The only way out is through. Robert Frost said that. It means when faced with something difficult, the shortest way out is to go through the middle, endure the thing, come out on the other side. Don't spend so much energy trying to avoid what you have to do, or bargain your way out of it, or deny it.
On December 11, I had my sixth, SIXTH!, brain surgery this year (OK fine it wasn't brain surgery this time, it was surgery NEAR the brain), to install titanium mesh to cover a missing piece of skull bone. The titanium is autographed, "Prince Harry, Defender of the Realm." As I understand it, the mesh screws into the surrounding skullbones in four different places, covering the hole left from the missing piece of bone. The titanium will protect my brain so that a flying aquarium can't hit directly on my brain and cause major damage, although it would still suck to be hit by an aquarium. During my first surgery at the end of June (called a craniotomy), the surgeon removed a piece of skull bone in order to be able to access the brain, so she could surgically remove the tumor there. Craniotomy means the skull bone was put back in during the surgery. Ultimately, however, that piece of bone became infected about a month later, and then during later surgeries the bone was discarded in a Subway lunch wrapper. So then it became a craniectomy which is brain surgery with skull removal without skull bone being replaced. So I went about four months with a large gap in my skull. (According to medical experts, the longest anyone has survived without a brain is about 80 years, a record held by Donald Trump). No more! Thanks to my latest surgery, I have a normal skull again and the good news is there are no signs of infection. It's a relief to have my skull fixed and to not worry so much about falling.
This surgery and hospital stay were mercifully easy for me. The whole stay was only two days and I enjoyed all my hospital meals. There were no instances this time of peeing the bed or having to go #2 in a bedpan. So Kim and I are very happy to have spent Christmas at home and things are looking up. (Insert epic sick fire emoji here!)
Now that a difficult six months is behind me, I thought it would be funny to write a top 10 list of the worst things that have happened to me in the last six months. This is part of the healing process, to laugh at the past and to de-sensitize myself from traumatic events.
TOP 10 OF 11 MOST MISERABLE THINGS OF THE PAST SIX MONTHS
11. Peeing in barfbag
10. Having violent diarrhea in a foldable camping cup after holding in diarrhea for four hours waiting for Mitch from Ogden to bring special helmet to hospital so I could get out of bed and use normal toilet (he didn't make it in time)
9. Having eight different bacterial or fungal infections
8. Having hospital worker constantly monitoring my input of dry turkey sandwiches ('your turkey input is down")
7. Having xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (too traumatic, removed during editing process)
6. Spending approximately 24 straight days on toilet with C-diff (OK, fine, not 24 consecutive days, but 24 days broken into 3 groups of 8 days); the whole time the anal and rectal muscles are in full clampdown mode--yes, I said that
5. Seeing the film Oppenheimer twice during a break from the hospital
4. Worrying about my wife and daughter if something should happen to me
3. Learning from new hospital nurse that I had been without a bladder my entire life despite peeing several times per day all my life
2. (removed in editing process)
1.Thinking the hospital was an infinite space station I was trapped inside
And of course it would be wise to write a list of the top 10 or 11 best things from the past six months
TOP 10 OR 11 BEST THINGS FROM THE PAST SIX MONTHS
12. The awesome University of Utah nurses in neurocritical care unit for keeping me sane. These people go to school not to learn how to invest money or to fight courtroom battles but how to take care of people when they are sick!!! Amazing!! They provide one-on-one compassionate care to patients, without video games, AI, texting, robots, Netflix, or Amazon!
11. My brain surgeon, Dr. Menacho, heroic person of heroic deeds. We are close to the same age. Decades ago, I watched SportsCenter late at night with a sack of Tostitos on my lap while she, on the other side of the country, practiced brain surgery.
10. Getting a second or rather third chance at life
9. Awesome friends and co-workers who worried and brought food and helped change thinking habits with positive energy
8. Getting to watch the ENTIRE tour de France and Spanish equivalent bike races on TV
7. Getting to read about forty novels, none of which was written by Mark Twain or Dr. Phil
6. Carrot cake!
5. After head shaved, not spending any time on my hair!
4. Appreciating the comfort of bed and hot food
3. Family who took care of me and my wife
2. My daughter who stayed positive
1.My wife for her heroic deeds and taking metaphorical grenades again and again
When you are sick you have nothing but time to think. In my spare time, I think about time. The main sources of pain and grief for me are time and geography. Time causes us much pain for we remember the past and then immediately feel grief to realize the past is gone and that we live in the present, and this grief happens hundreds or thousands of times a day. I remember my Grandpa Smith and his nasally voice in the last years and his warm-heartedness and his humor and he is, as it were, present with me, and I feel warmth and comfort. But I remember that I cannot access him now, I cannot speak to him, I cannot have a meal with him, and I feel grief. And I cannot go into his house, a place of personal worship for me, for the house was razed to the ground to make room for another building at Southern Utah University. And yet I am a witness to his life and there are many other witnesses and we can speak of him together and build a temporary house in the likeness of the old one and visit him there. And what's more painful from the past is my Grandpa Knell, my mom's father, for all the witnesses of his life but a few are gone, and so I can't even re-create him in nostalgic form very well. His old house from 1980 burned to the ground a few years ago, and there are few left who ever knew him or his house and the time is longer and it's harder to remember and to rebuild a memory. And the future also causes pain: I think of some beautiful future moment I aspire to, like seeing my daughter's wedding, or saving up "enough" for retirement, or the next trip to France whenever that is, and then again the grief when I remember the future is not guaranteed and that I am not there yet, not even close, so I may never experience what I desire, and that even if I were to touch the future, the future once touched would turn into the past anyway. So I come back to the present and ground myself there and focus on my breath and heartbeat and warmth and cold and food and comfort and all the five senses and I stay there in the present for a moment before flying off again and no matter how mindful meditation I do I am always flying through time, coming back always to the present. I don't do any yoga. It's too hard for me and I'm not so bendy.
And geography causes pain because we are separated from those we love. Many of those we love and who loved us are dead, and we don't know where they are and we don't have access to them. And we know this will happen to us, too, some day we will be the one who has gone away and we feel grief already into the future for those who will wonder where we have gone. And even for those living there is the painful separation of geography, some family in Utah, some in New York, or even some family in Sandy and some in Salt Lake, all the hellos and goodbyes of daily life keeping us apart. So even when we are with friends or family in a beautiful moment, the moment is not quite full, we are not quite whole, because one friend or family member couldn't make it, and is still in Florida or wherever, so there's the sting of geography separating us. And ironically funerals are beautiful because it's the one time, other than weddings, when everyone comes together.
And time bends and twists. You've seen Dali's watches and clocks, like melted Camembert. Time is not linear. You could get stuck at 3 p.m. Earlier this year, in May and early June, before my diagnosis and before my first brain operation, time seemed to be expanding for me, perhaps because of the tumor in my brain, perhaps because of some undigested beef. It felt like time was expanding to an infinite nature, so that I had plenty of time for everything. If I took a shower, it felt to me that I could shower for 112 minutes and that when I emerged from the shower, it was still the same time as when I entered, even though I knew I had showered because my hair was washed and less greasy at the end. It felt like I could squeegee the glass in the shower for a day or a year and it didn't matter and I didn't feel subject to time or anxious about time--I could stay in the middle of time for minutes and hours and I could squeegee the glass forever and not "lose" any time for I was atop it or inside of it. It felt like no matter how long something took to accomplish, I had infinite time left in the day to achieve the other things on my list. It's hard to describe and I don't know why it happened except that it did happen and it felt good to have so much time, to have time STOP, as Dostoevsky says.
This feeling persisted until the end of July and beyond, through and throughout my first hospitalization and diagnosis and surgery. As you know, big events in life like sickness, birth, marriage make time slow down because they put a deep mark in time and we begin to reckon time differently around those moments -- before Jack was born, after the surgery, after Glenn died, and so on. It was said of many Americans who lived through the American Civil War that every day of life felt like 30 years, as they waited for newspaper reports from the front to tell them if their loved ones were still alive, and which side had won the latest battle. And when it was over they almost grieved because life and time were boring again.
My first hospital stay to have the giant brain tumor removed was only four days, but it could have been forty. Just before and during and after my surgery, I traveled it seemed to a world of light, a world where light was like tangible three- or four-dimensional waves or bands to tread through, where everything was made of particles of light. This was a feeling of existence at the cellular or neurological or atomic level, the feeling of being inside atomic energy, the energy of the sun that radiates through and throughout all space and all time so far as we know it. I felt invited to travel through space and time in a rebellious manner (for such travel involved no jurisdictional rules of which I was aware, and there were no boundaries or fear or grief of any kind, insofar as I could travel infinitely throughout all space and was obedient to no one).
Then as I woke up in my hospital bed and heard the voice of my wife and the nurses it felt there were jurisdictional arguments between light particles and organic particles like carbon and the jurisdiction of my actual body and its power over me, and then the spiritual jurisdiction and whether I belonged to it. And for whatever reason I was obedient to the voice of my wife and the nurses in returning to the hospital bed and I invite you to consider where authority comes from, does it come from empathy and experience and credibility as it did here, for I listened to my wife and the nurses, or does authority come from outside of us from a manual or policy or from a woman in a pond with a sword? All these thoughts of course came instantly in layers and seemed to last forever although they were instantaneous; and this made time feel very long indeed.
And then as I returned to reality, time felt very long indeed for I was confused and sore and uncomfortable, and with nothing to do, the actual physical clock that we follow seemed to so slowly like honey dripping out of a tree. One night it felt like time was stuck on the same time all night and finally I looked at the clock and it was 1:42 and it stayed 1:42 for 24 hours. So time went from lasting forever in a good way to lasting forever in a bad way.
I had the thought lately that time is like being inside a huge pipe under the earth. Imagine a pipe of concrete, ten feet in height, ten feet wide, and of infinite length. We are all in the pipe moving we think, we hope forward. Behind us is all the space we have traveled so far, we don't know how much but it feels like a lot. Is it a 100 yards, a mile, hundreds of thousands of miles, we don't know. Every day we pass thousands moving slower just as we are passed by thousands moving faster but we know there are an infinity of people ahead of us and behind us. In the pipe we only see what is around us a few feet or a few hundred feet and it's futile to plan ahead or think ahead because the pipe goes on forever so we just have to keep walking.
Now imagine the pipe, ten feet by ten feet, begins to rotate sort of like a funhouse pipe let's say. If you fight the rotation the pipe will carry you up until you are upside down and gravity pulls you back down and you fall on your head or shoulder or pelvis or whatever. If you kind of balance in the middle of the pipe and move your feet quickly to stay loose, then the rotation of the pipe doesn't pull you up and over, and you don't hurt your head as much, and you make more progress forward in the pipe, because you are spending less time rolling over and hitting your head. So you are still trapped inside the pipe (time) moving forward slowly, but let's say with fewer bumps and bruises. You are just moving forward with whatever agility you can muster, enduring the length of monotony of the pipe, and trying not to fight it too much.
We are INSIDE of time, deep down inside of it, just inside, way inside of time, BELOW and INSIDE of time, marching forward forever as far as we can tell, at least in our current sense of reckoning. Part of the hope we have either as Christians or Jews or Muslims or even as pagans or whatever we believe is that we won't always be trapped within this notion of time. What if the pipe were much shorter for example and circular instead of existing in a line, so that it went on forever but in a circle so that we saw the same people inside of the pipe much more often, and we noticed the same landmarks in the pipe more often. So we would always be traveling ahead but always also traveling on top the past and into the future over and over again, in a circle. In that way time might be less painful, for we would be traveling in a never ending circle without so much grief, always treading on the same time we had already passed and always knowing in the future we would come back to the present, for time is a circle. I like the idea of time as a circle because when I feel grief about the past, I can tell myself that if I keep walking I will soon "catch up" to the past and retread that same ground. The past isn't dead, it's just around the corner.
Everyone has heard the phrase that "the only way out is through." I guess Robert Frost said this. But I like more the version: "the fastest way out is in and through." When you are in a crisis or mental or physical pain, a crisis of despair or grief, you are stuck inside of time, and you have to go down inside of it, all the way in, like burying your head in mud, and there's no escape except that by allowing yourself to sink all the way in, and to stay agile and not fight time, maybe time doesn't knock you around as much. You can't go around time. You can't trick it. You can't outsmart it. You can't avoid it. You can't jump ahead.
I'm attaching a photo now. Look at these marvelous creatures of the everlasting universe at my side, young women made of carbon and oxygen and other stardust, descendants of the first atomic movements 13 billion years ago, my wife Kim, my daughter Bella. What beautiful intelligent fierce and autonomous creatures they are, full of energy and life. My whole life and before I wanted to meet them, waited to meet them; my whole life since the beginning of time, from wherever we come until now, I have traveled across many galaxies for these moments together. I am astonished every day that Kim and I found each other. I am astonished every day that Bella is my daughter. How did stardust turn into humans who gained consciousness including complex emotions like love and fear?
What will happen to us across time and what will come of these moments that we are given, what will we be allowed to experience together, and for how long? We don't know. And the best thing, honestly, HONESTLY, is to not think about it.
What rules govern that other place beyond the river? Why don't the dead visit us more? Are they selfish or lazy? Did they forget about us? Is it so nice there that coming here is like going to Detroit in January, or Phoenix in July? Is earth like a bad picnic, surrounded by mosquitoes, with rotten cheese and lunch meats only to eat? Or is time different there and our year is their second or day, so really we are not waiting that long, according to them.
Marilynne Robinson wrote that the idea of humans trying to ponder the universe and life/death is similar to a cat trying to understand the larger implications of the physical world around it. Take a cat, which lives in the physical word. It eats, sleeps, runs around, interacts with animals and humans. So it has some connection to the physical world, to time and space and to movement. But suppose you asked the cat to describe or predict what you do for your day job. Using the tools available to cats, how would they describe your life, your marriage, your job, history, politics, the future of the planet. No matter much how much time you gave the cats, they could not explain or say anything, they would just purr and look for snacks and relish in their cat-ness. Suppose God appeared to the cats and told cats the meaning of all things; then what, could the cats grasp it or relay it back to us or other cats? There is no amount of time or thinking that could make them escape their cat-ness or to understand what's going on in the world around. Imagine a cat saying that God told the cat that such and such would happen after death. It makes no sense. The cat doesn't have the tools to understand God. Imagine the cat meditating for thirteen days and reading a thousand books and fasting and so on--does the cat get any closer to understanding the cosmos? Why do we think we can? We are as stupid as cats, if you will, and probably more stupid honestly, because we have the hubris to believe otherwise. We are of the same stardust as cats, why do we expect we can solve mysteries and riddles that are boggling (or rather, not interesting) to them?
Behold in the photo my daughter's cats Gracie and Oliver. They are the remnant of 13 billion years of evolution and universal change. Gracie is the more pointy one with the lighter hair and Oliver is the more round one with the darker tiger features. What do they think will happen after we die? What do they think about the future of the universe? Of course it's silly, they don't know or care why would they, for they are cats? And of course we are the same. Why do we even try, why do we waste time using our weak tools to see into the future. Cats are smart, they just do cat stuff. We should just do human stuff, don't you think? All our striving brings what, only grief? Right? So stop it, I say to myself. Just live. Just live like a cat, let the universe take care of the universe. Let the dead bury their dead. Let's be cats, let's be catlike! And i don't just mean to walk quietly when are burgling.
Anyway, when I feel mixed up in my thoughts, I like to ground myself by thinking of cats and dogs and how they view the world.
And the hardest part, the most heartbreaking part, is do you try to protect yourself from your fear, by holding something back from the world and the people in it, or do you completely surrender and let your heart open all the way and put everything on the line, put the chips all on the table? Should we live wildly and dangerously or should we live carefully? Can we protect ourselves against the grief that comes from love and living?
Of course, have to risk it all. Why? Because. Because the shortest way out is in and through.
At night when I go to bed I feel so much love for the world and the people in it and the experiences here, I open my heart completely, tear it open until the door creaks and strains, pull it all the way open and let everything in and everything out, like breathing through my heart and shaking and groaning at the weight and beauty of it all, paralyzed by beauty and stillness. You have to risk it all, open your heart and stand aside as an observer and let your heart love everything and receive in return. Marching to the front in war, your days are numbered but you stop to smell an orange and you keep that feeling that scent inside of you, you make eye contact with other soldiers, bravely, proudly, you don't shrink, you take everything in and you let everything show, vulnerable and exposed. You study the mud, all the blue and hazel and brown eyes, witnesses of each other. HERE I AM! Behold my breath my eyes and my hands! I leave nothing behind, I hold nothing back. The accounts are empty, the parking meter expired!
Think of the world and everyone there and everything there you love. Take all the time you need. Take five minutes, an hour. You can cram infinity into five minutes if you try. Picture every thing in your mind minutely. Treasure it all up. Now picture your own self how you think other people picture you, what you might mean, what you must mean to them. Now picture the world without you. It's OK, right? It keeps turning, right?
I gasp. It's too scary to live like this. But what is the alternative?
Holy cow! That was too much, Scott! I'm laughing at myself imagining someone reading the blog and thinking "What the hell, Scott?? Why so dark??" Ok, I understand why you wouldn't want to meditate about the world without you. Too painful, too negative perhaps. Maybe that's like a cat trying to learn math. But what you can do every night is travel in your mind, whenever you want, to visit your loved ones. In the past few months I have visited every person I have ever met (that I can remember), I have been to my childhood home and the homes of my grandparents many times, I've roamed the halls of my elementary school, junior high, and high school. I've thought of the face of everyone I can remember from school, college, jobs, mission, anywhere, and I've put all those people in my heart and stored them there, I've remembered every restaurant and coffee shop I can think of, thought of every corner of Paris I can remember, thought of every book and movie, thought of every song, every smell, everything I've eaten. If you are reading this I've thought of you in the last few months, remembered every time we met or spoke, every time I saw you or heard you. I've remembered every memory involving my daughter, every memory involving my wife, every memory involving my friends and family, replayed them from every angle (sometimes I am looking through my eyes, sometimes through another's eyes so I can see my own self), replayed them all. Dostoevsky said if you had five minutes you could replay your whole life in about 3 minutes and still have infinity of time leftover to replay more before 5 minutes was up. I decided to try it. It makes my heart swell until I gasp. And then I fall asleep and sleep the greatest slumber of all time, without any remorse.