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Good morning all-

Most normal day yet. I slept and felt rested, and went to my daughter's madrigals performance, bringing with me a dinner of my own chicken sausage, sauteed cabbage (I love cabbage) and green peas. You can do a lot worse than that for dinner! I also made dark brown sugar shortbread, which everyone loves. It fits well in a renal diet- all sugar, flour and butter. That was my dessert.

Today is my postop visit. We will be driving to and from Louisville, KY. I feel like a I have an incisional hernia in one fo the trocar sites. I really hope that's not true, but if it were my patient's belly I was feeling, I would tell her she had a hernia. 

Thank you Erin for your very kind post. I agree with you that seeing the humanity and weakness of a parent can be more than emotionally traumatic. Here my fears are driven by terrible things I saw my father go through. It is certainly not a matter of wanting to maintain my 'parental dignity and authority' in front of my children. You can well imagine I am not much on that sort of thing anyway. Rather, it is wanting to spare them the ugliness of illness.

There is no question that an emotional bond gets forged through shared adversity, and through a willingness to show need and weakness. Life is a large, emotional paradox. It is in serving others that our own needs are met. It is in humbling ourselves to accept the guidance of another that we are given leadership. It is in generosity to those who suffer that we find our own suffering relieved.

Conversely, those who attempt to force others to acknowledge their superiority are beaten down. Those who are stingy find themselves shut out of others' generosity.

To paraphrase Francis of Assisi, it is in giving that we receive, and in dying that we are raised to eternal life.

Besides my wandering thoughts about birth and death, the fundamental emotional paradoxes of life lead me to believe that what we think is an ending is nothing more than a beginning. It's just a beginning of something we don't understand.

One of my favorite passages in the Bible (and just about the only one by Paul) comes from Corinthians. I first heard it when it was read at my father's funeral. 'Now we see through a glass darkly, then face to face. Now we know in part. Then we shall know even as we are known.'

Of all people, Neil Young expresses some of the same feelings in a song for a movie about a gay man dying of AIDS- Philadelphia. The second verse of his song-
'I've had my friends in this world. I've had my friends.
When we were boys and girls, and the secrets came unfurled.'

In adolescence there is one set of 'secrets' that become apparent- the emotional motivators of life- lust, fear, greed. In death, perhaps we understand at last that it is a tempest in a teapot, that what we eat, wear and drive and with whom and how many we have intercourse are all irrelevant.

There is a movie I like very much called 'The Last Samurai'. I think it is Tom Cruise's greatest performance. As his Japanese friend (and originally captor) is dying, he looks up at the cherry blossoms and says 'Perfect. They are all perfect.', referring to an earlier scene in which he said that spending a lifetime looking for a perfect cherry blossom is a not a wasted life. It is only at the end that he realizes they are ALL perfect.

When Cruise presents this man's sword to the Emperor, he is asked 'Tell me how he died.' Cruise's reply has always touched me 'I will tell you how he lived.'

When I was a boy, we had the soundtrack album from 'Zorba the Greek'. It includes little pieces of dialogue followed by the various songs which, if oyu are a fan of rempetika bouzouki music, are terrific.

The young Englishman asks Zorba, at the end of the film, 'Tech me to dance, will you?', and Zorba replies 'Did you say Dance?! Come on my boy.'

I never heard it that way. Even as a boy, I heard it as 'Teach me to die, will you.', and then the reply 'Did you say dance? Come on...'

I have always greatly preferred my mishearing of those phrases. If you want to teach someone how to die well, they must be taught to  live well. And I don't mean that in the consumptive sense of US society. I mean it in the sense of living a life with some values, of serving others, of doing what is right for others, of creating some good for the world.

You want to know how to die- learn to dance. 

I told you I find inspiration in the funniest places!!

Ted
  

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