After the Dance

Follow-up to Slipping the Ballroom

I went out to California a couple weeks ago to spend time with my friend who has terminal cancer. I’ve been home a while now, yet you’ve heard nothing from me until today. I’m sorry. I’ve been laboring with an internal conflict which I wasn’t willing to confront head on.

In “Slipping the Ballroom” and the pieces around it, I took you all the way up to having booked my trip. As a result, when I got home I felt like I owed you the logical next chapter: an entry about the trip itself. However, it wasn’t a chapter I could write honestly. The irony is that when I left for California, it was the chapter I fully expected to write next.

I thought I’d just go away and be fully present with my friend; and then I’d write something about our time together. The actual events wouldn’t matter much. They would be just backdrop for something about life and loss and old friends and hard goodbyes… The piece would be moving. It would warm your heart only to break it. It would be the kind of thing you finish reading long before it has finished with you. You would feel it, because first I would.

And that is where things went awry…

“For better or worse, I tell you the truth.” – me, ad infinitum

I am a sentimental person. I want moments to be golden and precious. I want to experience them deeply. I want to remember them vividly so I can remember them, relive them, cherish them. That is my nature. I am a memory gardener. I fill glass bottles with meaningful memories and then tend to their care.

I wanted my trip with my friend to fill a few bottles. I did.

I was primarily going out there to hopefully be of some comfort to him, but I was also going to fill bottles. To remember the moment. To capture my friend in it, immortal. I knew the trip wasn’t likely to be our last vintage, but it is coming on fall and there is a hard frost ahead. Bottles filled now would be dear today and then someday precious.

Whatever was somehow golden about this trip, I would bottle it up. A conversation, an event, a feeling… something… there would be something to bottle, something to remember fondly. That is what I thought somewhere way down deep at the subconscious level where the person you are just operates without needing your attention. I would fill bottles.

And then I didn’t.

I came home with only one.

It is a bottle just not one filled with the honey-amber of something remembered warmly. It is something darker corked tight. It will go on a shelf and be preserved, and I suspect I will take it down and hold it in my hands often. Those will just be acts of tending to my own best present rather than fond reminiscences of a best past.

(I should tell you that I have been struggling to write this for almost two weeks now. At this point, I don’t think there is a version I could write which would fully please me. Its importance to me makes that a particularly hard thing to accept. At some point, gestation has to give way to birth though. So, I’m just going to do my best here and accept what flows from this point on as final and the best I could do.)

My friend and I were together for three days. I picked him up on a Friday night and we drove out to the California desert to Palm Springs. I have this little hotel hook-up, so the stays were on me. We stayed in a nice place the first night and then a ridiculously over the top resort the next two. We slept in good beds  in rooms with lovely showers and then ate big breakfasts and good lunches and lounged about doing little. I will spare you the play-by-play. There was a smoked duck omelet. I took a picture of it… and took pictures of the coffee drink I had with it, the restaurant’s signage, the view up block, and the mountains in the distance. They were all lovely. Take my word for it.

Instead, I will fast-forward us to Sunday…

By then, we were staying in an absolutely ridiculous $500+ a night resort. It had automatic sliding glass doors in the lobby… out in the water above a lagoon. They were for the resident black swans. The place literally had a lagoon which started in the lobby and then wound out around four pools and a golf course. The resident swans know how to use the glass doors and freely avail themselves of them to paddle back and forth between the indoor lagoon and the outdoor one as the mood strikes.

Swans, y’all. Black swans. From Australia. International swans. Who have their own automatic doors to come inside whenever they feel like it.

The flock of Chilean flamingos though… those stay outside. They seemed fine with that.

Like I said, the place was nuts.

Now, bear in mind, my friend and I aren’t the vacation-at-resorts-with-their-own-Chilean-flamingos type of people. My friend is a teacher. I am, at best, a not presently starving artist. We ain’t indoor/outdoor lagoon people. We were punching well above our weight class thanks entirely to my little hotel golden ticket. (Our three nights would have cost a total of $1,400. I paid $180. Total. It was… wow… a treat.)

So, we stayed in nice places and that was nice. We just hung about moving seldom, slowly, and not terribly far. We didn’t much of anything.

On Sunday, we did little more than watch football. We just camped out on a sofa in the soaring lobby overlooking the lagoon in front of TVs and barely moved. It was what my friend had wanted to do, and I was down for it. Since the games start early Pacific Time, we settled in by 11 a.m. and then stayed put straight through the late games.

Along the way, we ordered a round of drinks… and then more rounds. By the time the games were over, I had polished off seven drinks. My friend had thrown back fourteen. Two for every one of mine. I had washed down a lightish beer an hour - right around what someone my size can oxidize.  My friend had matched me on the seven beers and had accompanied each with a shot of tequila.

Of the two of us, the one whose drinking had been out of character for them was me.

I can’t remember that last time I drank that much in a day. I certainly have. I’m not dogmatically opposed to it. These days though, I have an occasional pint or two but seldom more. The main reason for that is because I am pretty comfortable sober.

I don’t think that is true of my friend. I don’t think it has ever been. And I don’t think it ever will be. And that wasn’t a new discovery. I have known that for decades. We all have, our group of friends. There had been signs by the time we graduated high school. They were glaring by the time we graduated college.

I’ve known my friend has a problematic relationship with alcohol for 35 years. That not only wasn’t news, it was a fully understood condition in planning this trip.

And his drinking on Sunday wasn’t actually what bothered me. It was what I saw behind it.

I saw my father.

My father was an alcoholic. He worked and he drank. Those were his two most consistent daily activities. He worked weekdays and often on weekends. He drank all seven days. He was a profoundly unhappy person. He made no effort to be happy nor even work toward changing that. He chose a job straight out of law school which made him miserable and then he spent his entire career dividing his daily time between the misery he voluntarily chose and numbing himself to it.

My father didn’t spend a single day comfortable in his own skin and happy in his life. Instead, he spent his entire 72 years on earth in a numb sleepwalk through one long wasted opportunity to be healthy and happy and fulfilled for even a brief time.

That to me is the tragedy of my father’s life.

Not his alcoholism per se.

Alcohol was somewhere between an accomplice and a tool. A slim-jim. A thief’s device. The thief who stole away my father’s opportunity to evefr happily inhabit his own life was my father himself. He had ample choices, ample opportunity, and ample free will.

Alcohol did not make my father’s choices for him. My father chose alcohol so as to not have to make better ones. That was his nature. He found alcohol because it was the right tool for a task he chose: avoidance. That’s quite literally why he began drinking. To keep from having to cope.

Now, my friend is not my father. His drinking doesn’t take the same shape. My father stayed home, had no friends, and did nothing. My friend is gregarious and social. He has a network of friends. He goes out.

The similarity is in what lies beneath. Each drank/drinks to avoid being present within their own lives and with their own feelings. Rather than cope with the emotional volume, they turn down the speakers.

Now that my friend has terminal cancer, his impulse to numb himself to his emotions has gotten far stronger. He, understandably, has been experiencing some depression. His response, however, has been to go on antidepressants on incrementally escalating dosages to the point where they are now causing debilitating side effects which are themselves depressing. They are impairing him… but they are also lulling him into a muted sedation. A distant numb cousin to waking catatonia. An emotional flatness. The only time it briefly lifted when we were together was Sunday after a dozen drinks.

What depressed the absolute fuck out of me after I dropped my friend off on Sunday wasn’t any of that in and of itself. It was how clear it was to me that he has lived his whole life doing the same thing to varying degrees, anesthetizing himself. All I could think was that he has lived the same 53 years as me but had so much less “lifetime” within them.

(I will explain that last line but first, I should confess: I’ve stumbled through starts, stops, and start-overs trying to write this entry in no small part because I worry I can’t do justice to my explanation and without doing so, this will be disposable rather than existential, essential, memorable. It will wash over readers and be gone, leaving no impression, having no impact, whereas if done well, the explanation would change at least one reader’s life. I believe that. Alas, onwards I go.)

We think of our ‘lifetime’ as being the period between our birth and death. That isn’t our lifetime. It is our lifespan. Our lifetime is the period we get to spend between our birth and death living our lives, conscious in them, awake for them, and present. It is the time we have for life. That is different than the amount of time we have to merely be alive.

We spend about one-third of our time sleeping. We spend probably around another one-third working. The final one-third is divided into all kinds of tiny slivers and many of them are not, qualitatively at least, much in the way of ‘living’. Sitting in traffic. Running mindless errands. Thinking about the past or worrying about the future. All consume time. None are consumed living meaningfully and in the present.

When you actually whittle down the total block of hours that elapse between birth and death, a frighteningly scant few are allocated to being fully alive in a meaningful sense: being fully present in the moment with eyes wide to the world and heart open to the company, being fully yourself.

My father and my friend all but abandoned that already small slice of the pie by opting to systematically avoid even attempting to cope with inhabiting their own skins in the present un-numbed.

I am coming to realize not just how precious and golden that slice of the pie is but also how truly transcendent moments in it can be.

“What does that even mean, Mike? Jesus, you are getting seriously woo-woo here.” you think.

I dunno, man. Maybe I am. But this past year of writing has had an affect on me. It has been interesting in all kinds of collateral ways. A year ago I would have told you that the work of writing is in the writing. Now, I would tell you that the writing is only 10% and it is the last 10%. The first 90% is feeling. A year ago, I would have said that writing is an act of communication. Now I would say that it is an act of expression. It is the plumbing of your own humanity so as to let it gush out upon the page. It is the constant revelation of who you are through what you make.

That is not benign stuff. It is at least somewhat and sometimes terrifying. It requires a level of naked exposure that gut-checks even a dude who likes to proudly proclaim how comfortable he is with being seen truly as he is. Living in the cathedral of your own thoughts and then throwing open the confessional doors to the ears of the congregation is not for the meek.

But here is the thing: it is fucking transcendent.

To do the hard, uncomfortable, grinding work of plumbing who you really are, what defines you, what you care about, what matters enough to you to think about and share, it is a running lowkey agony. It truly is. I am not so sure it gets easier as much as it just ebbs and flows everchanging. Along the way though, you come to see yourself in higher resolution. Who you truly are. When you then write exactly as that person wholly unfiltered and unrestrained, you are accepting that person. You are saying they are good enough and worthy of love because you yourself are loving them unconditionally first.

That is some transcendent shit.

In my case, it is arrived at through living as a writer but that is just my route. At its heart is endeavoring to live wholly as yourself present in your life and the world. It isn’t easy. Getting to that place even for moments feels like the attainment of something. A summitting. A reaching of the peak of Maslow’s pyramid. Self-actualization.

When you have trauma or grief or have learned to self-judge and criticize, it takes some monumental damn labor to climb that mountain. It is a fucking Everest. Even without those hindrances, society saddles our backpacks with millstones of expectations and judgment.

It is no easy feat to get all the way to the altitude of 1) fully embracing your full, true self; and 2) at peace living publicly exactly as that person.

It is worth it.

We have but one lifespan. Within it is a harrowingly small subset of time in which we get to truly be alive. Every minute we give away or opt out of is a minute wasted. Death is not a tragedy. Never living is a tragedy. Spending a lifespan uncomfortable with yourself, unable to inhabit your own skin, avoidant of being fully present, that is a tragedy. That is losing one’s life long before ceasing to be alive.

It is incredibly tough stuff to sit next to someone who you’ve known most of your life who is now dying of a terminal cancer and realize that the above applies to them… that they are numbly listing toward death after having spent the years prior numbing themselves to life.

That is a grim thing to see. It is hard and it hurts. It renders you doubly helpless to do anything about their past or even present suffering.

It’s the kind of thing that wraps itself around you like tentacles and then doesn’t want to let go.

I could have pried them off at some point over these past two weeks. I could have just put it out of my mind or whitewashed all of this away. I could have reframed it somehow. Distanced myself from it by repainting the weekend’s scenes with warm colors. I could have opted out of the full aperture of my feelings, how depressing all of this felt. I didn’t. I chose to sit with it. I opted to fill a bottle with the memory and then turn it over in my hands until I could share its contents with you in words.

To live is to feel.

I choose to live.

To be yourself is to accept yourself. To share yourself is to love yourself.

I choose to be myself. I choose to share myself.

It is hard. I think it is worth it.

It hurts that my friend could never find his way there.

He deserved the peace of being able to live wholly as himself comfortable in his own skin, present in his life.

So do you.