I spent most of the summer of 2023 taking care of my father while he was hospitalized after a car crash and aneurysm. In the evenings I would send updates to his family and friends.
The full archive is here and the family shares it publicly in hope that it might be helpful to others who are dealing with an aneurysm (including caring for someone who had one). But for most readers only two entries are worth reading. Here is the first.
Hi again,
Many of you have kindly been asking how I am doing. I confess that I have not provided a good answer earlier. This was because I lacked the right experiences to communicate my situational thinking.
I mentioned in yesterday's final update that I was reading Heschel's God in Search of Man to Lee during his distress of coming up from sedation while still on the ventilator. Here is a quotation, the first of several in this e-mail:
There are two types of thinking; one that deals with concepts and one that deals with situations...The beginning of situational thinking is not doubt, detachment, but amazement, awe, involvement...And so, for example, the problem of religious philosophy is not how does man arrive at an understanding of God, but rather how can we arrive at an understanding of God.
Yesterday provided the situations I needed to finally describe the past two-and-a-half weeks in a hospital with Lee. You deserve a deep answer.
After Lee and Dena's car accident I wanted to put into words my grieving and mourning and memories of Dena in that shared Google Doc. This was largely for my own sake, since writing helps me process. But I also hoped that putting my thoughts and process "on the table" for everyone to see might help turn the personal into the communal, and help other people grieve and mourn even though we are all different.
Similarly, despite our differences, perhaps putting some of my experiences during the past two-and-a-half weeks "on the table" might allow elements of the personal to be helpful as communal. To a huge extent you have been with me during these hospital days
I will conclude this preface with a "heads up" that I will be mentioning ways in which God talks to me. You don't have to believe me. You can certainly think any or all of those accounts are something else. I will not think any less of you for that. I have met plenty of people whom I thought were crazy when they discussed how God talks to them.
One day, while Lee was at Palomar Medical Center, I was really bothered by a certain theological issue. Does God pick when people will die?
(Tangentially, there is a famous story that claims God not only picks the day, but he plays games with it. I despise that story.)
Did God pick when Dena would die? I wanted to know. So I went down to the foyer and sat quietly, waiting for an answer. Foyers can be special. The holiday liturgy contains a quotation from the book Pirkei Avot. "This World is a foyer that leads to The World to Come. While in the foyer how can we prepare ourselves to enter the main rooms?"
Does God pick when people will die? Did God pick when Dena would die? I realized it was a bit of a personal question to ask, but I expected that if I sat in the foyer patiently then God would say something.
When I think my own thoughts, I am aware of both the thoughts as I think them and also as a memory of what I just thought. But when God puts words in my head I only get the memory: the words are an immediate past without having been in the present. Usually what God says also takes me by surprise.
Several years ago I sat down at a table beside a swimming pool with Lee and Brian and asked Lee, "Did I ever tell you about when God told me a knock-knock joke?"
"No," he said. "But that's quite a way to start a conversation.
So I told the story. "I was being quiet, and God said, 'Knock, knock'. My immediate reaction was to think, Oh no, this is not going to end well. How arrogant of me to think might I understand something better than God, and not trust that he knows what he is doing."
Lee replied, "Everyone does that."
I agreed. "Yes, but I get to be especially rude about it. I even thought, At my age there aren't even any good knock-knock jokes, unless we count the one about the interrupting cow, which is only good because it's not really a knock-knock joke. How could God possibly expect this to be a good idea?
"But I love God, so I said, 'Who's there?' God said, 'Adonai,' which is Hebrew for 'the Lord' and one of God's traditional names. Then I thought, See, this is not working--you're not supposed to say your own name in a knock-knock joke.
"But it was too late to stop. I said, 'Adonai who?' Then God said, 'Adonai hu elohim!' There is a Hebrew word pronounced 'who' that means 'he', so the punchline was a wordplay that when translated means 'The Lord, he is God!' I was shocked. It was quite clever. God did know what he was doing."
That day my arrogance was humbled by a knock-knock joke. I got off very easy compared to most other stories about God humbling people.
Anyway, at the Palomar Medical Center foyer I sat quietly and waited, asking God if he picked when people die. God eventually said that I should not phrase that question so conceptually, putting an idea under a microscope, but instead I should look around the foyer and think about if God should pick when these people will die.
As a novelist, I knew that answer was clearly yes. Although I invented the characters in my novels, they quickly developed lives of their own, and would do and say things that I had not planned. As the author of their story, I could look at and edit any page: I was not bound by their chronology or physics. But any novelist knows that even when an ending is predetermined the characters have free will. That's a metaphor that helps me think about God.
Did I want these people with me in the foyer to merely have lives like Brownian motion, meeting and competing until senescence killed them? Of course not. Far better that their lives and deaths have some intentionality: not necessarily having meaning, but having a personal touch from the author of their stories. As a novelist I also know that perhaps the greatest honor I can give one of my characters is the classic fairy tale ending: And she lived happily ever after all the rest of her days.
Dena got that ending, as much as anyone does in This World, although losing Madgel was hard.
I would love to have Dena still present, to have more holidays together, to see her show off her hamster's newest antics to my boys. But who am I to wish upon her the more statistically likely and depressing version of a final chapter of life: old and infirm, having nursed and then outlived her older husband, without kids living nearby, remembering past vibrant days of energy and travel?
The night Lee had his aneurysm I woke up at 3am full of anger. Angry thoughts are a part of grieving, especially in situations like Dena's that involve criminal behavior. But why revisit the angry phase then? Oh well. I expected that later that day I would get a bit of black cloth and one of the makeup mirrors I had brought to Lee for his bedside table. I could sort of sit shiva in the hospital foyer, with people around me, as I followed my grief into places that are not healthy to go alone.
I also prayed a lot that night, since usually that's the right thing to do when I wake up in the middle of the night for reasons other than to use the bathroom or write down thoughts.
Did God wake me up to pray for Lee as he was having his aneurysm?
I also woke up yesterday morning when Lee was having his vasospasm. It was 6am and for no reason I was awake and got a tremendous leg cramp. I was in way too much pain to fall asleep again. I wondered if I was again woken up because it was important to be praying at that time. Later that morning the timing of many unwanted things combined to have me arrive at Lee's room exactly as the surgeon was picking up the phone to call me to authorize the procedure. Coincidence?
Heschel writes:
It is not the sublime as such of which the Biblical man is aware. To him, the sublime is but a way in which things react to the presence of God. It is never an ultimate aspect of reality, a quality meaningful in itself. It stands for something greater; it stands in relation to something beyond itself that the eye can never see.
The sublime is not simply there. It is not a thing, a quality, but rather a happening, an act of God, a marvel. Thus even a mountain is not regarded as a thing. What seems to be stone is a drama; what seems to be natural is wondrous. There are no sublime facts; there are only divine acts.
It does not matter if God woke me up at those two times Lee needed prayer. "Maybe" is sufficient, because examples like those are endless. What matters is that we can learn to sense the sublime.
When I wrote my big essay on social dynamics, I defined love as "a kind of spice, seasoning, or style we put on things to add depth and meaning to life." Sublimity is God's version of love. It is that personal touch from the author of our stories that seldom means anything specific, but always means that we matter
Yesterday evening I was with my father as he slowly came up from sedation but still was on the ventilator. He shook and looked around the room like a wounded animal: uncomfortable, confused, unfocused. I did not put a concept under a microscope to ask, "What kind of God allows this to happen?"
Instead I read aloud words like these from Heschel:
Is wonder the same as curiosity? To the prophets wonder is a form of thinking. It is not the beginning of knowledge but an act that goes beyond knowledge; it does not come to an end when the knowledge is acquired; it is an attitude that never ceases. There is no answer in the world to man's radical amazement.
I held Lee's hand, complimented his strength, promised that tomorrow would be better, and pet his arm as I filled the room with words he was not yet able to understand. With wonder I thought, "Hm, this is a lot like the troubled parts of childhood we don't like to think about, and the larger troubled parts of adulthood we don't like to admit." (I later realized it also had all five love languages condensed.
"Do you know the story about the rabbi and the ugly bride?" I asked the nurse named Grace
"No," she said. "Tell me."
"Once there was a rabbi who was really distraught. Soon he would officiate a wedding, and the bride was the ugliest woman he had ever met. One of the traditional prayers said at a Jewish wedding praises the beauty of the bride. The rabbi did not want to omit that prayer. Nor did he want to lie. What could he do? He asked his peers for ideas. He prayed for guidance. Finally it was the day of the wedding. The music played and the bride entered, joy shining like radiance from her face. And the rabbi learned that on the day of their wedding all brides are beautiful.
"Similarly," I told Grace, "I have realized that when it is my own father on the hospital bed, all nurses are beautiful. Even the male nurses, to me, appear to have something like a pregnant glow. But I expect you can't see it, because it's not your father on the hospital bed."
When my sister was little, she announced one morning, "God and Santa Claus went to the same school, because they both can see you, even in the bathroom."
As I mentioned before, you don't have to believe me about God talking to me, or waking me up at just the right time to pray. Those who don't believe me often live more productive lives. People who react to a terrible situation by putting a concept under a microscope can feel driven to do great things, such as invent medicines that will improve quality of life for millions of people. People like me too often only think strange thoughts and write really long e-mails.
But now that I have shared, perhaps you can understand how I am doing.
I get tired, but never feel worn down. How could I get worn down when hospitals are so full of sublimity and wonder?
I get scared, but never feel alone. How could I be alone when God wakes me up with a leg cramp?
I miss being with Ceri, Simon, and Gildor. But for a few weeks I am growing in new ways with new challenges, and they are too.
Hospital time can be boring, but I am never bored. How can I be bored when these days have so much depth?
One last set of Heschel quotations:
Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation...
This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things...
What have Job, Agur, Ecclesiastes discovered in their search? They have discovered that the existence of the world is a mysterious fact. Referring not to miracles or startling phenomena, but to the natural order of things, they insist that the world of the known is a world unknown; hiddenness, mystery. What stirred their souls was neither the hidden nor the apparent, but the hidden in the apparent; not the order but the mystery of the order that prevails in the universe.
So that's how I have been doing, and why yesterday it seemed proper to read from Heschel's book when my father and I were both needing comfort.