ELEGY

ELEGY

When you are away and “healing” the world out there kind of fades in both time and space. In some ways that is not very different from the manner in which you have treated that very world for these past many months or years while you were cradling the bottle, lost in an alcoholic haze unreachable to the wife, the child the family and, of course, the friends.

In my case it is even more amazing how much time and distance I have placed between me and everyone because it has only been upon  my return that I have begun to appreciate how the closeness I had with family and friends has dissolved and how I now feel that distance that I myself put there between us in the first place. And it is a shame how I am not able to revel in the joy of having been welcomed back into the family fold by those whom I have hurt the most because it is those who suffered to most from my having “been away” and are not so eager to forgive and forget. Well, even forgive, if not to forget. For there are many in the family whom I have not alienated and whose open armed welcome is so loving that it makes the loss of that welcome from those closest to me all the more obviously absent.

I so understand this that it goes without saying that it should be a long haul for that recognition to be realized, if ever. It takes more than just a little work to patch that up.

But I didn’t realize just how long I had been gone until just the other day when, through a set of serendipitous circumstances having to do with trying to repair that very relationship with the closest of those I have hurt, the spouse, failed. We have been trying to get back together but an argument forced us to cancel a date and I went alone to a jazz concert in NYC.

At that concert were many jazz notables whom I have come to enjoy over the past thirty years, and whom I have seen in performance, some many times over. One in particular whom I originally met through a mutual friend and has since become a casual acquaintance, was also playing that night. It so happened that I went to medical school with that mutual friend, as I did with that friend’s wife.

Ordinarily, I do not bother performers whom I assume do not like to be pestered. But on this occasion I met Jay backstage and he was as gracious that night as he always was on every occasion in which I reintroduced myself to proffer my appreciation of his playing and his music.

And as a reminder prompt I mentioned the mutual friend, and after he accepted the thanks, he got quiet and said “I have some sad news. Steve left us this year.” And my jaw dropped. “You knew about his heart valve problems?”, as indeed I had.

When we were finishing up our last year in medical school in Baltimore, Steve had enrolled in an experimental program at the NIH and received one of the first porcine aortic valves, back in 1977 when it was still a new procedure. 

For the past thirty plus years, since the time we spent in medical school, he and I, my wife and his were fairly close friends, despite the fact that they were ten years our senior. They were a couple with zest, humor and joie de vivre that my contemporaries in medical school were missing and that was what drew me to them and kept us as friends all these years.

Except during the storm that were the last years of my drinking, when I was licking my wounds in recovery, I pulled in my emotional antennae and pulled in the “friend feelers” and surrounded myself with only those folks who could easily cocoon me. Somehow, for some reason they did not fall into that category and for two years I remained incognito to them. But their lives did not remain static, as mine ground inexorably to its first deadly and then hopeful destination.

“Steve had had two more operations on that valve”, said Jay; I had known about one of those and I guess the last was new to me. “He finally gave up and decided not to fight anymore and he gently passed. I would not have mentioned this except I know you were friends, as were we all.”

And I thanked Jay and he added, “and Barb, well you know she has been suffering from memory loss for some time now and she has gone to live in the west with her daughter.”

As I left, the loss was palpable and I felt this immense sadness and tightness in my chest. I had to lean against a building for a moment while I wept, for the loss was so sudden and so great and I was immediately so angry with myself that I had been unavailable. I had been gone; out of touch; I had not kept up! I felt empty.

That biennium of living angrily had left me untethered from those for whom I cared and now I paid the price. And part of that price was that there are mutual relationships that the spouse and I share and whose mutual grief I am now responsible for because it is I who am responsible for having created, in  a sense, some tethered relationships, Steve and Barb being two of them. And it was I who caused that breach of continuity so that when that all important time came, when people were in need, I was not available. Just as I was unavailable to those even closer to me.

But I suppose there is a peculiarly optimistic way of looking at this whole episode, perverse as it may seem. Had the spouse and I  not been in the midst of a reconciliation, we would not have been at each other’s throats, emotionally speaking while trying to work out our admittedly rough, tense and difficult attempt at familial reintegration.  Had we not been as fragile as we were at this particular juncture, that date would not have been cancelled.

Had the date not been cancelled and we had gone together to that concert, then our typical shyness would have overcome any desire to go up to Jay and we would not have found out about Steve and Barb for a long time.

And it does turn out that we are just six months late since the funeral, not years late. There is still time for redemption. There is time to make amends. More importantly I hope, while Barb still has cognition, there is time to express condolences to a dear friend and perhaps even to see her while she can still recognize me.

There is a way to extract the positive out of this whole situation. I cannot dwell on the past which I cannot do anything about. I can’t plan on a better tomorrow without doing some good today.

There is a crude AA slogan that opines, “if you have one foot in the past, and one foot in the future, all you can do is piss on the present.”

So I have my work cut out for me for a better today.  

© res 5/16/2011