Wastrels of Our Sorrows

 Here's the thing about living with a loved one with terminal illness. They are still alive. You can wake up every morning and see them. If you are mourning their absence in advance, you can still go and give them a hug. That, surely, is something. 

But it can also give one an illusion of normality. On a given day, you can catch yourself up in the miniature struggles for survival and daily living. You can lose yourself in your work. You can forget, for a time, that anything's changed. 

But there are moments that suddenly remind you of the fact that you are watching someone you love deteriorate before your eyes. Moments that stab at your gut with a sudden and unexpected skewer of raw pathos. 

And then, one has nothing to say—no insights or philosophy with which to defend oneself. The only words that came to me last night were Philip Larkin's: "It is intensely sad." 

They come so strangely, these moments. I can sit through hundreds of conversations about my dad's cancer diagnosis without flinching, weeping, or crying out. 

But somehow, watching him quietly do finger exercises with the physical therapist the day he came home from the hospital overwhelmed me. 

Or hearing him ask whether shrimp contain iron over dinner (his doctors have warned him about a risk of anemia). For the record—I have no idea whether shrimp have iron in them or not. 

Or the night my dad went into the hospital with sepsis, and I opened the mini-fridge to find a ginger ale, and thought "I can't drink that, it's for dad when he starts chemo"—until the thought crossed my mind he might never have chemo, because I might not see him alive again. 

These are the moments when all my psychological defenses fail. I can't distract myself in time—possibly because these moments are so small and so seemingly insignificant that they slip through the gaps in my plating. 

Those are the moments when "my manhood is cast / Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past," as D. H. Lawrence put it. 

Except I don't actually cry. Due to whatever fairy tale curse, I am never actually granted that form of emotional release. My grief is concentrated entirely instead into a ball of pain and fear in my gut. 

"A father's no shield / for his child. / We are like a lot of wild / spiders crying together, / but without tears" (Lowell)—might be the stanza that describes my distinct reaction even more accurately. 

My brain keeps trying to find some source of reassurance. Some way to tell myself: "well, this isn't as bad as I feared it would be." 

This, after all, has generally been my experience of life up to now—that my fear is always overblown; worse than the thing itself when it comes. Life is more "an affair of being rather frightened than hurt," as Samuel Butler put it. 

But here now is one time when I can't pretend otherwise: this thing has been as bad as I could have feared. Worse. And it will go on like this—losing even what ground we've preserved—with no hope of change for the better. 

"Today it is bad," as Schopenhauer once wrote of old age, "and day by day it will get worse—until at last the worst of all arrives." (Hollingdale trans.)

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring—to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins. 

I feel awful now, his poem suggested—with Schopenhauerian wisdom. But that's no guarantee that it's the worst. More pain will yet come. More and worse, endlessly. 

This too: when these moments of gut-stabbing grief come to me, I find I cannot even reject them or try to dismiss them from my mind. Instead, I clutch them to me tighter, with frantic masochism. 

Others might say: "don't think about that." They might tell themselves inwardly, as a character in Siegfried Sassoon says to his "ugly thoughts"—"No, no, not that," in his poem about "Repression of Wartime Experience." 

But I catch onto each of these "pangs" of agony and treasure them like pearls—each of these "ugly thoughts". 

Why do I do it? I guess because I still have never cried for my father. And these little balls of pathos seem like the closest I've come. 

They seem like the only way I've yet found to honor his dying. "If he can go through this, the least I can do is feel something about it." 

I sense somehow that I will be grateful for these "intensely sad" moments someday. Because they are the only things, in all these months of misery, that paid tribute somehow to the magnitude of what was happening. 

And so I feel I must keep hoarding them up still—even as they rend me. I must savor each pang, replay it to myself, memorize it through repetition—make sure I never forget. 

This too was the only wisdom that Philip Roth could find, at the end of his own father's battle with a brain tumor. "You must not forget anything," he chants to himself. "Remember everything accurately." 

That's what B.S. Johnson concludes too, in his novel The Unfortunates, about a friend who died young of cancer. "I'll get it all down, mate," he tells the latter—at his death bed. 

This is his last promise to his friend; the only one a writer can make—"I'll get it all down." I won't let the world forget. I'll record this in a medium more permanent than human memory. To honor it. It's all I can do, and it's not much. 

But to make sure I can do even that, I have first to scar them into my brain, like I'm laying down grooves in vinyl. I must treasure and store them up, so I never lose them. 

To quote Rilke:

I must learn to hold these

nights of anguish dear!

O Sisters Of Lament,

why did I not kneel

more lowly to receive you-

surrender myself more fully

to your loose and flowing hair?

We are wastrels of our sorrows,

gazing beyond them into the

desolate reaches of endurance

where we seek to know their ends.

(Tenth Duino Elegy, Hunter trans.)