It’s always young women who offer me a seat on standing room only crowded BART trains or MUNI buses. Never young men, who remain seated, cocooned in their obliviousness by whatever screen they’re attached to. The young men never even look up, even when they’re sitting in the marked senior/disabled seats as they often are.

This courtesy however comes with the harsh realization that a kind young woman has regarded me as a senior; in other words, old. Of course I am a senior, in biological years, yet am always surprised when asked if I’d like to sit down. Of course I don’t want to sit down…or am ready to admit that a seat would be nice. I always decline.

Gertrude Stein once said, “We’re always the same age inside.” Inside I’m not a senior. Maybe…35? 45? Certainly not a teenager, or even twenty-something. To regain those years could only be contingent on knowing what I know now and applying that knowledge (wisdom?) forward. Maybe I would make the same mistakes, but it would be with some foreknowledge of the end game.

Being a senior comes with some relief, too. I’m not hopeful about the world in general to wish to be young today. I fear for my grandchildren. Irreversible climate change. Erosion of democratic principles and practice. Scarcity of needed resources. Environmental catastrophe. The lowering of civil discourse. Population growth. Resurgent nationalism. Cancer. Republicans. Trump.

The daily news is a heavy dose of depression and anxiety.

There’s heartbreak, too. Reading a story I wrote about another time and another loss, a friend of mine wrote the other day, “My sincere hope for you in this very difficult year is that these many reflections bring clarity and not disappointment and being disillusioned. You are walking a new path with new knowledge.”

Clarity. Disappointment. Disillusioned. New Knowledge.

Clarity and disappointment might be the same thing—though clarity is a word I never want to hear. It’s the word my wife used to confirm her decision not to try to find a new future for our marriage. Clarity of vision. Her vision. And yes, that was disappointing, heartbreaking.

Disillusioned? Love seems to be a disillusion. That it’s so ephemeral, inconstant, unsustaining. That marriage vows mean nothing, can be so easily broken. That one must be in love or out of love. That relationships require “equity” to be maintained, to make the effort “worthwhile.” My wife said our marriage had no equity, and therefore was not worth saving. That is disillusionment.

So perhaps, just perhaps, being a senior means not being disillusioned for too many more years. And finding a path to that new knowledge before it’s too late.

Look Through My Window

Written by John Philips, The Mamas & The Papas

And the rain beats on my roof

And it does not ask for proof

It’s not that lovers are unkind

She always said there’d come a time

When one would leave and one stay behind

We both knew people sometimes change

And lovers sometimes rearrange

And nothing’s quite as sure as change

And the rain beats on my roof

Look through my window to the street below

See the people hurryin’ by

With someone to meet, some place to go

And I know I should let go

She always said “I’m not like you”

“When love is dead, for me it’s through”

“And I will find and love someone new”

Look through my window, yeah, to the street below

See the people hurryin’ by

With someone to meet, some place to go

And I know I should let go

I must admit she knew her mind

And it will not take her long to find

Another place where the sun will shine

And the rain beats on my roof

If I still require proof

Well, the rain beats on my roof (She’s gone)

If I still require proof (She’s gone)

Well, the rain beats on my roof (Look through my window)

If I still require proof (All the people)

Well, the rain beats on my roof (I love her)

If I still require proof (She’s gone)

I miss my little white dog. I miss his boundless affection and companionship, his burrowing under the covers early in the morning, his sweetness and loyalty. Having been a rescue, he didn’t deserve another separation.

I miss the woman I married now nearly five years ago. I loved her, and I believe, at that moment, she loved me. Or she wanted to believe she loved me.

I do not miss the woman she became.

A year into our marriage she withdrew all intimacy and affection. It wasn’t replaced by rancor or anger or even ill feeling. It just disappeared, without much explanation. When I would hold her hand walking down the street she would quietly slip it away. Our bed became the place only where we slept.

Four years into our marriage she declared her intention to end our marriage. No rancor or anger, only a deadening fog of distance, deeper withdrawal, and sad loneliness.

That woman I do not miss. I’ve searched for meaning, for some explanation that would absolve her, and me. Last night a friend asked me, knowing what I know now, what would I have done differently? Would I have asked her to marry me? Would I have accepted her early withdrawal with the same equanimity? Would I have been content to go on living with not good enough? Would I have expressed myself more, my desires, my fears? Would I have said anything?

All of that is past, and not helpful to recount. It’s just what happened. As she told me, we were never trudging the road of happy destiny together. There was never a together.

More important matters concern me now. As I write, Adam is undergoing his first chemotherapy infusion. My close friend Ray is napping following his yesterday’s chemotherapy infusion. These are real life issues, not the artificial pain of divorce.

My former wife fades into a distant background, isolated in the clarity of her vision. May she be in peace.

Alone.

An ordinary Saturday in Oakland.  It was and it wasn’t. I bicycled across West Grand Avenue to Adam’s and together we went to the farmer’s market, shopping for the last of summer’s tomatoes, pluots, peaches, plums. Lettuce appears still to be plentiful. Northern California has a bountiful harvest extending late into the autumn, at least autumn as perceived by an Easterner though not here.

Years ago, though it doesn’t seem like that many, we would go to a different farmers market, in Ossining, New York.  Adam was still in high school and I was still at home.  That was before the final upheaval, when life was only smoldering not yet erupted.

After we finished our shopping we went back to Adam’s and made a light lunch of tomatoes and basil leaves on artisanal seeded rye bread, listened to the somehow appropriate ethereal Sufjan Stevens, before deciding on the spur of the moment, to walk over to the Grand Lake Theater to see Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. I had seen the movie already, and hadn’t liked the fictional fairytale portrayal of the real-life horrific murders. This time, knowing how it ends, I saw the deep nostalgia, the heart stopping sadness of all that was lost when those four were killed. Something died in America and it wasn’t only four innocent victims and an unborn child.

Adam drove me home in time to coordinate with Bowdoin friends he was seeing for dinner. Life lived as normal, even when it isn’t.

Normal in the face of calamity: this seems to be a theme this year. I lived for five months under a cloud of normalcy, blanking out the thunderous storm of divorce. My storm was a mere squall compared to Adam’s cancerous tornado. Yet we strive for routine to keep the fear and heartbreak away.

I hope my wife is finding all the satisfaction she desired in her dissolution of our marriage. Nature inflicts enough meaningless misery.  I hope the misery she inflicted has some meaning for her, some existential kind of happiness to justify her clarity of vision.

The coming week will be a turning point, the beginning of Adam’s treatment. Let it be a turn towards recovery and health. In which being here together is enough.

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

WS

Tonight I broke down and cried. I’m not ashamed to say so.  It’s the first time since the dissolution of my marriage, and the news of my son’s cancer.  Maybe listening to Susan Graham singing Reynaldo Hahn’s beautiful, and sad, songs wasn’t the right music to listen to while writing to my new daughter-in-law Rachel.

I learned this morning that Rachel’s grandmother Nancy passed away in the early hours of the day, with Rachel there and her family. This wasn’t unexpected, and in so many ways a blessing, ending her slow decline, over several years, from liver cancer.  Nancy was a strong and lovely woman with a huge warm heart. Her passing leaves an irreplaceable hole in her family.  I have the fondest memories of many holiday meals and celebrations at her, and her husband Norm’s, wonderful house in Lafayette.  Rachel and Adam plan to have their wedding, now wedding celebration, there.  I hope they still can.

Still, this is a loss, and this is accursed cancer. It strikes too close to home. Writing to Rachel, knowing all the emotions she’s had to bear, with Adam’s lymphoma news, with her grandmother’s death, with her father’s own, now successful, fight with cancer, the tears just flowed.

I feel very alone here.

I’m thinking of the poem Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

I, too, am mourning for myself, for what I’ve lost: sorrow’s springs are the same. These are internal states, part of the story I’m telling about myself, and not anything about just what’s happening.  I know this.

Yet, why did my wife have to end our marriage? It’s not really a question but a cry in the dark.  Can’t people be true to one another, in need and loving support, even if love isn’t there?  What does it even mean to say I love you, or…I no longer love you?

It is a failure to accept what’s possible.

I’m lucky, now, to live closer to Adam, to have no other relationship with which to share my time.  A result of being on my own.

What we know and what we feel aren’t the same.

Tonight feelings are overwhelming knowledge.

I’m trying to accept my son’s lymphoma diagnosis as just “what is,” without meaning–and in the language of the Werner Erhard/Martin Heidegger discussion I participated in this morning (A New Possibility of Being Human), a “breach” in the fabric of the petty pace of life: the excessive violence of Being breaks in its appearing, so that this breach itself shatters against Being.

Threatening what’s already there.

“Excessive violence of Being” kind of says it all. Threatening what’s there. No wonder I resist.

Heidegger states that any attempt to analyze Being “constantly has the character of doing violence, whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquillized obviousness”

Trying to analyze my son’s Being has a definite character of doing violence—an exploding question that doesn’t have an answer. There’s no answer to Why.

What I’m working on for myself is to be free from the way I wound up being–thinking of my whole life and this year in particular.

I say “this has been a bad year”– my wife falling out of love, unwanted divorce, dislocation of moving, insufficient income, uncertain prospects, and now my son’s cancer–and I know from the new learning that this is just my story, that there’s no inherent “bad” in this, it’s just what is, and to be free to be and free to act, I have to take all of this, put the past in the past, and create a new future, one that wasn’t ever possible before. To be in a clearing I don’t understand.

And this new “Way”–to be on my Way–has no destination.  It’s the mountain with no top.

What struck me about the Erhard/Heidegger discussion was the proposition that one is inherently at risk when one’s familiar way of thinking is deconstructed, erased, when our subjectivity is rendered “homeless.”  And that risk is the risk of being free to be/free to act.  That’s really risky!

[What would I be, how would I act, if I were truly free to be, free to act?]

To have no home: I feel that literally and metaphorically today, right now. I have no home (not homeless, but having no home) and my future is a question with no answer.

From another part of Speaking Being, the exercise of separating our story from what happened. In my life a lot has happened. The narrative is exhausting.  In some ways erasing the story–the attempt to find language to describe what happened, how I wound up being–is freeing in and of itself, even though it’s hard to accept that this didn’t lead to that in any actual way. What then becomes of autobiography? Much to think about (but not to figure out!)

Why does it still feel like free fall?

Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to feel. Resisting is futile.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

What would a parent give of himself to trade places with his child diagnosed with cancer? Anything? Everything? His own life? That I can’t is one of the great tragedies of being a parent.

We look for meaning in illness, some narrative that helps to make sense of the calamity, but there is none. It’s just what is, as serious and unfortunate as what is is. Life can suck big time.

Very, very little in life turns out the way it was promised. So I remember my mother told me if I was a good boy everything would be great in life. I tried it for one day and it didn’t work. People are told that when they graduate life will be wonderful, life will be easy, and it didn’t turn out that way. When you get married it’ll be great but it doesn’t turn out that way. People say when you get divorced it’ll be all right but it doesn’t turn out that way. Most things don’t live up to their promises.

Werner Erhard

When my youngest son Adam called last Wednesday to tell me he had been diagnosed with lymphoma, my insides turned over, my head hurt, my heart hurt; I ached for him, his brothers, his mother, his fiancé, me, all of us. Why Adam. Why my child. Why not me. What would I give for it to be me, not him. Anything and everything. These aren’t questions: they’re cries in the dark.

Strength, courage, positive planning, and doing all the right things–these are the states and steps we need to take. That is what Adam is doing. He and his lovely, supportive fiancé Rachel decided to move up the date of their marriage, to commit right now, and were married in Oakland City Hall on Thursday afternoon. Prudence and love combined to create a memorable ceremony.

The women in my own life have not been there for me. I wonder if my wife feels any remorse at abandoning her husband at a time when a wife’s support would have been gratefully appreciated, and accepted. As for Adam’s mother, her life-long campaign of divisive enmity continues even in the face of family crisis.

We need to be a family united in common cause.

This has not been a good year. The country is in crisis, the world is in crisis, and the environment is beyond crisis. My son’s life is in crisis. My own life has suffered unexpected and unwanted jolts and twists. It feels like free-fall without a landing site.

I followed up with the Vedic astrologer who recently read my horoscope to find out if there were signs of any of this in my chart. He wrote,

The specifics and the severity of the disease would probably be best seen from your son’s horoscope.  That being said, you’re currently running Me Sa (Mercury/Saturn).  In your D12 (which governs children), Me and Sa are both poorly placed.  In your main horoscope, Me rules the house of the 3rd child, and Sa (a natural malefic) is in that house.  Me is also in a nakshatra that can cause problems and is in the 12 house of hospitals.  So yes, unfortunately there is some indications that the third son would be having some problems now. 

That’s no comfort, only interest.

We go from here into the unknown. Not totally unknown, since this disease is treatable and courses of therapy prescribed. More will be revealed next week and the weeks following. All the forces of love and good are on his side.

His brothers will be at his side. His father is at his side.

He who bends to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Here we are the last day of summertime; the last day I live in this house; the last day of being with my wife.

The new season isn’t springtime. It’s autumn.

We said goodbye today. It took less than a minute. I said it was weird. She said yes. She said she was sorry it was ending this way. I said yes.

That’s how it ends. That’s how it ended for us.

My wife  is spending the night and tomorrow morning with a friend, as I had asked. I’m grateful she agreed to do this. Maybe it’s easier for her, too. We don’t do emotions well.

I’m feeling immensely sad for the circumstance. I’m feeling sad that the full experience of being “out here” with my wife never occurred even during our marriage and especially now during our divorce.

I’m sorry my wife could not experience me or appreciate me as the man I am, as opposed to the man she wanted me to be. I could only fail at being that man.

This morning in the call with Werner Erhard one of the many things he said was you can’t have a life if you’re stuck with trying to figure out the meaning of your life. It has no meaning. Life is inherently meaningless. Things just are the way they are or the way they are not. Don’t ascribe meaning.

I get it.

This divorce has no meaning, and trying to figure out a meaning is meaningless. Oh, we can both ascribe some kind of meaning, or blame, or sadness—but it’s just the way it is. The world has given us an opportunity, an opportunity not to be figured out, or known now, or maybe never known. There’s not already an answer.

Where I go from here is all possibility. For me to be free to be and free to act. It’s up to me.

But now the days are short
I’m in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life as vintage wine
From fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
And it poured sweet and clear
It was a very good year

Thursday August 29, 2019

My last Thursday in the house. In three days I’m gone, forever.

All my belongings are staged in the garage, awaiting loading into the moving/storage Pod later this afternoon. My wife has left for the day, having taken Bebe with her.

The house is silent. I’m alone.

I don’t know whether I’m sad, relieved, happy, miserable, or numb. Maybe all at the same time.

I don’t know whether my wife is sad, relieved, happy, miserable, or numb. She has been especially remote, almost furtive, the past few days– for her emotional benefit or mine I don’t know. I seem not to know anything about her anymore. That she wants me gone is clear.

For someone whom I’ve loved, and love, to become so opaque and distant is a relationship tragedy. I guess it’s a blessing the emotional temperature isn’t higher. Even as it is, in this time of non-communication, her slightest irritations and barely below the surface anger, when it arises, sets my heart thumping and blood pressure pulsing. I feel it instantly.

It’s early evening. The house is quiet. My wife and Bebe are spending the night in San Jose with friends. The Pods truck broke down—so they said— and delivery of the container is delayed until tomorrow. Frustrating but not a problem. I’ve rearranged my helpers. All are available.

I miss my little dog. He is my companion. But I’ll be missing him forever too soon enough. It’s right that he stays here, but I will miss him nonetheless.

I watching season one of The Bridge again. We watched it together the first time. We both thought it was the best crime show we had ever seen. Did she not love me then? Had she fallen out of love? Did she know, then, she would divorce me?

I think she loved me once. She said she did. She does not lie. She doesn’t always say all that needs to be said, but she doesn’t lie.

Mark Twain wrote, “Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”

My wife was my priority. I was never hers. She hated that she was mine.

What hope is there in a marriage like this?

What hope is there in a world like this?

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

My love, my wife, wasn’t true to me, only to herself. She said she had clarity of vision.

I’m happy for her that she can be so sure.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

She had the ability to throw a lifeline but didn’t. She knew that’s what I wanted so withheld it. Because she had clarity of vision.

I’m happy for her that she can be so sure.

A day like any other: got up, made coffee; my wife went rowing in Sausalito; walked the dog. Oh yes, not like any other: I finished packing all my belongings being loaded into the moving/storage Pod. This is my last Wednesday in the house—the midpoint of the week of leaving. The ordinariness of it is surreal.

Last night I experienced the worst pain and discomfort in my hand and arm since the surgery on July 24^th, now a month ago. My left thumb and pointer finger ached in pain—I would call it 7 on the 0-10 scale. My hand and arm were numb. I couldn’t bend my fingers. There was something about lying in bed that triggered the numbness and pain. Every half hour or so I was up walking around to find relief. I hope not to repeat this experience tonight.

I wonder if this is it. Nothing but being ordinary. Maybe it’s better this way. No authentic conversation; no authentic emotions.

I wonder if my wife knows what I’m going through. She’s a trained professional to know. She must know. She reads what I write. But does she really know? I realize she doesn’t care, nor should she care. If she cared she would behave differently. If she truly cared she would have sought a way to resolve her issues without dissolving our marriage. She would have talked to me about her issues in the first place in a way that was direct and workable. There was no workability in our marriage. It’s just what was—no one to blame. We both wish it had been otherwise.

I wonder if my wife will say more than goodbye. To say more than that, now, after not saying very much, would be pointless.

She has her life to return to, much as it was before she knew me. She has new projects to attend to, new goals to reach, without me. The irony, for me, is that she always had these things in her life, without me. She doesn’t believe a life is to be shared in any conventional way. Her life, my life: different. No trudging that happy road of destiny together.

I wonder if she’ll find another man to live with, or marry. I know she thinks she invested five years on me, and it was a loss, and that’s the sadness she’s experiencing. She’s not sad to not be with me. She’s sad that I took these years of opportunity away from her.

I wonder if my wife will find happiness. I wonder if I will find happiness. As Jordan Peterson says, happiness is a small boat on a very rough ocean. There’s no reason happiness should be our life’s mission.

What I do know is that rupture also spells opportunity, possibilities. It gives me the possibility to create something for myself that hadn’t existed before; the possibility of a new world opening up.

Had I stayed married to my wife, by and large, the future would have been an extension of the past, more of the same. We add bricks to our wall that fit with the pattern of the existing bricks. Shakespeare noted, life “creeps at this petty pace.”

But this divorce intervened, and my future became discontinuous. It’s not going to be an extension of the past. My job, now, is to be free—really free to be and free to act.

For this, with all the sadness, the dislocation, the rejection, the loss, I must be grateful.