Memorial Service

I am just back from the memorial service for a friend 10 years younger than me, diagnosed with CLL two years after me, who had his transplant two months before mine. This is a rotten disease that doesn't play nice.

I wish I had the faith to believe that it all evens out in some incomprehensible eternity.

My only cold comfort is to paraphrase the words of G-d to Job and Jesus to his followers who seemed to say: "I am G-d and you're not." I guess that it is a better toehold in a world worth living in than to say that it is all meaningless. What I do believe is that the conversation doesn't end with the grave. The holy principle of parsimony begs that a person lives on with clear and tangible influences on this world likes Patrick Swayze's Ghost, but that does not mean there is more to this world than meets the eye.

I will live as this is all there is, and will cling with considered desperation to this earthly plane. I'm sad, but I am also OK. For now, that gestalt will see me through these present storms and those to come. It imbues my life with meaning and mitzvah so that in the distant future when my influence is only what remains of my work and my memory, it will be a force for good and strength.

My friend achieved that through his exemplary life and faith. His wife's, at time joyful, too often painful recounting of the ups and downs, and downs and downs and downs of his struggle has helped so many, known and unknown, in understanding their choices in the battles with their personal dragons. Thank you for writing and posting when it must of been so hard.

Later I will share what I have gleaned, medically and psychologically, from this tragic tale as the greatest lessons are learned from our fumbles and failures. But at what a price! What a price! Did I mention that is is a rotten disease?

A fellow member of our CLL support group reflected that we had lost our first member. That surely is the truth, but it implies that a second and third will be following. That too is surely true, but not for another 40 years or so, please.

I may be no St. George, and my friend may not have killed his dragon, but may all our exploits be as mythical. The dragon slaying rhetoric favored in the CLL community hits the right tones of bravery, faith, and daring-do, but for me, I need something more concrete to image.

Heaven or no heaven, dragon-slaying or no dragon-slaying, faith or no faith, we all, in our own ways, are doing our gritty best in trying circumstances to make good choices and make sense of a world full of pain.