from
Tethered to a Dying Animal:
Putting Ourselves in Perspective
in
Living Posthumously:
Confronting the Loss of Vital Powers
by Andrew Bard Schmookler
Henry Holt and Company
NOT ME
A Yiddish saying expresses the craziness I have discerned in myself. “Dear
God, you do wonderful things for complete strangers. So why not me?”
The assumption that I must occupy a special place in God's universe, as
I
do in my own, seriously undercut when my plans for my life were derailed
by
illness. That sort of thing might happen to complete strangers, but not
for me.
According to this implicit view of the cosmos, with a pre-Copernican
narcissistic
self at the center, my vital powers would go on flowering. If that's what
my life
is about, I seem to feel in my inner heart, that should be a law of the
natural
order.
Had I been killed instantly in a car crash, my narcissistic assumptions
would
have been violated, but I never would have had occasion to revise my
cosmology. The experience of outliving myself compelled me to reexamine my
place in the great scheme of things.
Looking into the human encounter with our finitude, I discover that, in
thinking myself special, I am no different from other people. “In a
hundred
years, we shall all be dust—but not I,” says Scheu, speaking in the voice
of
Everyman1. “All men think all men are
mortal but themselves,”
wrote the
seventeenth-century English poet Edward Young2. Young would
not have been
surprised at the difficulty experienced by Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy's famous
dying
character, in discovering that the prototypical syllogism applies to him.
The
inescapable trap—”All men are mortal”—which was shown to me as snaring
Socrates, Ilyich evidently learned with death capturing Caius.
That Caius—man in the abstract—was normal, was
perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract
man, but a creature quite separate from all others. …
"Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die,
but me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my thoughts
and emotions, it's altogether a different matter."3
When we are struck by the obvious, part of the blow is evidently a
narcissistic injury. Here is one additional obstacle to our knowing what
is
logically manifest and inescapable. Not only is it hard to give reality to
what we
have never experienced. Not only do we have motive to deny the prospect of
loss that would, in any event, be painful. But we have, most of us, a need
to be
more important in the great scheme of things than we actually are. I am
not
“man in the abstract,” I am me, with my special and irreplaceable store of
treasures. Little Vanya, being special, should be exempt from the iron law
of
the human condition.
Dear God, I understand you have to inflict tragedies on complete
strangers,
but certainly not me. “This can't be happening to me,” writes Thomas Bell
of his
coming to grips with his malignant tumor. “Me with only a few months to
live?
Nonsense.” He goes on:
Perhaps the difficulty is my half-conscious presumption that
such things happen, should happen, only to other people.
… People who are strangers, who really don't mind, who …
are born solely to fill such quotas. Whereas I am me. Not a
stranger. Not other people. Me!”4
Confronting my illness gradually moved from that question one often hears
from the afflicted, “Why me?,” to the question my aunt Chava raised. My
father's sister, she had gone through life with much the same attitude
about
grabbing the bull by the tail as her brother. After she was diagnosed with
cancer, she considered her situation and asked: “Why not me?”
1. Josef Mayer Scheu, “Compassion and Death,” in
Norbert Greinacher and Alois Muller, editors, Experience of Dying,
p. 121.
2. Quoted in Jacques Choron, Death and Modern Man, p. 106.
3. Quoted in Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses, p.309.
4. Thomas Bell, quoted in Mwalimu Imara, “Dying as the Last Stage
of Growth,” in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, editor, Death, p. 149.
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