Life is short

Our family has had a particularly bad week.  My immediate family, the four of us, are all fine, but my nephew has been diagnosed with what is probably terminal cancer.  He has yet to meet with the oncologist directly, but the initial diagnosis was that it's incurable.  I find myself struggling between being very, very sad, and being very reflective.  

There are moments when I can take a deep breath, tell myself that we all have to play the hand that we're dealt, and then start to try to figure out just what that metaphor means.  Add to that the fact that in my theatre history classes this past week we've been talking about existentialism and absurdist theatre (and my facebook "Which French philosopher are you?" quiz did come up as Albert Camus...), and maybe, just maybe, you might kind of get where my brain is right now.  

Sartre rocks my world almost as much as his long-time partner de Beauvoir does.  But he wouldn't tell me that we all play the hand that we're dealt.  He'd tell me that there's no symbolic deck of cards, no dealer, and it's all about what we do with these choices that we think of as a hand of cards -- cards that we in fact pick up ourselves.  If you put that together with this cancer diagnosis that our family is reeling from right now, it sounds remarkably like the message of The Last Lecture.  Not that Randy Pausch is an atheist.  But he is arguing that it's about what you do with what's left of your life that matters.  That is very existentialist -- that your actions create the meaning of your life.  I tell my classes that the thing that really jazzes me about Sartre is his absolute insistence that you be engaged with the world -- politically, culturally, socially -- that even when I was leading a youth group and contemplating going to seminary (yes, me), that aspect of existentialist philosophy spoke to me.  What that means to me now, thanks to Sartre, in a context like what my family is facing, is that even when the pain is so great that we can't fathom moving forward (which is certainly how my sister and brother-in-law feel today), we cannot and should not withdraw from the world.  That is the magic of being human.

It's probably the confluence of a number of things.  I'm 40.  My parents have crossed into their 80s.  My kids have become little human beings, no toddlers left in my life.  My dad lost a sister last week, and this week, my 31-year-old nephew is facing the end of his life and we're all realizing through our anger and disbelief that we are going to have to lose him.  

I remember holding him when he was a toddler.  I babysat those kids all the time, spent almost as much time there as I did at my own home, half a mile down the road.  One afternoon when he was about 18 months old, he was so worked up after playing through the morning like a madman that he would not settle down to take a nap.  I was supposed to just put him down for his nap.  But instead, I pulled him up into my lap, held him against my chest, and rubbed his back until he fell asleep.  I was 12.  I started learning to parent by taking care of him.  I am not supposed to have to tell him goodbye before I die, but somehow, in the fabric of the universe, in the meaning of our actions and choices, what he has meant in my life has at least in part translated into my relationships with my own children, too.  

There's an unwritten rule in the universe that we hear and feel breaking when something like this happens, like the string breaking in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard.  It's visceral; we feel it in our bodies.  I've woken up the last two mornings hearing it, feeling it.  In Valency's book on Chekhov, he writes, "Whatever of sadness remains unexpressed in The Cherry Orchard, this sound expresses."  And he later notes that the sound of the breaking string is intimately associated with the passing of generations.  But it's really not a rule, Sartre would say.  Humanity has made it seem like a rule, to make life feel safer, more ordered.  The existentialist universe is unordered, irrational at times, only because it doesn't obey the rational rules that we humans want it to obey.  Life is ruled by chance.  Scary, frightening, unpredictable chance.  Every moment, every choice, every action matters.