Holidays in Heck (26 page)

Don't blame the future. For one thing, it doesn't exist yet. And, for another thing, we do. We're always creating our future whether we mean to or think so or don't. Global creativity, like global climate, seems to have its cycles—natural, man-made, or whatever. Sometimes human beings just aren't very imaginative. There was our first million years of existence as a species, for starters. We came down from the trees, made some stone choppers, and that was it.

The last 1,000 years of the Roman Empire, until the fall of Constantinople, were no great shakes. The Romans had all the engineering knowledge needed to start an industrial revolution. But they preferred to have toga parties and let slaves do all the work.

The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.

And here we are now. Name a cherished contemporary avant-garde painter or novelist. Name a great living composer. Say “Andrew Lloyd Webber” and I'll throttle you. Theater is revivals and revivals of revivals and stuff like making a musical out of old Kellogg's Rice Krispies commercials with Nathan Lane as “Snap.” Movies are famously not any good anymore. More modern poetry is written than read. Modern architecture leaks and the builders left their plumb bobs at home. The most prominent contemporary art form is one that is completely unimaginative (or is supposed to be), the memoir. To top it all, we have just experienced perhaps the
greatest technological advance in the history of mankind. And what are we using the Internet for? To sell each other eight-track tapes on eBay, tell complete strangers the location of all our tattoos on Facebook, and, if Tomorrowland is anything to go by, turn our houses into nattering, shrieking, dysfunctional reality TV shows even when nobody's home.

I took a last look into the homestead of the hereafter and said to Muffin, “Let's get out of here.”

She was nothing loath. I asked, “What do
you
think will happen in the future?”

“You'll buy me a humongous ice cream cone.”

Summer 2008

Part 1

I looked death in the face. All right, I didn't. I glimpsed him in a crowd. I was diagnosed with cancer, of a very treatable kind. I'm told I have a 95 percent chance of survival. Come to think of it—as a drinking, smoking, saturated-fat-hound of a reporter—my chance of survival has been improved by cancer.

I still cursed God, as we all do when we get bad news and pain. Not even the most faith-impaired among us shouts, “Damn quantum mechanics!” “Damn organic chemistry!” “Damn chaos and coincidence!”

I believe in God. God created the world. Obviously pain had to be included in God's plan. Otherwise we'd never
learn that our actions have consequences. Our cave-dwelling ancestors, finding fire warm, would conclude that curling up to sleep in the middle of the flames would be even warmer. Cave bears would dine on roast ancestor, and we'd never experience any pain because we wouldn't be here.

But God, Sir, in Your manner of teaching us about life's consequential nature, isn't death a bit . . . um . . . extreme, pedagogically speaking? I know the lesson that we're studying is difficult. But dying is a harder final exam than I was counting on. Also, it kind of messes up my vacation planning. Can we talk after class? Maybe if I did something for extra credit . . .

Seeing things from God's point of view is difficult for a mortal. The more so for a mortal who's just received an updated mortality scheduling memo from the pathology department.

Seeing things from God's point of view is the purpose of conventional religion, in my opinion. And I am a conventionally religious person. But I feel the need to think through a few things before I unload my gripes on Father Hoolihan. He's got a busy parish and he isn't as young as he used to be. In fact Father Hoolihan doesn't look well himself. Perhaps, if I can get my thoughts straight, he can unload his gripes on me. I can't give him last rites, but I can give him a whiskey.

Why can't death—if we must have it—be always glorious, as in
The Iliad
? Of course death continues to be so, sometimes, with heroes in Falluja and Kandahar. But nowadays death more often comes drooling on the toilet seat in the nursing home or bleeding under the crushed roof of a teen-driven SUV or breathless in a deluxe hotel suite filled with empty drug bottles and a minor public figure whose celebrity expiration date has passed. I have, of all
the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.

Furthermore, I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy's. That
he
should have cancer of the brain, and
I
should have cancer of the ass . . . Well, I said a rosary for him and hoped he had a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreas? Liver? Lung?

Which brings me to the nature of my prayers. They are, like most prayers from most people, abject self-pleadings. But praying for oneself has disturbing implications. There's Saint Teresa's warning about answered prayers or, for our atheistic friends, the tale of “The Monkey's Paw.”

And I can't be the only person who feels like a jerk saying, “Please cure me, God. I'm underinsured. I have three little children. And I have three dogs, two of which will miss me. And my wife will cry and mourn and be inconsolable and have to get a job. P.S. Our mortgage is subprime.”

God knows this stuff. He's God. He's all-knowing. What am I telling Him, really? “Gosh, You sure are a good God. Good—You own it. Plus, You're infinitely wise, infinitely merciful, but . . . Look, everybody makes mistakes. A little cancer of the behind, it's not a big mistake. Not something that's going on Your personal record. Let's not think of it as a mistake. Let's think of it as a teachable moment. Nobody's so good that He or She can't improve, so . . .”

It's one universe, entire, God's creation and all of a piece. There's a theory about how the fluttering of a butterfly's wing can somehow eventually cause a cyclone in the Bay of
Bengal or something like that. What if the flatulence of me in a radiation therapy session eventually causes . . . I mean, suppose Saint Peter had my fax number and faxed me: “P.J., we did the math. We can get you a 100 percent survival rate instead of 95 percent, but twenty years from now a volcanic eruption in Honduras will kill 700,000 people.” What do I fax back? “Dear Saint Peter, Thank God. That's a real shame about Honduras. I promise I'll donate $1,000 to the International Red Cross.”

I think I'll pray for fortitude instead and, maybe, for relief from gas.

No doubt death is one of those mysterious ways in which God famously works. Except, upon consideration, death isn't mysterious. Do we really want
everyone
to be around
forever
? I'm thinking about my own family, specifically a certain step-father I had as a kid. Sayonara, you SOB. On the other hand, Napoleon was doubtless a great man in his time; at least the French think so. But do we want even Napoleon extant in perpetuity? Do we want him always escaping from island exiles, raising fanatically loyal troops of soldiers, invading Russia, and burning Moscow? Well, at the moment, considering Putin et al., maybe we do want that. But, century after century, it would get old. And what with Genghis Khan coming from the other direction all the time and Alexander the Great clashing with a Persia that is developing nuclear weapons and Roman legions destabilizing already precarious Israeli-Palestinian relations—things would be a mess.

Then there's the matter of our debt to death for life as we know it. I believe in God. I also believe in evolution. If death weren't around to “finalize” the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas. We'd eat by surrounding pizzas
with our belly flab and have sex by lying on railroad tracks waiting for a train to split us into significant others. I consider evolution to be more than a scientific theory. I think it's a call to God. God created a free universe. He could have created any kind of universe He wanted. But a universe without freedom would have been static and meaningless—a taxpayer-funded-art-in-public-places universe.

Rather, God created a universe full of cosmic whatchmajiggers and subatomic whosits free to interact. And interact they did, becoming matter and organic matter and organic matter that replicated itself and life. And this life was completely free, as amoral as my cancer cells.

Life-forms could exercise freedom to an idiotic extent, growing uncontrolled, thoughtless, and greedy to the point that they killed the source of their own fool existence. But, with the help of death, matter began to learn right from wrong—how to save itself and its ilk, how to nurture, how to love (or, anyway, how to build a Facebook page), and how to know God and His rules.

Death is so important that God visited death upon His own Son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace. (Although this option is not usually open to reporters.)

I'm not promising that the Pope will back me up about all of the above. But it's the best I can do by my poor lights about the subject of mortality and free will. Thus, the next time I glimpse death . . . Well, I'm not going over and introducing myself. I'm not giving the grim reaper fist dabs. But I'll remind myself to try, at least, to thank God for death. And then I'll thank God, with all my heart, for whiskey.

Part 2

A diagnosis of cancer raises deep metaphysical questions such as, “Is God a nice guy?” and “Will my bird dog go to heaven or do I flush the quail of paradise with seraphim, cherubim, and putti?”

But after a while diagnosis wears off. It's time for an intermission in the self-dramatization of “I Have a Life-Threatening Disease.” I wasn't able to play the role to its full tragical effect anyway. The kind of cancer I had was too treatable and too ridiculous.

It's not every time you get diagnosed with cancer and it makes you laugh. I'd had a hemorrhoid operation. Two days later the colorectal surgeon called. “I'm sorry to tell you,” he said, “your hemorrhoid was malignant.”

“Malignant hemorrhoid?” I said. “There's no such thing as a malignant hemorrhoid.”

“In almost every case you'd be right,” the surgeon said and paused in a moment of sympathetic hesitation and of unintentional comic timing. “But . . .”

I laughed but I wanted to argue. “Malignant hemorrhoid” is Rush Limbaugh talk radio. “Malignant Hemorrhoid” is a Dave Barry rock band. But I still had to get treated. Going from the metaphysical to the all-too-physical reminded me of my gratitude to God. You have immediate access to the top specialist in the field when you pray. (Do polytheists have difficulties with this?) At least I had the good fortune to be in Washington, D.C.—a city full of flaccid old guys like myself who spend their time blowing smoke out of you-know-where and being full of you-know-what and sitting on their duffs. Consequently the town is full of medical expertise about the body part in question.

It turns out what I had was a skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma. Practically every melanin-deficient (let alone Irish) person who spends time in the sun gets this if he or she lives long enough. “I call it ‘adult acne' when it turns up on the face or arms,” the oncologist said. But why it occasionally turns up where it turned up on me is something of a medical mystery. I mean, I was naked a lot in the 1960s but not
that
naked.

There's a considerable loss of dignity involved in trading the awe-inspiring fear of death for the perspiration-inducing fear of treatment. There are hells on earth. Until a generation ago the cure for anal cancer was a colostomy. Doctors have gotten over that. Most of the time. Now, with God's grace, the cure is radiation and chemotherapy. Would I have to go to some purgatorial place for this? To Sloan-Kettering in New York, a city I detest? Or out to the Mayo Clinic, although I have a phobia about hospitals named after sandwich toppings? “No,” the oncologist said. “The treatment protocol is standardized and is successfully used everywhere.”

I named my local New Hampshire hospital (and large animal veterinary clinic).

“Almost everywhere,” the oncologist said.

I asked about the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, ninety miles from my home but still on the planet New Hampshire. Dr. Marc Pipas at Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center came strongly recommended. Dr. Pipas is an avid bird hunter and an advocate of reintroducing the prairie chicken to the eastern seaboard. So he and I had something to talk about in addition to my behind. I'd need radiation therapy every day for six weeks. (Every day, that is, Monday through Friday—the radiology department has to play golf, too.) And I would undergo two four-day stints
of around-the-clock chemotherapy, carrying a fanny pack of poisonous chemicals to be pumped into my body through a surgically implanted mediport. (Dr. Pipas persuaded the infusions department to install this on the left side of my chest so that it wouldn't interfere with mounting a shotgun.)