Pathei
Mathos: What I Relearned the Last 12
Months
What doesn't kill me, makes me sadder.
By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ Media
Greek tragedy often ends with a
succession of personal disasters that doom an Oedipus or Ajax — apparently part
of a divinely inspired nemesis (retribution) to pay back personal hubris
(overweening pride).
The latter flaw seems to grow and
grow until fate strikes the arrogant at the most opportune but still unlikely
moment: a Nixon sweeping to a landslide victory in 1972, only to self-destruct
over the cover-up of a two-bit, needless burglary. It apparently at last
brought out his long-held character shortcoming (hamartia), theretofore
seemingly either not too serious or at least adroitly managed.
The Sophoclean idea of eironeia
(irony) — Oedipus cannot see until he is blind in the manner of the blind, but
all-seeing Tiresias, whom he damned as sightless before his own blindness —
suggests that the nature of one’s fate is often tragically ironic.
The swashbuckling George S. Patton,
who braved death in his drive to Germany and was worried about his role in a
peacetime world, was paralyzed in a minor traffic accident shortly after the
Allied victory — and on the day before he was to go home and leave postwar
Europe for good. He died not on the battlefield, but painfully in bed in a
military hospital in Germany.
The idea of karma within the
traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism is somewhat similar to Greek tragedy,
though more geared to action rather than attitudes causing future accounting
for past behaviors. Modern Western religions also share somewhat in both
Eastern and Western notions of payback, even while on Earth before the final
accounting in the hereafter.
Still, it certainly seems innately
human (and thus egocentric) to try to make sense of present bad and good
fortune by reviewing causation through one’s prior thoughts and deeds. The
problem with mostly positive moral introspection is the narcissistic element:
good or bad things don’t just happen to a single individual, but harm many of
the uninvolved or innocent around him. Why do the innocents of Thebes have to
suffer plague for Oedipus’s hubris?
It is all narcissism to think that
catastrophes center on one person’s behavior, even if earned, and especially
when they hurt innocent others. Aeschylus seems cruel to talk of pathei
mathos, learning from pain.
I can see the logic of tragic
collective vengeance, but even then, I don’t quite believe that a divine plan
led to Hitler raging in his suicidal bunker as the logical retribution to his
sick Nuremberg rants a decade — and six million innocents gassed —
earlier.
At best, all we can do, I think in
our ignorance of causation, is to cover our bets and tread lightly and remain
observant — keeping humble and modest in occasional good fortune (given so
often that our blessings turn out to be dependent on the work of other friends
and benefactors), while staying resolute in more frequent times of chaos and
disaster, to be able to help and offer sanctuary to others.
It is wise to remember the good dead
and emulate their example rather than to be caught up with the mediocre of the
present. I certainly spend more time recalling the voice of my mother than
listening to the televised psychodramas of our elite. Faith and transcendence
in the end matter most, whether for us who believe in God and an eternal soul,
or for the more agnostic humanists who trust that one’s good works now can
affect others following them, from raising good children to planting an olive
tree.
I’ve been trying to sort such
thoughts out after the most terrible past 12 months. Everyone has horrific
seasons. Nothing seems worse than losing parents. Mine died far too early, my
mother from a malignant meningioma that first struck her at 64 while an
appellate court judge; my indestructible father from a stroke at 75. Like most,
I’ve had a few scrapes, a variety of accidents, diseases, and operations in some
scary places.
But all one’s health seems the minor
melodrama that it always really was. My granddaughter Lila was born December 5,
2013. Something seemed wrong almost at once. An adroit diagnosis at Stanford
Medical Center found neonatal cholestasis, a severe malfunction of the liver,
involving spikes in conjugated bilirubin. For days we researched the likely and
quite scary causes — biliary atresia, alpha 1 syndrome, and worse. None had
good prognoses. All had scary names.
But 10% of the infant cholestasis
cases were in the literature dubbed “idiopathic” and resolved eventually. No
one knew why. And so miraculously did tiny Lila’s — or so we thought.
Her bilirubin returned to normal;
she survived and she seemed to recover. But by six or seven months something
else was clearly wrong, or rather “delayed.” By March 2015 she was far behind
in terms of walking and talking. We spent hours each night reading about
post-cholestasis syndromes in almost every American and European journal we
could find. Surely that mysterious liver disease had caused the delay — and
thus catch-up would follow?
Not really.
More strange symptomology followed.
Three weeks ago, after genetic testing, doctors diagnosed her with something
known as Smith-Magenis syndrome, described as a “deletion of genetic material
from a specific region of chromosome 17 (17p11.2). Although this region
contains multiple genes, recently researchers discovered that the loss of one
particular gene the retinoic acid induced 1 or RAI1 is responsible for most of
the characteristic features of this condition.”
Previously SMS was often thought to
be a severe subset of either Down’s syndrome or autism. The strange and
multifarious symptoms are too numerous to list here. A wonderful foundation does its best to fight for help for this tragic syndrome
and I am going to try to support it according to my station.
And yet a wonderful thing arose
throughout this ordeal. The more the bleak diagnoses and worse prognoses piled
on, the more Lila smiled and exhibited the most outgoing and warm personality.
(Was it due to the SMS trait of not feeling physical pain, or its associated
symptom of natural exuberance with a tendency to hurt oneself rather than
others?)
At 18 months, I’ve noticed that her
efforts bring out the best in the entire family, a little less concern for
self, a little more for those with less natural advantages than the healthy. We
look for other Lilas more than ever now. She was named after my aunt Lila Davis
(1917-1980), who lived 55 years in my present living room, here in the home of
my grandparents, after suffering a most severe case of polio shortly after
birth. From 5 to 25 I remember her as a brilliant, warm woman, trapped in a
twisted body that could scarcely move, but which seemed irrelevant after
talking to her for only a mere seconds. I confess I was worried, being
superstitious, when my daughter chose that beloved family name, but now that
tie through the halls of memory brings solace and a strange sort of continuity.
My other daughter Susannah was most
worried about Lila’s first nine months. She frequently in 2014 drove up to
Santa Cruz from her job at USC to visit and help out. But she was an empath,
and that occasionally worried me. Susannah did not so much as sense others’
doubts, insecurities, physical pains, and depressions as to take them on to
such an extent they almost manifested themselves as her own.
She seemed to have a unique ability to
make others feel better, but all too often at the cost of herself feeling worse
during these moments of strange osmoses. I would warn her that was not healthy
— to agonize more about whether her professor was fairly evaluated and
appreciated than whether he was a good teacher and scholar, or why someone
promoted over her probably needed the extra pay more than did she. Empaths are
not at all doormats, but often determined to succeed precisely to use their
accumulated resources to become even more empathetic to others.
As children age, parents go through
stages of relative focusing. The last five years I did so with Susannah. When
she went to Chile for two years, I tried to email her daily and call weekly and
send packages bi-monthly. When she returned and went to the MPP graduate
program at Pepperdine, I was lucky enough to teach there as a visiting
professor and see her weekly. When she went to work at USC we talked on her
lunch hour each day.
As parents age, they gain
perspective and calm, but also at the cost of growing pessimism or even a
dangerous sense of preordination. These can be deadly pathologies as they take
away the necessary spirit and audacity, so important in getting up one more
morning and heading on to the next mission. (My 86-year-old grandfather was
putting in new end posts in the vineyard on the day before he had a heart
attack and died; my 80-year-old Swedish grandfather was breaking a young horse
in his last few months.) Susannah seemed to know that and in the last year
called me more than ever.
Her optimism about the human spirit
was infectious. Vampire-like, we all drew on it. She would call and prod: “In
that last lecture, did you make sure to call on everyone in class? Hey, Dad, I
watched that YouTube video of a talk you gave, you should have been nicer to
that guy who asked the mean question. Why haven’t you called your twin brother
after all these years, after all, he is your twin! Do you have enough walkers
available for the tour coming up? Oh, don’t worry, I sort of like driving the
405 at commute time.”
On the day before the 2014 election,
Susannah called right in the middle of a lecture I was giving (I had not given
her my schedule that day). She left a message, “Hey, Dad, I feel great. Got
over that cold and so happy to be at work. Missed just two days, first missed
days ever.” We talked at two. And I drove the next day to work. All was good as
was normal.
But on the way up the 99, she
called, “Hey dad, it’s lunch here. But I have a terrible headache and vomiting,
and for some reason I can’t see very well.”
Chaos followed. In the next hours,
there was an immediate family collective rush to Los Angeles. Misdiagnoses. An
initial ambulance team visit had assured that she was fine — and then left.
Wrong hospital. A blood clot, but miraculously removed. But then worse news:
was it caused by an undiagnosed case of leukemia (at 27 to a seemingly healthy
young woman, vegetarian, nondrinker, and nonsmoker?)
But at least it was a sort of
leukemia that was treatable. But then on further examination it was not so
treatable, but rather an aggressive form of AML. Then in hours yet another clot
and another, far more extensive brain surgery. The WBC spiked at over 100,000.
I wandered and walked most of those five nights in East Hollywood around the
Kaiser hospital, trying to think of what regimen, what doctor, what hospital,
what miracle, what prayer might yet save her. Over the next five days the
unimaginable became all too real. And then she was gone as abruptly as she
called to say she was suddenly sick. Leukemia is not a cold, so how can one go
from robust to comatose in hours?
All the clichés that you all have
heard about losing a child, and which we all of the uninitiated may have found
strange or foreign — “I wished it was me,” “How unfair that parents outlive
children,” “How did I cause this,” “Why didn’t I do that or this,” “I should
have been a better parent, listener, friend, helper, benefactor, etc.” — I
assure you turn out hardly to be clichés, but simply reflect over the centuries
what is innate in every parent’s brain in extremis.
We occasionally had always gone to
the local cemetery to put flowers on the graves of our ancestors . Selma has
five generations of them. While there, I had always noticed that a few stones
of other families were blanketed with flowers on any given day, and seemingly
for years on end. How strange. But now? Not so strange at all. I found myself
and others in the family doing exactly the same thing, yesterday and tomorrow.
I built a classical commemorative plaza in the yard with stone urns and near
life-size lions guarding a memorial bench, all re-landscaped with lilies and
irises and Japanese maples beneath an arbor of wisteria, planted in 1880 — and
now all growing so rapidly that it is almost surreal.
As we age and try to make sense of
nonsense, we have only the solace that what is inexplicable now will be most
explicable soon, and that we are not natives, as we assume, here, but
refugees from home somewhere else, and that what seems all too real and hopeless
we hope is a just a dream of what will be soon very real and hopeful.
I would amend Nietzsche’s often
quoted line, “from life’s school of war: what does not kill me makes me
stronger,” to something like “what does not kill me, makes me sadder,” and
leave it to fate whether sadder in the end proves stronger or wiser.
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