Arcs and Vectors

I’ve been pretty quiet about an upcoming event, but I think I can now announce that my son and daughter-in-law are expecting their first child, Ev’s and my first grandchild in August. As you can imagine, we are really excited, and every once in a while I catch Ev tapping her toes looking forward to “getting my hands on that baby.” We anticipate birth with such excitement, superimposing hopeful fantasies and imagined perfection on these tiny humans yet to be born. At the same time, we call into question our own childhoods, exploring our parents and their parents, seeking understanding and wisdom before the experience. I can’t help but be comforted by the fact that as I wind down my time in this space, a new human being poised for birth finds his own way, perfect in possibility, not yet shaped into the joys and sorrows of life as we know them. Long explored by poets and philosophers and scientists and clergy, one cannot help but marvel at the contrast – beginning and ending, alpha and omega, birth and death, baby and grandfather yet to be.

Life is up and down.

A new baby and a man with dis ease are at different points on the same trajectory. A baby, like a sunrise reveals the hope of a new day, dew on the grass, birdsong, buds opening into new life. While she must acquire every single behavior associated with a fully functioning human – speaking, bathing, toileting, feeding, dressing, schooling – for just a brief moment between birth and breath there is nothing but pure potential. And over time, she will learn to make responsible decisions leading to the  independence in living that we so value as a culture. Our new grandchild, still in utero, is now nothing but a hopeful point, barely perceptible on the life arc that we all experience.

On the other hand, my trajectory is at the end of its curve, an Apollonian finale hissing into the ocean’s bubbling cauldron of the life that was. All of those human basics, pounded into me in a lifetime celebrating independence, indicative of adulthood’s responsibilities, are shedding like so many feathered layers, melted from the wax wing bindings of life’s earlier flight. Where our grandchild will acquire the intellectual and physical capacities necessary to independent life, I now lose these very same capabilities. While I still take responsibility over my own body, I can only do so through the help of others.

The arc, birth to life to death, is a story of acquisition and loss.

We accept the lack of ability in an infant, hoping and expecting that capacities will develop and capabilities will be achieved. It is far more difficult with our elders. In conversations with people my age, “Mom just doesn’t feel like mom anymore,” has become a mantra. If you think about it, the idea that “mom” would remain evermore the “mom” of memory is illogical. There is not a person on earth who has the same capabilities today as they had yesterday. We age, and our physical capacity wanes, trickling out in dribs and drabs of lost elasticity and flexibility and strength and eyesight and hearing, or worse our mental faculties fail us until we feel our youth as some distant fantasy of another person beyond our memory. The dependent needs of a baby are framed in hope while the dependent needs of mom and dad foment despair, yet the expectation that our moms and dads would be like they were when we were young is just as strong as our expectation that a baby will grow up.

The arced trajectory is a story of upward mobility and precipitous fall. Its narrative is one where youth is celebrated, envied, and ironically disposed of in adult expectations that are unattainable and unreasonable. In our culture we superimpose the avoidance of dependency at all costs on to the expectation. Thus, when our lives reach their independent apex, old age looms as a tragedy to be avoided and put off. We are born, we live and if we are so fated, we age until we die.

In anticipating the birth of our first grandchild, in anticipating my own death, suddenly I am hyper-aware that independence from others, this most desirable state, implicitly means that independence gained must never be lost. It is an illogical belief, fraught with mythos and irrational assumption. Our bodies are designed to gain capacity and then, in what Steve Jobs once called “… the single best invention of Life, … [death] clears out the old to make way for the new.” Our minds are designed for greater and greater analysis and efficiency at the cost of less and less plasticity. Our souls are designed to cling to this physical existence as if our very lives depended on it, and they do. In anticipating the birth of our first grandchild, the grand design, the arc of life, the trajectory of birth to death, soaring to its apex and tumbling freefall into death, provides me little comfort.

A number of years ago, I was preparing to do Brahms’ A German Requiem with my small but mighty church choir. Since it was for church and the German would be problematic to teach, I was working with all manner of translation software and biblical renderings to try to truly understand the biblical texts that Brahms had selected, rendering them into a more meaningful English translation than the Victorian English provided in the score. In the second movement, the chorus begins with the line, “Denn alles fleisch es ist wie Gras.” I have always translated this line as “then all flesh is like the grass,” but one of the translation engines I was using at the time came up with the following: “we are like meat.” I had to laugh, partly because of how far this translation was from the original text, and partly because of its accuracy in capturing the human condition.

Having just heard a lovely performance of A German Requiem last weekend (auf Deutsch), I am reminded with a smile of both the sentiment and the ultimate reality. Rather than a trajectory that implies upward hope and downward despair with all of the crazy energy we put into denying the fall, the birth of a first grandchild causes me to think of life as a vector, pointing up and forward, acquiring all manner of joy and sorrow until, weighted down by life’s cumulative experience, our only chance to break free is to shed our fear and sadness, our hurt and tragedy, our triumph and success, the very things we strove for with such energy, with such purpose, until we are only love and empathy and pure collective humanity. In the arc, we flourish and we fade away, and the gymnastics we perform to maintain the charade of physical independence will ultimately fail. But the vector is a story of comfort, for there is great hope that babies bring and great truth that aging teaches, leaving us pure spiritual connection within ourselves, with others, and with God, even into death.

No wonder we cannot wait to get our hands on those babies.