Line Segment

Begin with the end in mind.
- Stephen Covey

Suffering comes from wishing things were different.
- Paraphrase of The Buddha I read or heard

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas

I lack the ability to comfort myself.

The timeline of the last five years of my life is a line segment, a subset of what my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Pollet called a “ray.”  I can see it in my elementary school math book:  rounded off at its left side with the little black dot of my birth, my five-year timeline a thin elongated barbell in the middle of it, then the line extending to the right in an infinite series of points, arrow tip straight into the infinity of my future, until my death, when it would become all line segment.

“I read your timeline,” one person said to me, “and I just wanted to give you a hug.”  “Next year will be better,” another person said.  “Just think,” another person said.  “It can’t get any worse!”

Ay, there’s the rub.  Next year may or may not be better.  Next year could be worse. 

Over most of the events that happened in the past five years, I had no control. If what does or doesn’t happen is not within my power, I can no more make the next points in my little line segment of a life better than I can make them worse.  I can be optimistic or pessimistic to no avail.  I can make thoughtful, careful choices to reduce risk.  But life will be what it is.

What I want is to be able to handle whatever happens, no matter how heinous or how tragic.  I want to be able to give myself a hug, and more:  I want to be able to hold myself my whole life.

Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
- Maria, "The Sound of Music"

In psychology, the ability to regulate one’s own emotions from within, especially to comfort oneself during emotional or physical pain, is termed “self-soothing.”

From none of the adults in my family would I have learned self-soothing.  How could they teach what they were not taught?  I’ve watched two of them die within the last four months.  They suffered and we suffered without ceasing.

Resistance is futile.
The Borg

On one’s deathbed, all the swords and knives one has used to fend off the truths of one’s life become ineffectual.  One no longer has the strength to wield them.

“Are you having any insights?” I asked my mother a few days before her death, begging this intelligent, defiant woman to make meaning for me of any of what was happening.  She shook her head no.  I feel a child’s rage at her for not answering me and an adult’s perplexity.

On my deathbed, every truth I have not addressed will be there with me, sitting intertwined in a heavy heap on my chest, staring at me with powerful eyes as I struggle to lift my chest to take a breath.

No.

No, I say.

I will address my truths.  The points I most resist, I will examine.  I will make something from nothing.  I will learn to hold myself so well and so naturally that when I take my last breath, regardless of what I am feeling - rage, pain, relief, joy, whatever - with my last bit of strength, it will be my own arms around my chest I feel.