Elephant

Given the topic of what follows, I'll defuse any potential tension by pointing out up front that, as far as I know, I'm not currently dying on any kind of accelerated timeline.  My dad's death and my own significant but not (as far as has been determined by medical science to date) imminently mortal health concerns have put me more than usually in mind of the topic, however.  Hence this.

What should I consider to be risk

is there any flipside to this mortal disk

The answers seem pretty damn relevant

And maybe there my deficiency is on display

As the noose tightens up on my day to day

This damn room went

and grew itself an elephant

Sucker Bet, (currently) unpublished Song of the Day

For quite a while I’ve had something that I’ve wanted to say, or talk about somehow.  I have touched on it in the past but never really taken it head on.

You would all do me an amazing service if you would entertain the notion that the fight metaphor may not be the most helpful one.  Or maybe it’s not as helpful now as it was in earlier stages.  It’s difficult to change the language around something when it is so engrained.  “Fighting cancer..” “died after a long battle with cancer..”  etc.  But this implies that there are winners and losers.  That if we die we have lost.  But we ALL die.  No one makes it out alive.  That shouldn’t make us all losers.  The most pernicious part of the fight metaphor for me is the notion that if someone dies young from cancer they simply didn’t fight hard enough.  That if someone decides to forgo treatment, they have “thrown in the towel.”

I don’t see any grace in the desperate clinging to life that we call fighting in this metaphor.

Maybe instead I’m having a slow dance with a handsome and charming mad man who has made it quite clear that eventually he’ll have to USE the straight razor that he’s holding to my throat.  I believe him.  He doesn’t seem like a guy who lies.  Why he has to cut my throat isn’t clear.  In the mean time, it’s a warm embrace.  I’m holding him, he’s holding me.  He’s whispering the most beautiful and insane shit to me, all wise, all true.  I’m trying to enjoy the dance as much as I can, trying to learn as much as I can, trying to stay present despite the knife at my throat.   And now he’s starting to cry.  You dig?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a fighter all right.  I have been from the start.  Walking around barefoot with fists cocked.  But this isn’t a fight.

Ezra Caldwell, teaching cancer to cry

That blog, I'll warn you, is a rough trip, but of course the guy making it has pretty much most of us beat, so.  This video is a good place to start with the story, followed by this slightly longer one.

In February 2009 the Minnesota poet and author Bill Holm died: I knew him, a little, maybe about as much as Hamlet knew poor Yorick.  Dad knew him better, and had invited him to a gathering of Minnesota authors he'd been involved in organizing when I was maybe 13? 15?  After Dad died we found a photo of him with Bill, Paul Gruchow and John Rezmerski at this gathering: only Rezmerski still alive now. Dad took me to another reading of his at some other place, I feel like it was maybe the old chapel in the "Pioneer Village" attraction in my home town, I feel like I was younger than at the time of the author's gathering, but it all blurs together and I know my memory is unreliable.

Later Bill and I exchanged a few letters and I went to a couple of his readings on my own.  I had owed him a letter for a couple years.  I was all but vanished into my reality of stay-at-home, early years parenting.  I tried to send him an email at his old college address once which bounced.  And then someone, I think my brother, who knew my connection with him asked me if I'd heard.

It set a hook in me and I'm still not entirely sure why.  I'd gone through the deaths of all my grandparents with greater equanimity.  Certainly Bill and I had a cordial (if mostly superficial and greatly attenuated) relationship but it grieved me as a genuine loss.  A fair theory is certainly that it presaged Dad's death not quite three years later: another heavy smoker with heart disease.  The foreshadowing is not subtle.

And then again maybe it is just that Bill was the closest thing to a real active friendship that has been ended by death in my life at that point, which is something considering I was 37.  I'd meant to get him that letter.  Once in a while I'd think that maybe I'd get in the car and make the short trip to Minneota when I knew he was in the states.  Hell, I might even make it to Iceland some day, see him at Brimnes.  People are potential, until they're not.  All further opportunity is lost.  I wrote the song No Tomorrow.

And I've not lost many since even so, but I knew it then, really knew it, and know it now, as inevitable. Unless of course I happened to disappear first.

Of course all this reaction was nothing compared to when Dad died.

But I'll leave that for another day...

There's nothing like a crisis to make you focus, think clearly, and be able to present what you know in that moment.  I guess one of the things is you get this wonderful gift if you've been, you know, faced with some kind of a terminal illness of learning in a real visceral way that lesson about every day being really important and, you know, living like you could die tomorrow and all that kind of stuff... The problem with that in, sort of, reality, is that you can't actually do that because it's just fucking irresponsible.  I mean, so you have a brush with death or you have to think about dying because you have something that can kill you.  You think that oh, well this gives me, you know, this, this makes me realize how important just, you know, your experience and enjoying life and all that kind of stuff is.  And yet, so what do you do, you buy a motorcycle and a large format camera and go ride around and take photographs and, two years later, haven't died yet, and have no money, and you know, I mean, it's just like, it's the kind of thing where you, you know, it's like oh yeah live like you're going to die tomorrow, it's like well yeah but what happens if you don't?  You know, I mean, that's the reality, is that it's like, well, I haven't died yet!  So I think that's the biggest challenge, is just kind of figuring out how to reconcile the notion that, that I'm very aware that anything could happen, and in order to figure out where to go with the business and with making bikes and everything else, I have to kind of behave as though I'm not going to die next year, I have to behave as though this is something that actually has a future and that, ah and that it....  So that's, that's the thing that, that's difficult to kind of reconcile is just, just how do you, how do you get your head, ah, around that. (Ezra Caldwell, in Made By Hand/ No 5 the Bike Maker 8:25)

(As an aside it took me over half an hour to transcribe that minute and 40 seconds of monologue as precisely as I could... it is amazing how divergent speech is from writing or indeed almost all prepared dialog).

Death is the elephant in every room and how we reconcile that inevitability in our lives in the here and now - not just for ourselves but for absolutely everyone everywhere... seems a topic we barely engage.  God the bustle and the thrum and crash, our elections, our government shutdowns, our protests and police actions, our aggressive drone campaigns, our terrorist plots, our global climate disasters, our stock bubbles, our concept cars, our newly redesigned consumer electronics, our campaigns against obesity, our flawed healthcare rollouts, our fall television premiere schedules...  And I think that maybe all of it, every bit of this... evil, and nonsense is exactly our  reaction to utter avoidance and denial of death.  And how will we ever learn.

On the Fast Boy Cycles facebook page Ezra Caldwell posted about riding on October 19, 2013.  As of this writing, as far as I know, he persists.

Final note, September 7 2014: Daniel Ezra Caldwell died at home on May 24, 2014.  In the nature of things, of course, he still persists.