The other night I read my obituary.[1]
I was googling for reviews of my wife’s and my new book, I Will Keep You Alive, and there it was, atop p. 2 of my search.
My name.
My year and city of birth.
My schools and profession.
My books and awards.
My spouse.
The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, whose symptoms, I must say, had not been unpleasant; and I had been gone for nine weeks, with no noticeable interruption of my routine.
I appeared to have a son I had forgotten.[2]
As for the fellow, pictured in a baseball case… The DMV provided better reproduction.
What was it Mark Twain said?
I hoped so.
On the other hand, I was sad.
Several years ago, I received an e-mail from the editor of an on-line magazine to which I contributed that another Bob Levin had shown up. Work it out between yourselves, boys, he instructed.
While I mulled over “Classic Bob Levin,” “Bob Levin, the Elder” and “Old, Original Bob Levin,” Bob 2 offered that, since I had been first, he would be “Robert.”
He turned out to be a columnist for the Toronto Star. And he was aware of me. In fact, he had been 10 years behind me at the same small, private Quaker school, where he had captained the basketball team, and at which, when he had returned for a reunion two years after I had published a novel about a minor league basketball player, he received fish-eyes from faculty members who assumed he’d written its non-Quakerish sex scenes.
We became e-mail pals. Maybe we’d meet in 2020, my 60th reunion, his 50th. About the time the heart problems which led to IWKYA began, the cancer, which had been flaring and calming within him since he had been 18, returned. I came through several surgeries, a couple codings, a two-and-a-half day coma in a fashion that hovers in my mind in some combination of miraculous/amazing/lucky/blessed. He seemed to be battling successfully too.
He published a novel, Away Game, about a baseball player, fathers and sons, for which I congratulated him. When he did not respond to notice of my book, I figured he was busy.
xxx
The obit, I assumed. was a lesson from the cosmos.
But of what I was unsure.
The cosmos does not speak in plain English, as if its attitude is “What is the point of being the cosmos if you have to speak clearly?”
I think Don Maquis wrote something like that.[3]
ii
The morning following this discovery, Adele and I read from and answered questions about our book before 25 or 30 members of Mended Hearts, an organization of people who’d had heart surgery or were partnered with someone who had. A half-dozen, like me, visit people in hospitals who are beginning the recovery process. We address their worries and concerns as people who’ve been-there; done that. “Vertical role models,” we call ourselves.
But for me – and I assume others – doubt, buttered over by gratitude, lies within. I can not step into the hospital without recalling times I rolled on a gurney down its halls. I was walking now, but assumed I would be rolled again. Most of the time you make it, I think. But one time you won’t.
I see patients in their 20s and their 90s. I see those lying in bed, less active than cod on ice. I see them, even among the most elderly, sitting erect, bright-eyed, bubbly, looking forward to the day. Most times I lift the spirits of those I visit; sometimes they lift mine. I share what I’ve learned, and receive their wisdom in return.
“You have not finished the tasks Jesus has in store for you,” a woman with whom I had swapped histories concluded.
“God wasn’t ready for me yet, and neither was the Devil,” another confided.
Then there was the 86-year-old pastor to whom I’d wryly complained that the only visitor I’d had during my hospitalization was a chaplain. “I wanted no part of him,” I said.
“Why was that?” he asked.
“I wasn’t ready for the beyond,” I said.
“We are always ready for the beyond,” he said.
…
We do not know how long we will be here.
Or what will remove us.
We may feel certain what awaits after our removal, but we can’t be sure of that either.
iii.
Having been brought back from the dead twice…
Now 77, with an echo-cardiogram-confirmed partially dead heart…
“Dead.”
There is that word again.
Once exposed, it does not lose its glitter.
Can abrade your perspective fresh.
May inflame your days with joy.
The contemplation of any moment, if you turn your mind to it, can make you smile.
Which can cause you to contemplate how you wish to fill those moments.
I have done away with the NCAA basketball tournament and television news so far.
Notes
1 The source, globintel.com, announces itself as offering “the latest… in Celebrity News, technology, sports, lifestyle and other fields.”
2 You know kids. He hadn’t called or written.
3 Actually, I think what he wrote was “There is no justice in the universe. What is the point of being the universe if you have to be just.”