Well, Hello Again

Well, life got very life-y again. The lifey-est it’s been in quite a while. And, once again, I got blown off track with blogging. The whys of it all relate, in some part, to other people’s lives, and the details are not really mine to share. But they involve health crises, and, not surprisingly, they have been trigger-y.

One thing I’ve learned, as I’ve aged, is that my brother’s life and death, for better and for worse, were foundational experiences for me, and all new crises and traumas will lead me back to them. And, somehow, despite the redundancy of that well-traveled path, there are always new lessons to learn.

I could go on about some of them, per recent events. But they’re not all that pleasant, some of them. And they may also be more than you want to know and more than I’m capable of unpacking coherently, to be honest.

But as I sit here, trying to figure out which direction to go with this post, what I’m compelled to do, again, is look to my brother and think about how he faced the un-relentingess of bad odds and difficult circumstances.

It really all comes back to how do you keep going, with a growth mindset (to borrow a kind of annoying new age phrase), despite absolute crap circumstances? How do you go on? Why do people go on?

I’m reminded that I have a pile of books, ordered in an optimistic and productive phase, by prisoners of war who wrote about their ordeal. I read what was left of my brother’s journal (he’d shredded out a bunch of pages he apparently did not want to leave for posterity) and it’s clear from what remained that the prisoner of war experience resonated deeply with him.

I’m currently sitting in a bar with my laptop. It’s empty, the TV is blaring a football game (Packers vs Chiefs…I could care less). It’s me, the bartender, and some guy who just walked in, sat down at the bar and drained a beer, and left within five minutes. It’s one of my favorite ways to write….Social but not. Background noise that I can ignore.

But I’m without any of those POW books with which to finish this thought. So I googled POW and got this excerpt from US News and World Report of the late Senator John McCain recounting some of his experience as a POW in Vietnam.

Here’s some of the excerpt:

“As far as this business of solitary confinement goes—the most important thing for survival is communication with someone, even if it's only a wave or a wink, a tap on the wall, or to have a guy put his thumb up. It makes all the difference.

It's vital to keep your mind occupied, and we all worked on that. Some guys were interested in mathematics, so they worked out complex formulas in their heads—we were never allowed to have writing materials. Others would build a whole house, from basement on up. I have more of a philosophical bent. I had read a lot of history. I spent days on end going back over those history books in my mind, figuring out where this country or that country went wrong, what the U. S. should do in the area of foreign affairs. I thought a lot about the meaning of life.

It was easy to lapse into fantasies. I used to write books and plays in my mind, but I doubt that any of them would have been above the level of the cheapest dime novel.

People have asked me how we could remember detailed things like the tap code, numbers, names, all sorts of things. The fact is, when you don't have anything else to think about, no outside distractions, it's easy. Since I've been back, it's very hard for me to remember simple things, like the name of someone I've just met.

During one period while I was in solitary, I memorized the names of all 335 of the men who were then prisoners of war in North Vietnam. I can still remember them.”

I can see why this resonated for my brother, and how he absorbed the lessons. He was an introvert who became social, drawing people in to the salon on the non-sterile half of his room. He cultivated interests with a vengeance, and mastered things (math, guitar, drawing) at an eerie pace. He wrote books and plays (found in his notes) that he cast (unbeknownst to them) with the people in his daily life. (These never left his notebooks, but they’re there.)

His capacity for memorization is something I’ve mentioned before….entire plays, Poe’s lengthy poems. You could read a line out of Shakespeare, or pull a line at random out of Annabelle Lee, and he’d pick up and continue on, without hesitation. Maybe it was the lack of distraction, the focus time enabled him, that allowed him to do that.

McCain also talks about the need to cope with worry.

“One thing you have to fight is worry. It's easy to get uptight about your physical condition. One time I had a hell of a hemorrhoid and I stewed about it for about three days. Finally, I said, ‘Look, McCain, you've never known of a single guy who died of a hemorrhoid.’ So I just ignored it as best I could, and after a few months it went away.”

I can’t say that I can relate to the too much time on your hands that McCain and Ted dealt with.

But the worry, man, that resonates.

Not necessarily about my physical health. I haven’t dealt with that defining crisis yet. But there are plenty of other worry candidates. And other people’s health crises. The universe continues to deliver on all fronts. (Okay, one aforementioned lesson from my past: Past trauma does not immunize you against new ones. Obvious to you, maybe, but I think my subconscious had made some mental presumption that, you know, there was a limit on these things.)

You can watch a lot of your life’s energy go down the drain to worry.

I’m not a big fan of ignoring things, as McCain says, because that skirts too close to denial for me. (Definitely not a denial fan.) But the perspective taking inherent in that quote, I get that.

The bar is filling up, the buzz of conversations among regulars is rising, and a really sweet elderly man, who at first I thought was a client, since he sat chatting at the bar for a bit, but who clearly works here, just arrived with a huge smile to put a candle on my table.

After my brother died, I used to find it almost offensive that life went on, as if nothing had happened, for most people. Now, a lot older and hopefully a little wiser, I’m aware that many of the people here must have had their own struggles, and they’re here, keeping on, chatting, putting candles on tables.

I’m guessing there’s a lesson in that. There’s a lesson in most things, if you’re paying attention. I’m trying.