RENEWAL?

I have written over 1500 essays on Blogger. Buddha's Pillow and The Practical Humanist were previous incarnations of my writing here. I have intentionally taken them down this month of May 2017. This new blog surfaces from a personal transition. I like to frame it as looking to the shortening horizons of my life with renewed interest.

I've had my share of change in my sixty-seven-plus years.

I started out on the verge of autism, with neurosis so deep as a child that my mother would yell, "What did I do to deserve a kid like this?" I grew through religious delusions. I once left my body in a Catholic church and climbed to Jesus, turned to flesh from a stained glass window. He did not speak, but he caressed my cheek reassuringly and gently encouraged me to return to my pew next to a nun whom I feared greatly. She seemed less dangerous after that. After all, I had an in with her boss.

In early primary school, I was convinced I would be blind before I turned thirty. How I came up with that number eludes me. I practiced walking around my house with my eyes closed. Then my sixth grade teacher noticed I could not read the blackboard. It seemed I was nearly blind in my right eye and my left wasn't much good either. The eye doctor was impressed I had done so well in school without glasses. My mother was angry that I needed glasses. Another disappointment and expense.

I had a religious vocation in college. Well, to be honest, I had hedonistic insight into the more practical side of life as a Jesuit priest. My sexy Jesuit professors spoke of summer vacations on bicycles in the Loire Valley. The Jesuit residence at my university hosted Friday sherry hours, to which I had been invited on several occasions. Opulent trays of hors d'oeurves and fine sherry backed by Baroque chamber music, sometimes performed by the Jesuits themselves. This was the stimulus for my vocation. It would have been a ticket to an elegant life of education and travel. An escape from the dingy working-class city to which I returned every evening after classes. But my parents, determined that I become a doctor to minister to them in their dotage, would not sign the permission for me to join the order at seventeen.

Then I discovered sex with men, as opposed to the poor prequel of fumbling with other boys. This transition was my emergence from awkward novice to eager practitioner. I embraced it fully. I was a fast and accomplished learner. By twenty, I had explored homosexual life enough to settle down with my first lover. I learned to form an adult bond with another human being as a cherished equal for the first time. We lived together through Gay Liberation times in an open home in Harvard Square where we hosted strippers, hustlers, revolutionaries, actors, eccentrics and/or psychics at most meals. I learned how to feed many on a small budget. I learned how to listen. I discovered how much fun it could be to be young and alive. 

But the seventies became the eighties. Two plagues struck: Ronald Reagan and AIDS. I was drafted into the HIV-positive clan early on and involuntarily. I transformed from the strongly objective clinician, a registered nurse, to the more compassionate HIV-positive spy within the health care system as my peers dropped dead around me. I heard the bad jokes about AIDS that my colleagues covertly shared in staff lounges. I was out as a gay man, so I was spared the bad gay jokes. My coworkers assumed I was not one of the leprous afflicted. I knew that being exposed as HIV-positive then would have quickly ended my nursing career. 

I was given a 6-month terminal prognosis by my MD in 1995. In his defense, I have to point out that the anti-retroviral regimes we now take for granted hadn't yet become generally available. I nearly succumbed in 1996 to pneumonia, just before starting a new drug. It was not a biblical Lazarus scenario. Months of painstaking rehab brought me back to a shadow of my healthy life. Four more years of careful living brought me back to a fairly active daily life. Two years after that I developed cancer.

Now I am a 15-year cancer survivor. Actually, I am a 15-year survivor of massive doses of radiation and two toxic IV medications. The treatment rivaled the disease in its devastating impact on my body. A bladder which no longer works properly and a lower GI tract that has a mind of its own. I may look like a man approaching seventy, but my body functions like that of an 80-year-old. I plod on. "Where to?", you might ask. The answer is the same for us all. The essence of human survival is the circuitry in the human brain which simply does not want to quit, even when quitting may seem the wiser and easier alternative.

Renewal? It's a funny word. Renewing a subscription means, "I'll purchase it again." Renewing a prescription means, "I'll continue taking that medicine.'" Repetitive human renewal isn't much different. I have noticed how my brain wants to do things as they have always been done. My brain wants to respond to stimuli the way it always has. My mind, which I feel is the part of my perception which can objectify my vision of myself to some extent, knows better. It knows I cannot eat black pepper without dire consequences. It warns against Chinese buffets. It tells me I am spending too much useless time looking at my wrinkles and sags. My mind knows that every second of time in a mobile, cognizant body is the most precious and irreplaceable thing in life.

My mind doesn't much believe in renewal, despite the hype of mass media and infomercials. My mind is convinced that accepting the change of aging is the key to living through disaster to another kind of life. If a caterpillar renewed its existence, it would just become another caterpillar. Its metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly is magnificent change, not simple renewal. And with that change comes a brief life of flying splendor. The parallel to those of us who experience metamorphosis late in life seems quite valid. We have so little time and vigor to be what we are constantly becoming. I like to maintain my awareness that even Buddha died.