IN PRAISE TO EACH OF US ALL

For 70,000 years we have walked the earth as companions or adversaries. We have at times turned to each other and used language for understanding. 108 billion of us have breathed the same air, inhabited a form of mind and body each has called My Own. Homo Sapiens we are called—men and women of wisdom. A billion-and-a-half have preceded us in death due to our encoded expiration date or acts of violence. For the 7.5 billion of us alive now, there is hardly any difference among us—genetically less than ½ of 1%. This is the degree of individuality each of us asserts--.005. Yet we seem so different.

EULOGY TO AN UNNAMED WOMAN. All I knew of the patient on the operating table was the 4”x8” opening in the sterile drape covering her. I briefly saw her face and heard her voice before the anesthesiologist put her to sleep. No one spoke her name. My job as surgical technician was to have the appropriate instruments for the procedure and hand them to the surgeon and his assistant as needed. Fifty years ago the practice of medicine did not include the miracle diagnostic tools we have today—MRIs, CT scans, fiberoptics, blood tests that detect diseases. So a customary way to diagnose the reason for a patient’s problems was a Laparotomy. An incision large enough to open up the abdomen and see the organs living within.

The surgeon cut through the skin, the fat, and the muscle; I handed his assistant hemostats to clamp the bleeding vessels and sutures to tie off the bleeders. Our internal organs are covered by a sheath called the peritoneum. With forceps the assistant lifted the sheath and the surgeon cut through it with scissors. The abdominal cavity “….this is where we live.” The organs glisten with a separate brilliance matching their critical importance. As I remember, the liver a dark red brown, the gallbladder a ruddy red, the spleen a grey yellow, the flat tube of intestines a bright red, the pancreas (I can’t recall the color). But not today, not here. The organs were pock-marked and dry, adhering to each other. The surgeon pawed through part of the bowel and exposed a chain of tumors. 

He looked up from the incision to the assistant and said, “We’re closing.” The anesthesiologist asked. “Open and close?” The surgeon responded by ordering “Suture!” I handed the surgeon needle-holder with sutures and his assistant scissors. No one in the operating room spoke. The patient was quickly sewn together as the anesthesiology woke her up by degrees. 

This was before the days of chemo-therapy, immunology, advanced radiological treatment and the medical break-throughs that extend the lives of stricken patients. The phrase “Open and close” was a death sentence. I did not learn how long the patient lived after the procedure, but I was told that exposing cancer to the air accelerates its growth. We had been inside another human being—that intimate. Death was that close to us on that day, yet so remote and cold, cold as the air in the operating room. Nothing could be done for her.  Nothing to keep her alive. 

At this time, the same is true for 604,296 who have died from Covid-19 in America. I can put a face on only one of those.  An immigrant I met who saved his family from the consequences of the abrupt end of the Vietnam War. 604,296—almost a many Americans who died from cancer last year—606,520. I can put faces to that plague—the woman on the table, a dear cousin who should have outlived all his relatives if longevity was based on being convivial and of good cheer. 

EUOLOGY TO “ANY MAN.”  Can we make sense of all this?  Others before us have made an attempt. A poet named John Donne lost his brother to the plague that swept through England in 1593.  He would lose his 33-year-old wife in childbirth. He nearly died to Typhoid Fever. Within a sermon, Donne was also an Anglican priest, he wrote a poem about his feelings as he lived through loss so personal that he would never be the same. The poem begins—“no man is an iland, Intire of it selfe; Everyman is a peece of the continent, a part of the maine…”  His extended metaphor shows us that we are each members, organs so singularly essential to the greater organism that we are not separable from each other. Do we know that to be true?  Did our being feel the visceral ruptures, the raw extractions at the death of our plague’s victims?

Donne continues—“Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” I have puzzled over this line—“Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;” The poet focuses on the moment when someone is permanently disconnected from you, and you have become less for it. 

Strange. Donne and the people of his time used the word “involved” with a meaning lost to our language. In the poem’s context, it means that we are connected to each other in a greater unity than we are ordinarily able to acknowledge. We are wrapped together. Greater, so it requires what is greater in us. We are most alive when we are aware of being part of this whole of humanity, when we feel the loss of what is most dear to us. Our being is measured not by how much more we have, but by how much less of us remains. Of course, he concludes with the reminder of our limited shelf-life.

In their craft, sometimes poets withhold what they mean to say so the reader, listener can discover a personal meaning. I think Donne wanted us also to look within ourselves and ask, “Does each man’s life enhance mine and bring me to know that we are in-volved, inextricably?” There really are no any ones.

A BALANCE POINT. Last year 3 million 700 thousand children were born in America. More than enough to replenish the gene pool and the families those children entered. Enough to vivify each of us. I remember the birth of my first child. My wife Valerie paid for the entry of our daughter Leda with a 36-hour labor. I could not be in the delivery room because the doctor was expecting complications and an emergency Caesarian Section was being readied. I waited. During that wait Valerie delivered the baby naturally, and I was told I could see the mother and child. As I neared the bed, my wife held up the baby for me to see. Without my intent, my body told my mind I was a human being, and for the first time ever, my feet felt the ground under me. I felt the pull of gravity. I was no longer immortal. Prior to that, I’d lived by my wit and instincts without the sensation of humanity. We are given a measure of healing by the visceral and sacrificial act that creates another participant in this journey we make with each other. 

Reproduction is part of our inheritance, but remember the bell has tolled. Immortality is not our life’s design. Since our bodies die, what about everything else. What we’ve bought, built, and planned; how we’ve related, cared, and requited. We have been told it is possible to live with intent, to leave word because language gives us the possibility of shared meaning. When we speak or write, we do that not only for ourselves. While we live, we do not only live for ourselves.