections as well. I want to keep the books I read over and over, no matter how big the red spot gets.

The political science books that I have kept around as markers for a path I might be moved to take some time will have to go. It won’t be hard to do without the books, but it will be hard to say out loud that I will never actually pursue this or that very interesting path of inquiry. Evolutionary psychology will probably fall into that category, as will brain studies, world culture conflicts, and nearly everything about contemporary politics. The books on the psychology and sociology of intimate relationships, about dating and true love (not the same thing, in my experience), and histories of marriage in the West since the Industrial Revolution, will have to go. I will make an exception of Gary Chapman’s The Five Languages of Love because it has been such a good book for Bette and me and because it is about the need to find and learn the language your partner understands best.

No more new novels in paper form. Probably Kindle books or whatever has replaced Kindle by that time. Or I will buy them and read them and pass them along. And then if I have to read them again (that red spot), I will try to get one from the library.

So—as you can see—it isn’t the books that make this hard. It’s the rationales. I have become the person I am in large part by reading and internalizing the information and the arguments in these books. Now I’m going to have to find out how well I do without the books. The reasons for having books are so powerful; the reasons for not having them seem, somehow, weaker.

Well Dad, it’s time to “pre-think the inevitable.” Maybe I’ll start on it tomorrow.

Speaker for the Dead, Part II

Vivid, isn't it?

In Part I, I told about Orson Scott Card’s idea of a Speaker for the Dead. I liked it very much, but in order to work for me the way it worked for him, I would need Andrew Wiggin, ancient in the way only time travel will allow, and a top of the line computer system. I don’t have either of those, but I do share Card’s idea that a memorial service ought to involve the telling of the dead person’s story.

This post is about how to do that with the limited resources at my disposal and imagining myself to be the dead person. I specify that I am to be the guest of honor because, frankly, not everyone would want to have his “story” told in this way. I think I would like it—prospectively, of course—but I also think it could be justified only on the grounds that the people attending the service would be benefitted by it.

That brings me to my two questions for this post. The first is: for whom is the memorial service? The second is: is there a way to approximate a Speaker for the Dead?

There is a cheap answer to the first question. The service is for the survivors. Who else could it possibly be for? Not for me, certainly. But that simple answer leads, as they often do, to a more complicated question: what is it that will benefit the survivors? The service needs to be about my life. That is, after all, why people are there. All the people who come, with the exception of a very small number of young people, will have one eye on my life and death and the other on their own current lives and approaching deaths. So whatever happens in the service ought to be the kind of reflection on my life that helps them appreciate its true significance. (I defer, briefly, the question of what its true significance was.) In that way, it ought to help them think about the true significance of their own lives.

In saying that I would like to help the survivors “think about” their lives, I don’t mean anything teacherish. I mean only that if my story is told properly, it will be richer and more complex than anyone there knew. It will be brighter and darker than they knew will be more vivid and it will feel more “true.” [ Footnote 1:In this point, I am relying on a fairly dicey notion of true. On the other hand, nearly everyone has had the experience of finding out the full story of some event and comparing it unfavorably to the version of that event that was available at the time. When you heard the current account of that event, it was unsatisfying. It felt flat; without adequate features. When the full story comes out, it doesn’t feel flat anymore. The “missing” features—the ones you had no names for—are restored. It is at that point that you realize that somewhere inside you, you had a “feeling for the truth.” You couldn’t give it a name or describe its shape, but you knew it well enough that when it is presented, you recognize it as the “truth” you were missing. That’s what I mean by “feel more true.”

I think people will be helped to understand that their own lives are like that. They themselves are seeing only one face of it and when the fuller story is known it will be more than they could have known it to be. “More” includes both better and worse. No one benefits from a candy-coated life.

So, to review, the survivors will sense as they hear the full and vivid story of my life, that there is a full and vivid story of their lives as well and that they should be open to every intimation of just what it might be. They might want to try to live into it a little.

But, beginning on the second question now, all this relies on my own life being told. The model we are working from requires a Speaker for the Dead and we don’t have one. I think we can come close, though. If the story of my life could be told in a way that took into account the very different perspectives of the people who knew me, that story could rich in a “Speaker for the Dead” kind of way. Again, that sounds easy but if you have ever seen it tried, you know it is not.

Picture forty people, each waiting his turn to toss some anecdote into the pot. A lot of these stories are not about my life, except by distant reference. They are about the life of the teller, who is truly grateful for this opportunity to “share.” And speaker ten said just what speaker twenty wanted to say, so speaker twenty has to wing it. [Footnote 2: There would actually be a delicious irony if that came about. So many of the events of my life have been just like that and, put on the spot, I said things I had never said and had never heard before. Sometimes they turned out to be important for me and for some others as well. To have that happen at my memorial service would be worth a large communal laugh over beer afterward.]
For these and many other reasons, a “you'all come” story fest doesn’t work.

My best solution so far is to have someone whose job it is to shape those materials into a narrative. I asked my son, Dan, some years ago if he would do that for me and he said he would. And he could do it, too. Dan is like a really good tight end. He’s got good soft hands, so the ball doesn’t have to be right on target. And he can take a hit and get up and run that same route again without flinching. Those are pretty rare, together. And, he has known me all his life, which ought to count for something.

Dan would be accountable for the vividness of the story. If you want to think of the story as a tapestry, Dan would actively invite the holders of red threads and blue threads, etc. to make those threads available. He would seek out, if necessary, the black threads. That’s why I need someone who can take a hit. He doesn’t search for the black threads because he wants to emphasize the dark parts of my life. Only an enemy would do that and Dan is a friend. Dan searches for them because he knows I want a vivid tapestry and it isn’t going to vivid without dark threads. So it is friendship that sends him out looking for the holders of dark threads. Dan is lucky, in a sense, because he can find quite a few dark threads withouteven going outside the family. It will be a short commute for him.

I’m not counting on Dan to be my Speaker for the Dead. I am counting on him to believe three things: a) that my “real life” was richer (or at least, more complicated) than any of the participants knows; b) that if he doesn’t actively intervene, his father’s life is going to be presented as superficial and unpersuasive; and c) that he has my blessing to go wherever those threads are that my tapestry is short of. Since his father was a Duck, he will know where to go for the yellow and green ones, but who knows where the burnt umber threads are? The battleship gray threads? The dark and stormy night threads? Who will bring them into the public view, if asked, in order to make a richer and more vivid (and more honest) tapestry?

That’s really all I know. As a way of easing my way back down from the limb I have climbed out on, however, let me offer two additional points. The first is that my life has not been all that vivid compared to a lot of the lives I myself have seen or have heard about. I’ve never been famous or infamous; never notably rich or poor; not notably saintly; not notably scholarly. I have dearly loved the life I have had and I have no complaints about it, but when I ask for it to be told “in full color,” so to speak, I need to say that I know it may not take much color to be full color. On the other hand, as one of you is sure to point out, according to my view, I don’t know how colorful it “really was,” no does anyone else, so who would know?

The second point is that as a Christian, I do believe that the whole of my story is known. And I believe that the most truly significant truth of my life is whether I really did consent to play the part that moves God’s story on toward its providential conclusion. And not only did I consent, but I also trained for it and gave it my full attention. I believe that we can’t know those things, so as we remember those who have passed away from us, we ask the best questions we can and give the best answers we can and call it good enough.

Good enough sounds pretty good to me.

A Speaker for the Dead, Part I

I expect that the process of dying will be a nuisance. And it might be worse than that. But after I am safely dead, there will be a memorial service and I have a glimmer of what I would like to have happen there [Footnote 1 Ordinarily, I would have said “would like to see happen.”] . I would like a Speaker for the Dead to address the people who have come together to remember my life.

This Speaker for the Dead business is going to require just a little bit of explaining, so I’ll start that right away. First, Speaker for the Dead is a marvelous book by Orson Scott Card. It is one of the series that began with Ender’s Game. Second, the Speaker for the Dead is the name of an office. It is the responsibility of those who hold this office to come when they are called, to find out the truth of the life being remembered, and to tell that truth, whether what he says confirms the opinions of the people who knew him, contradicts their opinions, or expands their opinions into wholly new and unimagined constructs which deny nothing and revalue everything.

Finally, in this book, the Speaker for the Dead is Andrew Wiggin. He is an ordinary person, rather than a demigod or demidevil, as some have said, but he has had an extraordinary life (He is Ender, in Ender’s Game and committed xenocide) and he has the worlds’ best computer implanted in his ear. [Footnote 2 Please note the placement of that apostrophe; I am very proud of it.] Wiggin comes to the Lusitania Colony on the planet Baía to “speak” the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira.

It is this “speaking my death” that so attracts me. Here is Card’s account of what the idea meant to him when he first thought of it.

“How did the Speaker for the Dead come to be? As with all my stories, this one began with more than one idea. The concept of a “speaker for the dead” arose from my experiences with death and funerals. I have written of this at greater length elsewhere; suffice it to say that I grew dissatisfied with the way the we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life [Footnote 3 Learning what “the actual life” was is the first job of the Speaker. Saying what it was is the final job. My appetite for “the truth,” although it is lofty, is not that lofty. I am after a new story of my life; one that integrates the things people already know into a larger story, a fuller telling of the pattern of which my friends already know the pieces. It is just a little awkward to call this “my story,” because it is my belief that there is a story so grand and so encompassing that I call it THE story, and with reference to that story, I want only to be a character who appears in it somewhere. In that story, I would be happy to be the guy who shows up in Michael for the sole purpose of missing his train and who is never seen again.] that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived.I had the privilege of giving the eulogy at both my parents’ memorial services. It was called “a eulogy,” but it was eu- = good in the sense that it affirmed their lives and led us all toward a broader appreciation of them. It wasn’t eu- in the sense of proclaiming the nice things and hiding the harder ones.]

I rejected that idea. I thought that a more appropriate funeral would be to say, honestly, what that person was and what that person did. But to me, “honesty” doesn’t simply mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of saying all the nice ones. It doesn’t even consist in averaging them out. No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story—what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story that we can never know, the story that we never can know—and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only story truly worth telling.”

That’s Card’s view. My view is a little more modest. I don’t believe in “the real story” as something we can know so no speaker, even a Speaker for the Dead, could tell us. And, there is no one to serve as a Speaker for the Dead. At the same time, I think Card is worth listening to. It is a paltry use of time to gather together to say good things about a person’s life, while everyone there knows that “the truth” is much larger, much more varied, much more interesting, and—in the absence of the new narrative I am hoping for—that life is much more mysterious as well. Now that would be worth doing.

We can see the effects of such a Speaker in Speaker for the Dead. It has taken me a little effort to pull out of comments made about the life of Marcos Maria Ribeira some “kinds of comments.” It is the kind of comment I’m after, not the specific comments, because my life has not been at all like Ribeira’s. Similarly, it will take you some effort to grasp the responses of the people who have gathered to hear the speaker because the value they have are as “kinds of responses,” not as actual responses. Let’s play with that pattern just a little.

Ribeira was accused of beating up on his wife. He did. It puzzled people that he never beat up on his children. The Speaker points out that Marcos had no children; his wife had children. Obviously, someone else was the father. He had had since puberty a disease that made him sterile. Here is the response of the Colony’s doctor:

Dr. Navio was puzzled…then he realized what he should have known before, that Marcos was not the rare exception to the pattern of the disease. There were no exceptions. Navio’s face reddened.

What happened here? Dr. Navio knew Marcos had a disease that should have rendered him sterile. He knew there had never been an exception to this effect of the disease. When Marcos’s wife began having children, Dr. Navio decided that Marcos must be an exception. Now, with the Speaker standing before them all and telling the story, Dr. Navio realizes that he did know the truth about Marcos and that he suppressed it. He must have thought that if he failed to realize it, everyone else would also fail. Now that the Speaker has put the truth before everyone, Navio must face his own failure and his own embarrassment.

Then there is Miro, who has just learned in hearing the Speaker that he, himself, is a bastard. All of his life suddenly appears as false; the love of his life turns out to be his sister; the work of his life is overturned. Here is his response.

Miro clung to the sound of [the Speaker’s] voice, trying to hate it, yet failing, because he knew, could not deceive himself, he knew that [the Speaker] was a destroyer, but what he destroyed was an illusion and the illusion had to die. The truth about [the indigenous species of the planet], the truth about ourselves. Somehow, this ancient man is able to see the truth and it doesn’t blind his eyes or drive him mad. I must listen to his voice and let its power come to me, so I, too, can stare at the light and not die.

Bishop Peregrino objects, on a number of grounds to what the Speaker is doing, telling Marcos’s story in public. The bishop would have preferred to hear it in the confessional. Yet Peregrino felt the power of it. Here is the way Card represents the bishop.

“Yet Peregrino had felt the power of it, the way the whole community was forced to discover these people that they thought they knew, and then discover them again, and then again; and each revision of the story forced them all to reconceive themselves as well for they had been part of this story, too, had been touched by it; all the people a hundred, a thousand times, never understanding until now who it was they touched."

By my time of life, I have been at a lot of funerals already and unless I die pretty soon myself, I will attend many more. I have tried, twice, to serve the function of the Speaker for the Dead. [Footnote 4 I had the privilege of giving the eulogy at both my parents’ memorial services. It was called “a eulogy,” but it was eu- = good in the sense that it affirmed their lives and led us all toward a broader appreciation of them. It wasn’t eu- in the sense of proclaiming the nice things and hiding the harder ones.] I gave it my best shot, but I didn’t know enough to really do it right and also may not have had the courage. I did try, though, and in trying, I got a sense of what it would take to do it well and of how wonderful it would be—what a gift to us all—if it really were done well.

Consider the effects described among the members of the Colony who heard the Speaker. Dr. Navio had to recognize that really, he had always known about Marcos’s illness. That means he should have understood something about the children of Marcos’s wife. But he didn’t and now he is ashamed of himself. Miro hears shattering things from the Speaker, but he can see that the Speaker is not shattered by them and takes from that the hope that he, too, can learn to look at the light and not be blinded by it. Peregrino has the broadest view. He sees his own congregants learning the meaning of their own lives; their complicity in a community tragedy; their blindness to what could have been plain to them had they been willing to see it.

These three responses—excuse me, these three “kinds of responses”— are truly wonderful. They are good for everyone. They begin a reconstitution of a broken and distant community. But they seem to require a nearly omniscient Speaker for the Dead and I am quite sure that such people are in short supply. So what does that mean for my own hopes? At my own memorial service, I am going to have to get along without a Speaker for the Dead. But I still aspire to the goals Card had in mind. They still sound really good to me.

How close could I get to that, do you think, if I got to work on it now? Whose help would I have to ask? Would people be willing to help if they took seriously the value of Card’s sense of what sort of an opportunity a memorial service is?

On Playing the Hand You Are Dealt

In this morning's New York Times, there was a marvellous piece by Gina Kolata on Alzheimer's disease. I won't link the article because it isn't what I want to write about. The question they were dealing with was whether people who have very early Alzheimer's or a high risk of developing it, should be told given that there is no treatment. It's an interesting dilemma. For the record, I'd like to be told.

Robert Stuart-Vail found that he had a gene variant (APOe4) that made the disease very likely for him and said, "You play the cards you are dealt." I've heard that a lot and I've never had any objections to it before, but today it seemed oddly constraining. The perspective required for "you play the hand you are dealt" seems to blow by a few things we ordinarily know about ourselves.

The first is that we deal ourselves quite a few of the cards we have. That's just a thing; it's not a good thing or a bad thing.

The second is that this is just one hand. There was a hand before this one and there will be a hand after this one. Why should I think of my present situation as just one hand?

The third is that "hand" in this metaphor is thought of as the resources for strategy, but it could also be thought of as the resources for resilience or even for graceful endurance.

Let me put the card metaphor in the most unattractive light I can contrive for it: "The cards I have came to randomly from some source outside myself and severely constrain my ability to follow the best strategy."

On the other hand, I like the new meanings metaphors can bring and I use them myself. I don't want to be put in the position of criticizing a metaphor Mr. Stuart-Vail found useful on the grounds that I didn't find it useful. I have had hard times myself, and I have taken comfort in pithy little sayings. I'll tell you about one and refer briefly to another, which will have meaning to fans of The West Wing and probably no one else.

The first comes from poet Edwin Markham, of Oregon City. At the time I needed it, the last two lines were all I had heard and I didn't like them right away. Here they are:

For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear-
When you are the hammer, strike.

They meant something to me because I was feeling like the anvil at the time. The meaning it had for me was that there are times when just "taking the hits" is the best you can do. A time to act will come and when it comes, you need to be ready, but this is not the time. I found real comfort in that.

The second comes from an episode in the second season of The West Wing (Noel) in which Josh is being treated by Dr. Stanley Keyworth for his inability to buffer himself from his memories of being shot at a Bartlet rally. "You need to be able to remember it without reliving it," Keyworth says. "You're reliving it." It turns out that it is music that cues Josh's panic attacks and when he hears that, he despairs. "So that's going to be my reaction every time I hear music?"

"No," says Keyworth.

"Why not." says Josh.

"Because," says Keyworth, "we get better."

Those last four syllables meant a lot to me. It wasn't just the idea. They were delivered with a calm assurance and a matter of factness that helped me remember that I would get better too; that there was a trend toward healing in me. I could count on it, but I needed to be patient.

So you see, I'm not in much of a position to criticize Stuart-Vail's choice of metaphors. I would like to be aware, however, of how many of the cards in my hand I have dealt myself and to be aware, also, that there will be another hand.

Free, Equal, and Dependent

Independence is the goal of childhood. Interdependence is the achievement of adulthood. Dependency is the nightmare of old age. Is there any way to do this very hard task, well?

Caveats and Yes-buts I have something I’d like to talk about. The goal of this section is to help you let go of some other emphases, even very plausible ones, and come along with me on this trip. First, I know it is true that dependency happens to young people as well as middle-aged and older people. Second, I know that there are caregivers who are more dependent on giving than the receiver is on receiving. Third, I know that what looks like a one-way dependency on the surface is often a two way dependency—not a true interdependence—when you get below the surface. And last, I know that a lot of people who face this dilemma will not have a good marriage to fall back on.

OK, having said all that, what about being permanently dependent on another person? It is true with this question, as it is with many difficult questions, that an easy and very good answer can be given. This is true in the same way that putting the ball in the basket is easy after four or five difficult and well-executed passes. The trick is in the passes, not in the shot. So the trick is in the relationship, not in the dependency.

So here is the answer that seems to me easy and good.[1] I had my closest approach to this topic when Marilyn, my wife of many years, suffered two very hard years of cancer and cancer treatment. These “easy” answers draw on that experience and on our conversations at the time.

Rule one: You can’t pay for your care with gratitude. The dependent person gets a lot of care and doesn’t give any care. She—my reference point is Marilyn, but I really believe this would work either way—will be tempted to see how much it costs the givers to be there and do all the things that need to be done and to respond with expressions of gratitude. “Gratitude” in that way becomes the coin with which she “pays” the caregivers. Gratitude is a feeling and there is nothing wrong with expressing it when you feel it, but you get the care you need when you need it and there are lots of reasons you might not be feeling grateful. Saying how grateful you are when you are not feeling grateful gets toxic pretty fast.

The question now is how the dependent person can learn not to pay in gratitude. She must know first, that if she gives in to the temptation, it will be worse for everyone. She must also know that gratitude is not expected. The service that is provided by the caregiver in a good marriage is entailed in the marriage. That what the “in sickness and in health” language is there for. It is not a contract; it is a reminder. This is not, however, the kind of adaptation that can be developed when it is needed. If this mutual respect has been a part of the relationship when both partners are whole, it will be easier to adapt it to the relationship when one is not.

Rule Two: The caregiver knows enough not to expect expressions of gratitude. He knows it is a pleasure to express gratitude when one is feeling grateful and is onerous to express it when it is only an obligation. So he is careful not to seem, in what he does or what he says, that he expects such expressions. This leaves him free to enjoy them when they are offered and free from expecting them as a matter of course.

The marriage is a mutual commitment. It means that the well one cares for the sick one. It is the luck of the draw which one of you develops the cancer or has the stroke or whose memory starts to slide. When I was doing this, I developed a metaphor that not everyone likes, but it brought some clarity to me and I still like it. It is that the marriage is like a meal in a restaurant. You pay for the food and for the preparation and for enough service to get the food from the kitchen to the table. When they agreed to serve you a meal and take your money, they took on that obligation. But, in fact, everyone one of us has been served, at one time or another, by a server who had some sense of who you were, as diners, and what would make your meal more enjoyable. It is a great pleasure to tip those people by way of saying thank you.

So in the marriage. All the care the caregiver offers is part of the marriage the way the price was a part of the meal. And if the partners both look at it like that, it enables the receiver to express gratitude where it was not expected and the giver to receive it with surprise and with great joy. That arrangement is the A game of a lot of couples, but you don’t always play your A game. Sometimes you are tired. Sometimes you are distracted. Sometimes you are in pain or fighting off despair. This metaphor reminds you where you want to be and for that reason, it is especially important when you have failed in the task to which you are both committed. Being reminded helps both of you remember what you want to do. It is a great help.

Rule Three: Be the Partner. Finally, both the giver of these services and the receiver need to know that there is only so much the giver can do. It is tempting to hold onto the job yourself, even when there are others who would be glad to help. It is tempting to do more than you should and in that way, you slide over into resentment. You might think you are hiding it, but resentment is a strong signal and the person who receives the care is a very sensitive receiver. She will know.

Again, the practicalities of finding the help you will need may be daunting, but the simple clear realization that you will need help is easy. The fact is that the person you are caring for needs a partner. She needs a partner more than she needs a caregiver. When you have burned yourself out “caring for her,” who will be her partner? Looked at in that light, all that “selfless behavior” which cost you so much seems only selfish and shortsighted. There are things only you can do for your partner. Do those. Someone must see to it that the whole collection of her needs are met. That’s your job too. But a lot of other people, some family, some friends, and some professional, need to be a part of this show. You don’t need to do all the caring; you need to do all the planning.

And for the rest, you need to be for her the partner only you can be.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the truth of the saying, “Growing old isn’t for sissies.” Many of these things are hard, hard, hard to do. But they won’t get done at all if the ideas aren’t in place and if there is a manual for how best to love the actual person who is your partner, I’ve never seen it.

[1] I want to keep “easy” in my formulation, but I’m not really an idiot. I know that “easy” refers to knowing what to do, not to the process of doing it.

Am I Tired?

It is my pleasure to introduce for your consideration, one of the most tangled questions I have run across in some time. I am coming at this question as I come at so many questions, viz. I have an idea about how to approach the question in a new way, but I have no idea whether I will be closer to a good answer than I was at the beginning. Let’s see how it goes.

I don’t know any way to tell whether I am tired than to know whether I am feeling tired. I think that is the best I can do, despite the fact that I know “feelings of tiredness” are, like all feelings, subject to misinterpretation. The question could easily be rephrased as “Do I know when I have feelings of tiredness?” The answer to that one is, “Yes, of course you do. But do you trust them?”

Why would I not trust my feeling tired? I have had the experience, and I’ll bet you have too, of “being tired,” and then having those feelings vanish in the flicker of an eye. You know as much about tiredness as I do. Can you get “un-tired” instantly? I don’t think so. What physical mechanisms would do such a thing? So what does it mean that “feeling tired” can vanish instantly? It means, at least, that: a) “being tired” and “feeling tired” are not the same thing, b) that they vary in their rhythms and c) very probably in their causes as well.

Since the fundamental concept is not clear to me, let me proceed by means of examples. When I ran a lot of 10K races, I noticed that there would come a time when my mind shifted over. It felt like gears being shifted in an automatic transmission. Since I was running so many races, I had a lot of opportunity to locate just where in the race that occurred and why. My conclusion, based on all this “research” (many races, but N = 1) was that at that point, my mind shifted over from monitoring how I was feeling to projecting whether I had enough stuff to finish the race.

I am quite sure that this shift in the focus of my mind’s continual audit of my energy coincided with “not feeling tired” any more. Now I am wondering whether that new question actually caused me not to feel tired any more. I’ve had the same lift in reading a demanding or dull (either one will work) article. I am slogging along, feeling slow, maybe feeling sleepy. I turn back to see how much more I have to read in that session. I learn that I am almost done and decide to finish up. I have “enough,” I find to finish. I discover, oddly that the tiredness has gone away. I have even found myself, to my embarrassment, turning back a few pages to see what I might have missed while I was slogging through the swamp and finding that what I had missed was really interesting. What is going on there?

So that’s the question, really. I said I have “an approach,” and I do, but the approach has problems of its own. What I think is that what I call “feeling tired” is not the result of a measurement like sticking a dipstick in the engine to check the oil. It is more like looking at the balance in your checking account to see if you have enough to cover the check you are about to write. It is, in other words, a comparison, but it seems to be a feeling.

But if it’s really a comparison—a ratio—then both terms need to be looked at. You can no longer ask whether you are tired; you must ask whether you are so tired that you really should not engage in X, attend Y, or attempt Z. And then you would need to know something about what X, Y, and Z are, since they seem to be substantially involved in whether you are feeling tired. What if X is something you really love to do; Y is something that feels “right” to you, it feels like a calling; and Z is something that needs to be done and you are the person who is there. What if?

Some of the people who read this blog—both followers and lurkers are welcome—are old and male. I want to talk to you for a little bit. Have you had the experience of lying in bed in the morning, trying to sort out your day or your relationships or your life? You feel just awful. Maybe you didn’t sleep well. Maybe some part of your body hurts. Maybe some feeling is worrisome; does it portend something dreadful? Then you remember that the first thing you need to do (after Starbucks has done its magic for you that morning) is to take the car in to get the oil changed. Without thinking about it, you find yourself asking whether you feel well enough to take the car in. This is a Z kind of event. You decide that you can do that and all of a sudden you feel better. Ever had that happen? It happens to me all the time.

As an experience—not this reconstruction I just did—it is the difference between feeling tired at 5:30 and not tired at 5:40. It feels like I surveyed my body at 5:30 and discovered a serious condition of some sort. I went back to check it at 5:40 and discovered that it was not there and, in my judgment as of 5:40, probably never had been.

So here’s a thought. I’m sixty years old and I am rich with X’s, Y's, and Z’s. Now I’m seventy years old and I am poor in X’s, Y’s, and Z’s. I don’t have very many and the ones I do have are moth-eaten or threadbare. Specifying, just for the purposes of this paragraph, that the actual condition of my body is the same in those two settings, I would guess that I would “feel tired” a lot more at seventy although I am “not actually more tired.” It feels like being tired,but it is, in fact, a slow decay of my reasons not to feel tired.

So here’s another thought. I’m seventy years old and I have these pathetic X’s, Y’s, and Z’s—these past their prime “reasons not to feel tired.” Something happens. A romance. A new neighbor. A new job. A stroke. A religious vision. Anything that will, just for the moment, restore this fund of “reasons not to feel tired.” Result, I stop feeling tired. Note that this is not the recurrence of reasons not to feel tired. All this processing happens off-stage, out of my awareness, and it happens very quickly. My experience has nothing to do with reasons at all. I stop feeling tired. So this is too good to be true, right?

Yes. It is. Certainly it’s too good for me to believe it. At least, it isn’t anything I’ve ever experienced. Let’s go back to 5:30 a.m. I feel tired. In the absence of my refurbished X’s, Y’s, and Z’s, I will go on feeling tired. I will say, “I AM tired.” But with these new X’s, I experience something else instead. I say, “Am I so tired that I can’t do X?” The answer is, “No. You feel good enough to do X.” So I get up and start getting ready to do X. As I get going, I either feel better or stop monitoring; I’m really not sure which.

So the “experience” of so many tired old men is, by this understanding, a calculation masquerading as an experience. It would be shown to be, if we had a camera fast enough and pointed at the right spot, an assessment of the value of the task, an assessment of the energy required (mental and physical) to address the task and a report, finally, to the part of my mind that I get to see, that I am not THAT tired.

By this account, you can feed stimulants to your body or to your available tasks. X’s, Y’s, and Z’s on steroids are pretty much the same as you on steroids, because it is the ratio that matters. And if you are diddled into thinking that “being tired” is an experience you are having and that as an experience it is “true,” or at least, “not likely to be challenged,” then you have thrown away the half of the ratio that could be most useful to you.

I want to end here. This argument is not essentially a religious argument. Whatever it is that beefs up the task to be done (or that summons you, particularly, to do it), will perform the same function. Hatred would do it if it were focused. Communist conquest would do it. The implacable blandness of bureaucrats would do it. The urgent goals of sects I have never heard of would do it.

But I think the reason this question has been buzzing around in my mind for so long came to me in the form of a prayer. Maybe it’s just a quip that is presented as a prayer. My brother Mark is the one who passed it along to me. Here it is: “Thank you, Lord, for giving me work to do that is so important that it doesn’t matter all that much whether I want to do it.”

Willing to hear

I said something to my father that I wish, now, I had not said. I said a lot of things to my father I wish I had not said, but I am thinking of one in particular now. I think I said, "Pul-eeese." Or maybe I just rolled my eyes. Or maybe I just complained to other family members. I don't remember clearly just what I did, but I remember like it was this morning, how I felt. I felt incredulity and embarrassment and disdain.

Dad had Alzheimer's disease when he died. He had been living a life of mental impairment for years before that. And a life of emotional empairment even before his good mind began to go bad. I mention that because when Dad said something that struck me as odd or silly, or even childish, there were several ways to explain it. But however you explain it, there is still a person under whatever explanation you come up with. I remembered that sometimes, but on this occasion, I did not.

As Dad got older and less capable, he spent more time watching daytime soap operas. I've never had much appreciation for soaps and I didn't understand why he was wasting his time on them. The idea that he had more time than he knew what to do with and was just burning up some of it never occurred to me. Dad must have felt a little self-conscious about it too because one day, he offered an explanation. "Some of these shows," he said, "have a deep philosophy." I think I would have had trouble with that statement no matter how he made it, but in this sentence, he pronounced philosophy, "Phee-los-o-pheee." It is something he did with words sometimes, giving them what he imagined to be their "original" or "correct" pronunciations. I think when he got it right, it sounded "cultured" to him and he liked that.

I dismissed his statement as silliness and I let him know, one way or another, that I had dismissed it. I wish I hadn't.

I'm currently in the middle of an essay on the movie, The Joneses. I like it a great deal better than anyone I've talked to about it and better than anyone I've read about it. I'm seeing connections now that I missed entirely the first few times. KC, the supervisor of the stealth marketing unit is unhappy with Steve Jones's (David Duchovny) sales and challenges him, "The question is, 'How far are you willing to go to get what you want?'" Steve Jones is willing to go quite far indeed. He blows up the whole marketing unit so he can have a chance at a "real" (not pretend) relationship with his fellow actor "Kate Jones," (Demi Moore). I don't think that's what KC had in mind. And now, hearing it again and hearing her admonish Steve about "how far he is willing to go" just seems really funny to me.

I'm seeing events that occur in my own life as "just like that interaction in The Joneses, you know, the one where he..." Yesterday at the office, I heard a conversation in which the topic pivoted from one meaning to another in just the way it does in a scene from The Joneses. Steve and Kate Jones have had a good evening together, in role, and now that they are home, are in a situation that always produces a wonderful on-screen erotic kiss. And as Steve leans into it, Kate says, "This part (what you are about to do) is "pretend." Steve says, "Is it?" Kate responds, "It has to be." You'll notice that "It has to be" is not a response to "Is it?" Each person has a reality in mind, his authentic, hers instrumental, and each insists that that one be taken as more basic.

It's not an uncommon dilemma at all. In fact, I teach a course that relies on that mechanism to a significant extent. But being sensitized to it by a particular scene in a particular movie seems odd to me as I stand back and look at it.

Is that different from what my father was doing? Yes. It is. But it isn't as different as I would like. The great difference, the one I have been relying on over these years, is that Dad thought the "phee-los-o-phee" was in the show and he was discovering it. I don't think that is true. What I think is that the philosophical cast of mind is one you can bring with you to the watching of any kind of show at all. Or a narrative cast of mind; or a theological one; or an existential one. About those experiences, I say, "I am watching the show by means of the categories that mean the most to me. I'm not talking about what is IN the show."

And on those grounds, I expect what I see to be accepted not as "what is there," but only as "what I see." I expect my kids, for instance, to say, "Yup, that's how Dad sees movies. If it doesn't remind him of Jesus, it reminds him of Moses." They know they can ask me to talk about the movie using the concepts or narrative conventions they have in mind if they want to. They know I don't have to use my own. But they know I will use my own if there is no reason not to.

I think that maintains a crucial difference between where I think my dad was and where my kids think their dad is. But, as I said above, it is not as much difference as I once thought. I think my kids, in granting me "that's the way he watches movies" are willing to hear ME. They are willing to grant the reality, to me, of what I see and how I think. They are, usually, not willing to see that themselves nor willing to agree with whatever conclusions I might have drawn. But that I have done what I have done is OK with them. They are willing to hear it.

And that's really what I wish I had done with my own father. If I had treated the philosophical positions or presuppositions of, say, Days of Our Lives, as really there, I could have invited him into a conversation. I think he would have liked that. And if I had treated them as positions or presuppositions Dad had illegitimately projected onto the show--they weren't really there--I could still have invited him into the conversation and he would still have liked it. I was so fearful of Dad's delusions or disdainful of his pretentions that I really wasn't willing to push past them and make the contact I could have made. And that's what I mean, mostly, by "willing to hear."

I really wasn't. And now, at about the age Dad was when this event happened, I wish I had been.

Old and Smart

First a small complaint. I use the phrase "getting old" in the label for this post. The more recent usage as been "getting older." Or, sometimes, "aging." Aging is what happens to the patients in the neonatal ward just as much as in the Alzheimer's ward. Ditto for getting older. Getting old, on the other hand, is reserved for the veterans of many campaigns, during some of which we acquired wounds. It's not a word I want to give away. I also don't want to use it apologetically or to avoid it.

I've puzzled for some years how many of the increasing debilities of old age make me feel savvy and competent. It doesn't seem that they should. I began thinking about this in the 1970s when I noticed that my head got cold in cold weather if I didn't wear something on it. As I experienced it, this is a sequence of three steps. One, I am young and hotblooded and my head doesn't get cold when I expose it to cold weather. Or I don't care that much. Two, I don't cover my head in cold weather and I get cold and something bad happens to me. Three, I know I am going out into cold weather so I am careful to wear something--usually a ballcap--and nothing bad happens. It might happen to other old guys who don't have the understanding and foresight I do, but it doesn't happen to me.

It's that sequence of steps that caught my eye. If we went directly from one to three, it would probably feel like a loss. But moving from two to three feels like I figured something out and now I'm making it work. It's not that my head is vulnerable; it's that I'm so smart about adapting to it. It's all sleight of mind, really.

Nearly all the physical ailments I have acquired--these are like the campaign ribbons I alluded to above--follow this pattern. I'd rather not have them (stage one compared to stage two) but I have mastered some aspect of the effects (stage two compared to stage three). And so on through a list of ailments any old man (I speak from my own experience) can produce and that will make nearly any younger man (I speak from my own experience) roll his eyes and wait for the deep mine of complaints finally to peter out.

So as I acquire new debilities, I acquire new knowledge of how to manage them better than I did when they were new. The constraints surrounding the way I live my life increase, but I don't notice the constraints as much as I notice the high quality adaptation to them. It's amazing.

On the other hand, think of it this way. If you had a new car, you would get in and turn it on and drive away. It's effective but it's largely unconscious. But if you had an old car, a car you had owned for a long time and which you knew well, it wouldn't look like that. You would get in (kicking the door once, at the front edge, usually frees up the latch in the door); you would turn it on (crank it twice, then hold the accelerator pedal down for about five seconds, then crank it the final time); and drive away (the elastic band which you have passed through the steering wheel and attached to the lever below the driver's seat will keep the car from drifting persistently to the left).

Now see there? You really aren't unconscious about the old car. You can't afford to be. Each liability is something you have learned to overcome, something you take pleasure in overcoming. Getting in this car and driving it away is an exercise in sophistication and mastery. What's not to like about that?

All this came back to me in the last few days as I remembered an old Arnie Palmer Pennzoil ad. Arnie had been an old golfer for quite a while by the time of this ad. He still had Arnie's Army around him and was a very popular athlete. The ad showed him tooling around the golf course he designed in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, sitting in a very old tractor. He explained that the tractor still worked so well because he had always taken care of it with Pennzoil. He closed with a rueful laugh, and the line. "...and I believe in taking care of the old equipment."

I thought it was funny because he was the "old equipment" he was actually referring to and everyone knew it. The fact that there was a tractor in the picture made misunderstanding possible and therefore made understanding more fun.