geezerhoodguide

First, I apologize for my geezer slip that required a password for my last post. To the best of my ability (such as it is) that will never happen again. However like many interruptions, that one caught my attention and sparked my realization that we all – children, adults, and geezers – often find ourselves coping with disabilities, accidents, or other interruptions to “normal” life.

As I reflected on that realization, up popped a memory of a story sent to me ten years ago by a client who had been disabled for decades and was at that time confined to bed; so I had visited weekly at home. To my wonder and delight I had saved the email in my storage file labeled “wisdom”. So read on – the story of an ultimate geezer. No further comment needed.

“Article from the Houston Chronicle…
“On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an unforgettable sight. He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward.Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.

“By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until he is ready to play.

But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap – it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. People who were there that night thought to themselves: “We figured that he would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage – to either find another violin or else find another string for this one.”

“But he didn’t. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before. Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.

“When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.

“He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone, ‘You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.’

“What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since I heard it. And who knows? Perhaps that is the [way] of life — not just for artists, but for all of us.

“So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left.” — Jack Riemer

 These two characters inhabit most of us. Do you recognize them? There’s no denying it: death stalks us geezers more closely than it did when we were adults. This geezer identifies with the guy being interrogated more than with the junk collector.

 So why do I maintain myself in this big house filled with stuff I’ve collected over too many years — laziness? attachment? as my Dad would say, “I might need this some day”? procrastination? fear of isolation? Hmmm.  Yes — and more.

How in the world (or beyond the world) could we know what awaits us after we close our eyes for the last time? Speculation abounds. How can we know anything? Pat, my wife (may she rest in peace), loved to ridicule her college chemistry professor who instructed her class with intense  certainty in 1944 that the atom could never be split. Of course by then it already had been split. So what did she know? How can you know when you find the mate who will love you for the rest of your life? (I got lucky on that one.) When I was in college studying engineering, I positively knew I would be an electrical engineer for the rest of my life. Hah! I never did work as an engineer. So what do I know?

As adolescents most of us had to study geometry — so we think we can prove things –QED. Gary Marcus, an NYU research psychologist, has written in a New Yorker blog, “… outside of geometry, it is rare for scientists to literally prove anything. Rather, the more typical trajectory is to rule out competing theories, and accumulate more and more evidence in favor of particular hypotheses.” So much for adult attempts at knowing things scientifically.

We geezers have it better. By the time we reach geezerhood, numerous weird events have amazed us and defied any rational explanation. In California, my camera tripod disappeared from the shelf and then reappeared there a week later, followed by an uncanny conversation within myself with “George” who had once owned the house we were renting. (Yes, chills ran up and down my spine.) In New Hampshire, pipe smoke wafted in the window one evening just as Pat and I were going to bed, startling us with fear of a prowler outside. We had just  moved into the octagonal house we had built on land Pat had inherited from her grandfather, who had died in 1935. Suddenly Pat recognized that distinctive smell: “That’s my grandfather’s pipe!”  We both felt the spine-tingling chills. The aroma disappeared and has never returned in 25 years. We concluded he was blessing our living on his land. Most of you who read this could tell similar stories that you have experienced or heard from trusted friends or family. So what do we really know of this world and the next?

We do know what we experience – the delight of sumptuous ice cream;  teeth chattering after jumping into an ice-cold pond too early in the spring.  After allowing enough people talk us into stuff that turns out to be  false, we begin to recognize the hollow sense in our gut as a liar pumps out the b.s. As we hear or experience enough real truth, we learn to pay more attention to that leap of our heart, or its warmth, when we encounter reality. When the psychologist, Carl Jung, was asked whether he still believed in God, he replied,  “I don’t need to believe. I know.” That sense of knowing is a mark of true geezerhood.

Whatever we know about the next world will have to come from experience, not from science, philosophy, theology, psychology or any other -ology. Dr. John Lerma, medical director of the Houston, TX residential hospice program, presents other-worldly encounters some of his patients desctribe just before they die. In his book, Into the Light, these patients describe a variety of “pre-death experiences” — angels who visit them and facilitate healing and reconciliation of abuse, fear, rejection, and other issues that have plagued them over the course of their entire lives. This process seems to prepare these patients to pass in peace to the realm of these angels and to join others — friends and family members — who have passed before them.

If I really could know at that level of reality, I wouldn’t need to collect and save all that stuff, like the guy at the top of the page. I would also make sure I knew my userename and password. But that knowing comes from inside myself, not from memory thank goodness. Username and password protect and proclaim my identity —  who I am. The angels know who I am better than I do myself (see I Corinthians 13:12). So the refrain to my poem (or song) about looking in the mirror and wondering who I really am, included in my previous post, goes like this: (with thanks to St. Oren (0r Odran) of Iona)

Oh the only hell’s within yourself

And death can heal the fall

In fact the way you think it is

It’s not that way at all.

© John Van Ness, May 2013