Support Groups, Fight Club and Grief

When I was nine, I was going to a brand-new public school: Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School, known then more commonly and simply as Nova Elementary.  Over time I made a few friends out there in Davie, cowboy country in south Florida.  One day a few of us got together and informally established our own fight club, transforming into a sport and ritual an activity usually reserved for bullies and angry kids.  Surprisingly, it lasted longer than you might think, although with my ribs poking through my chest...making me look like a concentration camp survivor...I quickly got tired of the good-natured blows that naturally would come my way.  So I totally got the meaning behind the concept of an adult fight club, presented with such force in that 1999 same-titled movie. My son Will revealed, though, that this movie went down into a rabbit hole of plot twists and deeper meaning, so one evening I began to watch it...from the beginning.  Presented in the first person, the narrator...played by Edward Norton...is suffering from extreme insomnia stemming from his depression about his mundane, boring life.  He hits upon the strategy of participating in support groups to cure his insomnia, even though he usually doesn't have any connection with the groups' themes.  So my exposure to support groups, along with the way they go around in a circle during discussion time with the members spilling their hearts out, began in full earnest with this movie.  Earlier this evening I attended a "grief care" support group presented at a local church...Melissa suggested it.  I'm not sure what I see myself getting from it, but there I am, within this group.  We're committed to anonymity about the people in it as well as the specific stories told. Had I still been working and not retired like I did, I'd have the perfect excuse for avoiding it...I just DON'T LIKE support groups.  Earlier I mentioned that Will was the one who told me about the movie Fight Club: his recent passing is the core reason behind this support group having me "in" it.  Like the protagonist Jake Epping in Stephen King's wonderful novel 11/22/63, I am not a crying man by nature...although the tears are often simmering just under the surface.  I just never thought of life as being endless: it's mortal, with our life spans on Earth bracketed between the year of our birth and that of our deaths.  This mortal physical body that goes by the name William "Bill" "Billy" Irwin belongs to the life span begun in 1956, and the end year has yet to reveal itself.  I am dead to the year 1856, and most likely won't extend to the year 2200 as well (unless Putin's dubious immortality vaccine comes to the rescue).  I'm also dead to wherever my body isn't...I'm looking out the window and my life isn't there: it's here, seated at this keyboard writing this.  The HERE AND NOW, in essence, defines me in a subjective sense and cannot be quantified by physical science in any objective manner. My eventual experience of dying will, of necessity, be conceptually very different from what others experience about my death from their viewpoints.  It's a great quandary, this gulf between subjective awareness and objective observation, and since time marches on without regard to how I feel about anything, I might as well relax and entertain a sense of inner peace about it all, tedious support group or not.  Either I'll survive others or they'll survive me...

A Final Jeopardy! Answer, and Lifespans

The final Jeopardy! answer on tonight's episode of that long-lasting game show series concerned a topic I had no reason to be knowledgeable about: who is buried in England's Westminster Abbey.  It is where British royalty has historically been interred, but there is a place within, called "Poet's Corner", where standouts in the arts, most notably literary, have also been accorded burial spots.  I'm not sure exactly what the wording was in the Jeopardy! answer, but it did include the year of burial as being 1991...and I came up with the correct solution: "Who was Laurence Olivier?"  In case you didn't already know, he is widely acknowledged as being one of the greatest actors of all time...although, I'm sure to my own loss, the only movies I remember seeing him in were Marathon Man and The Boys from Brazil.  Yet in only those two films his performance was dazzling, especially in the former.  Being a dweller of the year 2025 as I write this, I was convinced that Olivier had already passed away...but was a little surprised that he died sometime in 1989, some 36 years ago.  As each of us passes, riding the "now" moment, through our own individual lifespans, we can only perceive the subjective reality of the years we remember being alive through our own experience and realities, depending on others' records and memories of those times preceding our births.  I don't know how long I will remain on Earth, but I'm confident that 36 years after my passing I will in no way be weighing in on the passage of time in that as-yet unknown, but inevitable year.  For each of us individually, as far as our own subjected perception is concerned, there is only one time, and it is now.  The nearly universal biography statistic of lifespan...the birth year, a hyphen, and the year of dying...is one of objective perception from outsiders.  Each of us can play a little at this and see ourselves as our birth years, a hyphen...and nothing, but never with that final year.  We belong to our lifespans, and that will always be real, as it has always been for every biological entity that has ever been.  The big mystery, which religion and philosophy tend to address, is what happens to that personally-experienced "now" at death.  If I say that I am defined for myself as being the "here and now", then not only does that mean that your "here" is by nature different from mine, but also that your "now" is different as well in spite of it seeming the same.  So my "now" doesn't depend on you or others or the so-called objective reality that trudges on ahead through time.  But enough of this metaphysical speculation, time to go get another coffee...

Biden's Cancer, and Surviving While Aging

It's been announced that former president Joe Biden has just been diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer, metastatic and into his bones, after an examination revealed a growth in his prostate.  This is bad news, of course, but it seems that his cancer may be effectively treated with hormone therapy.  Apparently, Biden did not have the advantage of a PSA blood test to forewarn anyone of the possibility of malignancy...I've even read that beyond a certain age, medical authorities often didn't even encourage patients to get one.  I'm a cancer survivor as is Melissa, and her sister is undergoing some serious struggles with her own.  Growing older has some really good aspects to it, but keeping your health is a big, top priority and that can become an adventure, to say the least.  And as you age you're bound to see yourself as a survivor, not only of the different physical afflictions you've had to overcome to get to where you are, but also over those close to you who have already passed from this world into death.  I look at the calendar and sometimes it's hard to fathom that we're in the year 2025.  Yet time marches on, and why not.  Right now my record has my birth year, followed by a hyphen...followed by a blank.  On some mysterious, unknown day that blank will change to a numbered year, but I won't be around to notice...

Happy Mother's Day, Melissa!

I'd like to wish my dear, sweet wife Melissa a most deserved happy Mother's Day.  She has always been a great mother to our wonderful children Will and Rebecca.  Will, taken by the Lord last year, is no longer with us on Earth and we miss him terribly.  Rebecca is here with us and we look forward to celebrating this wonderful holiday together.  I also appreciate my own mother and Melissa's...they both passed away in 2002 and 2007 respectively.  Our mortal bodies are indeed fragile on this broken world, and I think that sometimes we forget how transitory life can be...let's enjoy that all-too-brief time that we have been privileged to be here and show our loved ones how important they are for us.  Happy Mother's Day, Sweetheart!

Quote of the Week...from Bob Dylan

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.                 ---Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, Minnesota's great poet/songwriter/performer, turns 83 today...he is a part of that cluster of famous musicians born in the early 1940: he's 15 years older than me.  So for 15 years of his life I wasn't alive...should I be despondent over my death, or non-existence, during that period?  After I die...whenever that happens...should he likewise be despondent should he outlive me?  You see, I'm taking a little of ol' Bob's above quote and working with it, for I think we two just might have overlapping views about the passage of time and the concepts of past, future, and the now.  Not that the "The Bard" was referring to any of this with his quote, other than emphasizing that both future and past are indistinct and essentially unreal while only the now, the very moment we are currently both living through, is truly all that is real.  It's indeed a great mystery, not any less than what happens after death from our own perspective, about what we were before we existed in the first place.  Yet unless you believe in reincarnation, and that would only be a conjecture on your part, time itself seems to be an illusion, a construct that living organisms have used to perpetuate themselves...