Yesterday I went to a Jewish funeral for a person I barely knew. I was late, underdressed, and the only person there who knew the words to the various texts. Just by singing along I felt like an interloper from people trained to view religion unkindly.
The funeral was for the ex-husband of a very good friend; a very smart and accomplished Russian-American, a Soviet emigre who only found out he was Jewish when he was older, and struggled with alcoholism his entire life. I only met him once, a long conversation in a bar where we were the only two drinkers. In my drunken memory we talked about Russian literature and history, along with various scientific developments, but ultimately who knows... What I do remember is that he was clearly too drunk to get home, so I, obviously completely sober... drove him back to his house. I thought I'd made a friend, but I doubt we ever spoke again more than a very occasional hello in a drink-soaked haunt.
He was forty-five, found out he had liver cancer a month ago, he survived only three weeks, and died holding the hands of his ex-wife and son.
I never drank enough to kill me, I never smoked enough to kill me, but I most certainly ate enough, and after nearly nine years of exactly the sort of extreme stomach irritation that can cause serious illness, I dread esophageal cancer like it's already a foregone conclusion. The moment esophageal cancer is detected is a death sentence for 80% of its sufferers, who die within the first five years.
Every day I try to eat better, and all it takes is one hungry misstep and the irritation begins anew. I belch for hours, my lung space feels at quarter capacity, my heart rate goes up, I get pain and numbness in my arm, sometimes my ability to think goes foggy. Occasionally I get it under control; I feel the body repairing itself, and the endorphins it sends to my brain are like manna. But the voracity is overwhelming, and hardly a day goes by when it does not overwhelm me to action.
Just yesterday, at the Uzbek dinner after the funeral. I got an order of fresh vegetables and beef with horseradish. The horseradish was enough to give me a bit of upset, but I was so level-stomached that the vegetables made my stomach felt better than in a month or more; my only suffering being that I had to watch everybody eat delicious dishes of pure garlic and onion. After it was over, I just couldn't take it... I went to the sushi buffet next door to the Uzbek restaurant. I purchased the $19.95 buffet, ate roughly 18 pieces of sushi. Even then, I didn't feel the esophagus giving out on me. But I went back for sashimi, and after one piece, I felt the lining stretch. I managed two more pieces before I threw in the towel and left before I made any other bad decisions.
I went recently for a stress test to get my heart examined, and the nurse told me that I have no heart problems at all, but just from looking at me, he could tell I had the worst acid reflux he'd ever seen.
What I experience is not just hunger, it is medically induced ravenousness; a manic gluttony that thinks of nothing else until esophageal engorgement. Like so many aspects of mental health, medication is a nearly lethal Catch-22. Anti-depressents and anti-psychotics cause extreme weight-gain in so many, and yet there is no other option. When living in Israel, I was unmedicated but crazy nearly to a point of delusion and utterly without morale. I returned home at a relatively svelte and sexy weight of 185, went back on medication, and within a year, weighed 235 pounds. My constant eating couldn't help being a source of amusement to friends among whom I tried my best to laugh along with, not to mention the numerous 'evacuative' trips to the bathroom. I frankly doubt I was any better mentally, it was just the beginning of one of the (numerous) lowest points of my life. But what other option is there except to go by what the most proven science best recommends? Even if the best science kills you....
Trying to work a normal job when your heart regularly beats 130 BPM for a couple hours every day is like expecting someone to walk into a battlefield crossfire. Trying to date anyone in those circumstances is like trying to spin straw into gold. Believe it or not, I work out fairly consistently, and believe it or not, my heartrate usually goes down when I work out, not up. But there has not even been a full day in eight-and-a-half years when the heart beat at a normal pace and the lungs truly breathed. And those are only in the moments when I am not experiencing depression, which is so overwhelming that the colossal pain becomes physical, right in the pit of the duodenum.
My 5'4 1/2 frame is now around 180, my thinnest since high school. I feel not even a notch better, because the weight loss has been in no way induced by portion control. It is weight loss by reclusion. How do I lose the weight? Noom helps (a weight loss app), but it's fundamentally because I avoid social situations. On days I don't even see family, it's nothing but yogurt, berries, oatmeal, and the occasional bell pepper. Any weak coffee is further weakened by almond milk, any 'plumbing' problem is weakened by laxative. Every day spent not leaving my house is another pound lost, but even if portion size has dwindled significantly, every day spent with others is grepse after grepse. If the coffee's too strong, if I accidentally ingest garlic or onion, if I eat too quickly, I literally burp all through the night and the inflammations feel as though I could throw my back out at any moment.
As I write this, I'm a day-and-a-half from forty, and stare down the days when health problems always promise to increase exponentially. I rarely expected to live this long, at least in compos mentis. As I gaze down whatever years are left, be they ten, or twenty, or fifty, or much much less; I wonder, what's there left to do? I have neither children nor spouse, an unchallengeably light job whose workload is tended to by much more responsible people than I, and enough debilitations to make living anywhere but here just about impossible. All I have for permanent company is a mind and body which doesn't like me much. Death has its attractions, but there's no danger of accelerating that process when it promises to be so painful and permanent.
No, what I live for is 'the work.' The writing, the music, the faith that there is more out there I can create than these online rants, the book and music that my delusive mind promised me when I was a teenager was mine to create. it is a delusion no doubt, and much of the results have not been so good as they were supposed to be, but they justify me. The moments when I summon morale for them give meaning to the whole thing, and would make living to ninety-five a blessing indeed.
I doubt I'll make it that far and worry I won't make it to half that length. I won't deny that I dream of my death, a natural one of course, never anything self-induced, and often wonder what it should be.
But just for the record... I want to be buried in Jerusalem, as close to the Mount of Olives as you can get me. I want my soul to witness all the history I'm sure will continue to be made there. I want all my closest friends, Jewish and especially goyish, to have a memorial service with my family in Jerusalem, and bring all their families, where they can remember me by taking a big vacation. If it happens soon, it won't be for another few years. I may still make it to eighty (though the idea of forty more years with this esophageal shit is almost worse than death). If it happens before I'm fifty-five, take your kids to all the holy sites of all the religions, have them milk cows on a Kibbutz, play with the mud on the Dead Sea, crawl in the Land of a Thousand Caves, see the Roman ruins at Caesaria, and canoe on the Jordan River. Ride camels and camp in the desert and watch the bedouins with their sheep who live as they did 10,000 years ago. Walk the gates of the Old City and Nimrod's fortress, hike the gorgeous terrain of the North (and spend extra time up there, the Mediterranean is the most beautiful part of the Western world), climb Masada, play on the playgrounds in the Tel Aviv parks, go into the tunnel at Akko, and lie on beaches all around. God willing you can go to the Palestinian territories free from threat, There's no need for any classical music or high culture sanctimony you don't want to experience, but use Israel to newly appreciate the vastness of history and the cosmos. Talk to Israeli Jews and Arabs - both Israeli and Palestinian, find lectures in the political propaganda of every side (and there are 20, not 2...), eat pastries in the frummie bakeries in Me'ah Sha'arim, haggle over the price of stupid dried fruit in the markets, eat fresh baked pita and herring in the morning followed by a strong Israeli coffee (one should be good for the day...), eat falafel for lunch, fresh fruit and Israeli salads for snacks, grilled fish for dinner with as many side dishes as you can get, drink at bars that close at 5, and get at a late night schwarma to sober up. Eat pork and shellfish in Tel Aviv and go to a Friday night service in Jerusalem. Use Jerusalem to go to a Christian and a Muslim service too. Have an experience that makes you aware of the area's danger, and do all this not for Israeli propaganda, but so you can understand civilization itself and how a place the size of New Jersey can feel sacred enough to inspire the entire world. If you can, use extra time to make a trip all around the Mediterranean. And whether it's you or your kids one day, go to sixty other cities around the Mediterranean. Appreciate all the beauty - natural, manmade, and human, learn the vast history with awe, taste the food with gratitude to be alive, visit the museums, hear concerts of any and every type, learn about the authors and filmmakers. Meet people, try to learn as many words of the native languages as you can. Appreciate just how much there is to know about a world that can't be known.
I want my non-musical writings to be collected by a team of close friends I appoint privately, chaired by M--- M---- and M------ Z----, who cull through all the published stuff and the non-published stuff put in secret on my blog, and the best 180,000 words of which are sent to my journalist cousin and faithful reader to edit, who can then hopefully find a publisher. The musical stuff will be there for anybody who wants to notice it, and if anybody feels interested enough to publish it, I'm sure my family would be both thrilled and surprised.
I want to leave a whole series of letters to my nephew and any others I may have, whom I hope I live long enough to truly know, about the world I fear and hope they inherit when they complete their educations around 2050, and how they might help to leave a better world to their own next generation when they complete their lives. in 2150 or later, which will doubtless be so much longer than mine, that is, if the world allows any of us to live past the coming crises.
The world may not let any of us live past the next few years. But if the world does, I might be trapped with you all until well after 2050, and live my life in anticipation of that. Whether they're any good or they suck, I desperately want to complete all the musical and literary projects that exist in my head almost fully formed, but lack the will of iron to apply to paper every day for fifty years.
Perhaps it's a dream, but my dream for more than twenty years was to write all those works I've so long thought of, and that other people will look at it and realize that whatever I've done with my life, it was of value not just to me but to them. In less woke eras I used to dream of glory: inner city children wandering the night quoting my poetry and sexually liberated graduated students hanging on every word of my speeches. Now, in middle age, I dream of viewing readers and listeners like friends to converse with, and since they can't converse back, I hope I can find a way of making them feel listened to in a world where so many people have trouble listening. I still want to write that fictional epic of Jewish history where the beliefs and perceptions of the world change from era to era - but Jews remain the same forever in all their contentious ambiguity. I want to complete the Psalm settings, write cycles of Jewish liturgical music, and translate parts of the Bible. However long I live, I will be lucky to get to somewhere around 5% of it, and who knows if any of it will even be as good as the stupid essays I post here that are as easy to write as taking a shit (which I'm told will probably get harder as I age....).
All things considered, I obviously still expect I will outlive a number of people reading this post, hopefully by some decades, but nothing is guaranteed and a body in pain is more likely to give out than a body with no pain. Even the healthy die, sometimes before the unhealthy; which of us is the luckier then? But health or unhealth is a mere reminder that all things transitory are just a parable. It's up to each of us to find some meaning in our time here before the body breaks down, but even if we find no meaning, we are not just ourselves, we are all of us, just drops of water in a great cosmic river, and the river washes away all things. Whether it's God or the universe or some quantum process we can't possibly understand, something out there sets before us life and good, and death and evil. I don't know if life is good and death is evil, but all things considered, it's best to walk in the ways of life.
We all live on through the light and darkness generated through each other, and it's through the effects we cause on other people that our most meaningful stories are told. Whether it's me or you who tells the stories, what's important is that there are people who last after us, and that they can tell stories that explain how things came to be the way they are. We don't need stories because they're true, we need stories because stories are the way we connect with other people - empathy is value neutral, but sympathy might be an absolute good. We need to tell each other what it's like to live as ourselves. We all need to write our stories down, and we need other people to read them. This is how we connect, this is how we last. Meaning is the light of the world, and meaning is only generated by telling what we perceive to other people.
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