Perhaps it's just that side of me living up to the old caricature of Irishmen being lazy, drunken dullards but . . . I sometime can't help wondering if, cosmologically speaking, it really matters if I don't get out of bed tomorrow morning.
Maybe this happy train of random thoughts is being prompted by the fact that my page here has thoughtfully decided to add another year to my age, despite that particular event not happening in reality for another week. Or I might just have too much time on my hands. That is certainly a possibility I'm willing to admit to.
Then again, maybe I should just shut up and stop thinking about such things. But where's the sport in that? I mean, let's be honest about this. The whole point of sites like this is to exercise our power to proclaim to the world at large just how important we are. It's an exercise in stroking our own egos, in telling ourselves that we matter, in leaving something of ourselves behind, if only in a small archive in the depths of cyberspace.
Really, the things that are important to me are only important to me, and only have a context in the meanings they hold for me. Once I am removed from that equation, so is that contextual relationship. Those issues and those events will cease to have meaning, will become forgotten footnotes in a forgotten life, unnoticed and unmourned. We might not want to think about that, we might want to deny it, but that is a fate which awaits us all.
But it is a funny - and unsettling - thing to think about, how the intricate tapestry of your life can and will ultimately unweave and lose their meaning, lost to time and place, washed away in the unrelenting flow of time. There are times when I can't escape the conclusion that nothing really does matter, that whatever we, as individuals, choose to do or not do is the ultimate in personal vanities.
In my life, I have seen what the Earth looks like from forty thousand feet. I have played deadly games in the cold, thin air of the stratospehere, and I have seen young men gamble with their lives and lose. There was a time when I prepared for war, and then spent a career trying to put shattered lives back together in atonement. I have hazarded my own life, I have loved and lost, and in the end all that I am left with is a strange kind of emptiness that longs to, but never can be, filled, a profound sense of incompleteness.
I remember my first girlfriend, my first kiss, the first time I ever sensed the urge to belong to someone or something other than myself. I remember having just turned 14, of being on vacation in Florida with my mother and my brother, and learning that two of my friends had just been killed in an accident while street racing. The first of many shocks, the beginning of childhood's end when that childhood had years left to run, when I was neither ready nor prepared for the precipitous assault of the real world.
I remember a few months after that accident, finding my father's body in our living room, when he failed to wake me up for school that morning. I remember having to both call the paramedics and call my school to say that I would be absent that day, because my mother was so destroyed by the event when I woke her and told her that she could not handle it. I remember how cold my father was when I touched him, I remember waiting outside the house for the ambulance, my mind replaying over and over the last conversation I'd ever had with him. I'd called him at his office the night before, just to say goodnight before I went to bed, the hollowness in his voice. And I remember thinking to myself after I hung up, a fleeting notion from nowhere, that I would never talk to him again. An outlandish, fantastical idea that I dismissed, even as I fought down the urge to call him back, to say something, anything . . . but who believes in premonitions?
I remember a house suddenly full of people, uniformed strangers, family friends, my teachers - I lived only two blocks away from my school, after all, and still I thought it strange that my teachers and school administrators would show up. My best friend showing up, the same friend who weeks later would pull me out of the middle of traffic after a blind urge to self-destruction. The police sergeant who would not let me out of the kitchen when the paramedics removed my father's body, wanting to at least spare me the sight of that - too late, far too late, for the lesson was already learned. I remember being on a sort of autopilot for the rest of that day, for days after, really, of being a detached observor watching myself go through the motions, of even showing up that afternoon for a softball game because days earlier I had promised my friends I would be there. But most of all, I remember my father's eyes when I found him, the fixed, glassy stare focused on infinity and that which only the dead can see.
Childhood's end, indeed. In the end, nothing we do is really of any import at all. We are born alone, we die alone, and the only variation is the amount of suffering and pain we decide to inflict on ourselves in between. My father's last lesson to me, but the learning was far from over. I still had things to discover, of being forced to me more of an adult than the one adult left in my life, of watching friends die in high school because of stupidity and a false feeling of being young and invulnerable. Of going to college, and watching the same, sad tale repeat itself, of joining the military and witnessing death there through misadventure.
Memories of the girl I met in college who I should have married, who wanted to share my life and grow old with me, of how wrong I was to make the decision for her that I shouldn't leave such a young widow behind. Of breaking out the dress uniform, enduring the ceremony and delivering the thanks of a grateful nation, of explaining why daddy won't be coming home anymore, of the looks that barely disguised the question, Why him and not you?
Memories of the indescribable feeling of freedom, a lightness of being, while boring holes in the sky. Of machine as extension of man, completely responsive to any wish or desire, an intricate ballet that defied gravity itself. Of the majesty of being a creature of the air, with the world itself spread out below. Of once again being part of something larger than yourself.
And yet nothing lasts forever. After every beginning, there is inevitably an end, and time hurries on in its errands. I remember a year after I returned home, the night my mother died, a blustery, gale-lashed night. The fire fighter left to keep watch on me as the rest of his company and the paramedics struggled to return life to a lifeless body, the profoundly uncomfortable look in his eyes as he knew he should say something. But there was nothing for him to say; we both knew what the score was. My friend, who arrived after flagging down a police car. The doctors in the Emergency Room, who would not admit to the inevitable. The police officer who arrived to take the death report, who later showed up at the funeral service for a total stranger because, as he said, "she looked like a classy lady."
Of the years spent in a thankless struggle to rebuild shattered psyches and broken lives, wondering if anything I did would matter at all. Of struggling against people who had somehow forgotten that they were there for the patients, and not the other way around. Of the rare joy of success, and the crushing numbness of the all too frequent failures.
And there will come a time when all of that will be gone, lost forever like tears in the rain. A century from now, not even the memories will remain, nothing of the joys and sorrows but the forgotten images of characters floating on a phosphorescent screen, a record in binary code that no one will ever see.
So I guess it really doesn't matter if I don't get out of bed tomorrow. Except that I have bills to pay, and a small pack of hounds who will be extrememly distressed if dinner doesn't magically appear as it does every night. And yet that emptiness remains, that question nagging at the back of my mind . . .
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