DISILLUSION
The man sitting next to me was old, perhaps somewhere in his eighties, but he possessed a bright inquisitive gaze giving him the mien of a wizard. He seemed a sinewy slender man, graceful even when sitting, and like someone whose appetites had never overcome him. His face was narrow and his high forehead gave way to a rich crop of white hair that sustained the sense of the vitality he possessed. We did not speak for perhaps the first ninety minutes of our proximity until he bridged the gulf between us that I certainly would not have.
We had both ordered drinks when the flight attendant passed our seats. I ordered a double scotch with ice, while he ordered a pinot gris which he lifted towards me and proposed we toast our journeys, “to whatever new and unexpected it may bring to each of us,” he said with evident good humor. His overture took me by surprise, as might be the case when we are deeply absorbed in reading while sitting in an out-of–the way café and we are greeted unexpectedly by an old friend. We look up wondering briefly where we actually are. I returned his salutation, saying, “Skoll, and thank you.”
“You were, I think, very deep in thought. Perhaps I should not have disturbed you. I won’t bother you any further if you’d prefer some solitude.” “That’s very thoughtful,” I replied. “In fact, solitude has been my only company for so long now that I’m unused to anything else.”
My companion kept his wonderful gaze fixed on me without speaking. Ordinarily I think something like that would have made me quite ill at ease, but his bright eyes seemed to contain such compassion that rather than turn to stare out the window, I returned the gaze myself. He smiled and said, “I expect you’ve had some difficult times. They do come upon us, and sometimes very unexpectedly.”
“Very,” I answered not sure if I wanted to say more. A few minutes passed, again without the awkwardness I would have expected, but more like an interval of reflection.
“I myself lost a son when I was 32 years old when he was hit by a car. He was five and I felt as though a stake had been driven through my belly. I lost 30 pounds. I don’t believe I could think for a year, and a cone of solitude dropped over me like a shroud. People were kind, but I survived in a tomb of inwardness. Even my wife, who was a lovely woman, could not enter and after a while we could no longer live with one another.”
His confession startled me in its perfect candor and remarkable poise. Although he clearly had told me something of enormous pivotal significance in his life, he had also related it to me with such equanimity that it seemed perfectly ordinary. How could he tell such a private and tormenting story to someone he had only spoken to for two or three minutes? It was a story I imagined I could never tell anyone. His gaze was no longer into my eyes, but was slightly averted as though he were looking back into the museum of his memories in order to retrieve them. By looking away, he also seemed to be issuing an invitation to me in the most gracious way imaginable. It was as though he had said, with nothing so crass as actual words, “tell me about your own cone of solitude if you care to.” I had an unfamiliar impulse to speak to him about a bit of my own experiences. The impulse was strange to me: it was as though a story, my own story, had suddenly materialized in my mind when it had not occurred to me that there had been anything at all there a moment before. Had an acquaintance said to me the day before, something commonplace like “So, what’s up with you?” I would have replied, “Oh, nothing much really,” and been perfectly convinced that this was true. It felt accurate: “nothing much really.’ But this man seemed to have lifted the lid of an old dusty clay jar only to reveal the Dead Sea Scrolls inside! Personal scrolls of course, but records so buried, so long stored away that they had vanished from any memory, nearly dead and forgotten.
“I’m sorry to hear of your loss,” I said. I was aware already I was veering away from something, swimming back towards the surface when I’d been offered something from the depth. My awareness was indistinct, but I felt my heart pumping in my chest, signaling my anxiety.
He replied only after a pause. “Everyone in the world has these experiences I think,” he said softly, “but not everyone knows they have them.”
Again, he deftly opened the door offering to admit me; not demanding, simply offering. The offer created an internal experience similar to seeing the very first small movement of what will gain momentum sufficient to become an avalanche. I felt if I began speaking, I might not stop. Whether this sensation was analogous to pulling the cork on Champaign, or pulling the stopper on a drain I wasn’t sure. Was I celebrating? Or perhaps only draining things I needed to discard? I didn’t know, but only felt the force propelling me to talk further.
Looking at nothing in particular, I said, “Looking back these days, I have begun to have the feeling that I am disappearing. It’s very odd. I’m a pretty practical man. I was an accountant, and quite precise. Nevertheless, I have been feeling for some time that I am dissolving like an ice cube in warm water…just vanishing.”
My companion remained motionless for a long moment during which I imagined I’d said something so ridiculous I would have to apologize and remain silent, or else that perhaps I really was dematerializing after all. But then he spoke, furrowing his forehead slightly but otherwise remaining perfectly still.
“You know, I think you’ve just said something absolutely fascinating,” he said. “I’m quite delighted to have your company on our journey.”
Once more, I was quite surprised. I was flattered of course, in some way, but also perplexed because I had no reason to consider what I had said to be particularly interesting. And his phrasing was sort of old fashioned. Instead of putting me off as though it was arch, it felt like an old Victorian chair, big and comforting and inviting me to relax into it. I hesitated and then told him I could not imagine what I had said sounding interesting.
“Oh, but it is!” he said with some enthusiasm. “You have put your finger quite precisely on the whole business of aging. I hope you will tell me how you came to feel this dissolving process.”
His interest stimulated me enough to want to try to explain it all to him.
“Well, you’re kind to ask. I suppose there isn’t really a start exactly. But if there were, I wouldn’t know how to find it. But the first thing I keep remembering was a moment on an ordinary Saturday morning when my son, who is now 35, but was seventeen then, came rushing downstairs. I had made a pancake batter and was looking forward to having a family breakfast, but he ran through the kitchen, saying “hi” on the way by and telling me he had something to do. In an instant he was gone. My kitchen had felt so cozy and comfortable, but as he left, it suddenly felt empty. As silly as it sounds to me to say it aloud, I felt a tightness in my throat as though I might cry. I can still remember the feeling.”
“Yes. Of course! I understand that precisely,” my companion said without a trace of irony or condescension. “But there were more incidents?”
“Well, yes. I think there were. Most of them were so small I don’t really remember them, but I do recall another that was quite similar. Our daughter, Kate, who was three years younger than her brother, had a bunch of her girlfriends over for a brunch before they all graduated from high school. So, of course, when she left Jessica and I would then be alone in the place. I knew all of these girls who were coming by and I liked them. Each of them greeted me when they arrived, and every one said nearly the same thing as they dashed through the kitchen on their way to the back porch. ‘Oh, hi Mr. B,” they each said and then joined the others squealing and talking on top of one another. As glad as I was to have them coming through the house to visit, I also felt the transience of their presence in my own life. They were all leaving, springing off into their own new lives, and I felt something of the same sadness I had felt when my son dashed by. It was as though I were becoming translucent.
“Watching them that morning was wonderful, but also a bit melancholy. I felt as though I were bird-watching, catching an occasional glimpse of an oriole wing, or the tune of a warbler, but I was an observer of the lives of others, a species I could not join, but could only observe and appreciate.”
“Yes, yes. I understand you perfectly,” my companion said, not quite looking straight at me, but slightly to the side with his brow furrowed.
Encouraged I suppose by his apparent interest, I went on. “There was one other event I remember quite well. It came several years after our kids had left home. Members of my high school class had arranged an informal reunion for people in the same general area of the country. I had said I would attend, but then could not for some reason. I had not notified anyone I was not coming, but no one called to ask where I had been. My failure to show up had apparently been entirely unnoticed. I told myself it had been a bit like that awful story about Kitty Genoviese, the girl who was killed on a sidewalk in New York and whose screams were heard by a dozen or more people, none of whom called the police. Pychologists thought the sense of responsibility was diffused through so many that no one person felt obliged to act. But that explanation failed to put me at ease. Did no one care I had not come? Was I still visible?”
Now I myself had become absorbed in the story I was telling.
“Each of those events was quite small and incidental. I forgot them probably within hours or a few days, although apparently I did not forget them entirely. Then two much more significant events accelerated this feeling that I was just disappearing. I mentioned that I was an accountant. One of the companies I had worked for began as a very small startup with only a couple of young fellows. They were developing lasers for medical applications. I had even given them some money early on and had come to own about 4% of the company. Well, these fellows did remarkably well, and we ultimately sold the company to a Swiss firm for close to a billion dollars. I had just turned 56. Jason and Kate, the kids, were now out of the house. They were not only out of the house, they lived far away; Jason in Singapore, and Kate had married a South African man and now lived in Cape Town. So Jessica and I felt as though we had been blessed with remarkable good fortune because, of course, we had become wealthier than I’d ever imagined. She stopped working and I continued on for a short time, but at a very reduced pace. There was no longer any need to work, nor did the company we had sold require anything from me, so I stopped. It was fairly abrupt. I no longer had to get up in the morning, so I did not.
We “decided we would do what we’d never had time for.” That was what we told ourselves. I think the truth was that freedom felt vertiginous. We actually didn’t know what to do with it and that old phrase seemed to point the way, to advise us what we ought to be doing. We planned several trips to the European highlights: Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence, and so on. We went to Paris in September the year after I stopped working and stayed for twelve days. Of course, it is a beautiful city and we did enjoy ourselves. There was also a little bit of distance between us, though. We certainly were not fighting. Nothing like that. No, it was something much more subtle or atmospheric. Being in a foreign country makes you quite aware you are an outsider. You can’t manage the language and you know no one, so you are always gazing in from the other side of the store window so to speak. So I had something of the feeling of being only half present there too. But towards the end of that trip, Jessica developed awful headaches. Although they were bothersome, we didn’t attribute any particular meaning to them, but they became quite severe during the plane trip home.
“When we got home, Jessica went to bed for a few days and took gobs of aspirin, but nothing helped. We went to our doctor who immediately had her get a scan that showed a big tumor. It was horrifying. I’ll never forget the moment when he put the scan onto his computer screen and we both immediately saw something that looked like a plum inside her head. We sat in his office where we had sat many times before, side by side, but also now divided by this terrifying news which we shared, but entirely unequally. There was no hope of surgery because of the location of the tumor he told us. He had already consulted several neurosurgeons, and they all had told him the same thing: if they operated, she would almost certainly have severe deficits, even if she survived the operation. Radiation might make a bit of a difference, and perhaps chemotherapy might slow it down a bit, but the message to us was clear: she didn’t have much time left.
“We were stunned, both together and separately. We clung to each other, but despite that, the distance seemed to grow. Jessica, too, was disappearing. I remembered the scene in the movie “Titanic” where the young man slipped beneath the water to be lost forever, except this seemed to be happening while Jessica was still here. I just could not hold onto her. Both of our children came, urged by us both to come before the horrible disease did too much damage. I had not anticipated what those visits would mean to Jessica, not when the kids were here, but when they left. When Kate left, Jessica really sank. It was as though she no longer had the will to remain. She died six days after Kate had returned to South Africa. It was sudden, the result of a bleed into her brain. And I was asleep. That torments me. I think it will forever. I was not with her. It feels like a sin so terrible I can’t bear it. I had left her alone in her most difficult moment.
“There was a burial with a few friends and family. About six weeks later, there was a memorial service that the kids once again returned home for. People were lovely and generous, asking me if there was anything they could do. How could I answer? ‘Yes. Bring her back!’ They meant well, but the pointlessness of those questions appalled me.
“This time it was my turn to feel lost when Jason and Kate left to return to their lives. My house felt like a cavern. How can a place take on such wildly different aspects? At one moment, it’s a warm incubator filled with cozy proximity to your family and then be a mocking empty maze where you wander, not knowing what to do with yourself.
“Neighbors and friends asked me to dinner, but I declined most offers. On the few occasions I did accept, I felt so forlorn, trying to eat without any appetite, trying to take in their sympathy all the while feeling as though they had no idea at all what wound they were trying to patch up. Their company, well-intended as it was, seemed only to make my isolation feel more pronounced.
“Now I genuinely began to feel as though my presence was fading away. I would go to the grocery and always choose the checkout girl instead of the self-serve checkout just to have her ask me, ‘Paper or plastic?’ I’d reply and she would glance up momentarily and resume chewing gum and chatting with the boy bagging up the items. I was a ghost, just barely visible to the people still in the real world.
“I had heard that suicide rates were high amongst older men. I was not an older man, not in my own mind, but nevertheless, I felt as though I understood the impulse. It wasn’t precisely despair that brought these seditious thoughts to my mind, so much as a hunger for company and an escape from this horrible isolation. It seemed like there would be more company across death’s boundary than I could find here.”
I had by this time lost any awareness of how long I had gone on about my personal experiences and looked up to those sharp eyes of my companion whose gaze was still fixed on me. His shiny eyes seemed to betray a sensitivity to my unhappy state, and I felt a little healed by his fixed attention.
“You know,” he said after a pause, “I am very moved by your story. Even though I have grown up so far away, originally in Banda Ache, Indonesia in fact, where there was also great tragedy lately. I am deeply touched by your experience. Perhaps every one of us must slowly dissolve in our later lives, or perhaps it happens to some much earlier, for I am keenly aware you are a much younger man than I. So how do you feel we can bear our decline in this world as we grow into our last years? You have, I suspect, acquired a wisdom without even knowing it.”
Again, his utterances surprised me and I was left suspended with hardly a thought anywhere in my mind. It then occurred to me that the reason for my long trip to Cape Town, a twenty hour flight from New York, was to visit the granddaughter Kate had given birth to about three weeks earlier. She had conceived very shortly before her mother’s premature death and had been “with child” during her last visit. Thinking of this small new life sparked something vital within me and I told my companion what was motivating my trip.
“Marvelous!” he exclaimed, filled, it seemed, with a rich delight. “How wonderful! Perhaps this is a part of the solution to your profound unease my dear friend. New life is emerging to salve the pain of your loss. Your wife cannot be replaced, naturally, but the delight of new beings who optimistically fling themselves into the business of living; well, there’s something to excite the spirit, eh? “ He nearly danced in his seat as he spoke, and despite my impulse to receive his excitement as banal, I could not. In fact, he illuminated the dark form of my own excitement at the prospect of meeting the tiny being I had never seen.
Not long after my long soliloquy, my energetic companion lapsed into a doze that lasted most of the way down to South Africa. As we said farewell and good luck to one another, I had the terrible feeling I had gotten to know so little about him while he had seemed to learn nearly everything there was to know about me, an experience so unusual, I could recall no other such moment in my life. As a consequence, I felt quite sad to bid him goodbye, I also felt refreshed and more alive than I had for many years.
When I met my first grandchild, named for her mother, joy exploded in my heart.
