Sleep, Pray, Drugs: A Rare Anomaly

I have spent the past months obsessed with the Arctic and the Antarctic, with their long, cold, dark winters punctuated by the all-too-brief, sunlight-powered, fecund frenzy of summer. ---As if a geologic reflection, I've been experiencing my own dark days of frozen tundric mind and fatigued body, and I await the time of light and warmth when life will feel bountiful again. Meanwhile, the poles of this earth keep silent watch over our human follies and misery.

This week, I found myself with spectacular proof of such polar opposites: I received the news that seven of my friends were pregnant (bringing the grand total of progesterone-pumping morning-sickness fetus-hauling friends to 16). And then I was told that a dear member of my community was tragically and violently taken from the realm of this earth. Shocking news of both life and death.

During my sickest moments, I tend to exist somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. I am not healthy enough to seize the day, make love and procreate. I feel kidnapped and held hostage by a broken body, while I look longingly out of this prison at the productive lives around me. And yet my physical being remains rooted to the desert dust despite all of this. Each morning I wake to the hot touch of sunlight on my face and thin mountain oxygen in my lungs.

The memorial took place on a sunny afternoon at the Audubon Center. We gathered together to celebrate and grieve a man who had touched more people in his short time than many accomplish in lives three times as long. Stuffed and taxidermied animals stared down from bookshelf perches; posters depicting mountain succulents and crystalline rocks plastered the walls. A mobile fluttered in one corner, despite a lack of breeze in the room, moved instead by the kind and generous words we all sent into the ether for our deceased friend. He was full of many virtues, but perhaps the most striking was his ability to take you into his orbit after only a few meetings, to engrain himself in your memory even after the briefest of interactions. He was happy and positive, creative and kind, witty and loving, all these traits rooted within a fantastically vulgar mind and a decidedly unique take on life.

The first time we hung out, we drank cheap beer on the sidewalk at a party. A girl rode up on her bicycle breathless. "I just saw him!" she gasped, "The man in the black body suit, with a hole cut out for his genitals!" This man had been terrorizing the neighborhood for a number of weeks, masturbating over cars and apparently exposing himself to women on bikes. We spent the next few hours giggling in the mild summer air, envisioning a hilarious rag-tag group of naughty comic book characters inspired by this real life event: The Car Rapist, the Pearl Necklace Strangler, The Tea Bagger, and their feminine side-kick, the Bush Whacker. It was a night of laughing so hard as to border on the sublime. It was a night of making that which is unknowable and frightening into something joyous and ridiculous.

With death and illness (and sometimes pregnancy too!), there is a default tendency to ask, "Why me? Why now? Why at all?" Where does the line exist, between self-possessed free will and the desperation bred by external circumstances? Where do we intervene to prevent calamity, to hold and comfort those that have been marginalized so that we may dispel a collective misfortune and ward off future tragedy? Like most questions in life, these contain no answers of truth that will satisfy everyone. It is during such times that I wish I believed in something religious. An afterlife, perhaps, or God's Plan: a blueprint that explained the grand house that this suffering will eventually build. Something to hold onto, something to steady myself during days of such rough waters.

This death reminded me of another. It was mid-February, my senior year of high school, 10 years ago. When I found out that my charismatic and talented classmate had died, I realized that at the time of death I had been in my car, listening to classical music, watching snowflakes float through the night air, and feeling very grateful and blessed to be alive in that moment. It was unnerving to know I could be feeling so content and alive at the time of such sadness and struggle for another human being. His father, a physicist, spoke at the memorial of something so strangely and coldly comforting that I will carry it with me always. "There are many possible iterations of the universe," he said, clearing his throat through tears, "many dimensions of time and space with their own singular outcomes ….and I am so very thankful that my son existed, even briefly, in this cosmic formula we call reality."

When we are confronted with the premature death of a loved peer, we are told that we must ramp up our own living. "Grab life by the balls!" we admonish each other, "Live it to the fullest, for this day could be your last!" But this call to arms can be even more depressing, throwing into harsh light one's very inability to make of life what one wishes it to be. It can be easy to head towards nihilism, in which nothing matters and even less makes any sense.  And yet all tragedy contains within it a sort of rebirth, a reimaging of what life can be when that which was once easy becomes difficult and unfamiliar. I have come to cope with the narrative of fear that illness brings—its uneasy negotiation with uncertainty—through an engagement with the minute and miraculous. A life well lived is not necessarily about grand gestures, bucket lists and frenzied productivity. It is about noticing the smell of the wind after it has rained. Appreciating the way dust in the air scatters the late winter sunset in such a way as to trick the mountains into resembling the seas. A loving smile shared with a stranger who will appear and disappear with equal swiftness. All proof of our incredible existence, this rare anomaly we call life, and especially important during whatever hardships we may be experiencing.

Like the poles of our earth, times of darkness on one side of the world coexist as the oppositional experience to times of light. We must hold these two extensions up as reflections of each other, the duality of which contains all the gray moments in between. In the days ahead, as babies grow in wombs and a great loss is enveloped into daily routines, be kind to each other. Take care of as many people as you can. Find beauty and calmness in the smallest of moments. Sit in gratitude.

But most of important of all, never miss an opportunity to make a dirty joke.

RIP Ethaan

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