Against the End of Optimism

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

I left work early yesterday, and I left angry. Our oldest dog is dying, and I spent the night before sleeping next to her on the sofa, awakened twice to carry her outside, down the stairs, and into a patch of blue juniper on the lawn in which she could stand and take a few halting steps. I’d change her diaper, wash her off, and help her back into the living room to collapse and shudder back to sleep. Both of us.

The anger was unexpected. I couldn’t imagine anyone happy, and as I sank into the sorrow of absence I denied everyone a positive experience. It was hot and humid, I was tired, and I fell into a defeated, wallowing emptiness. And an uncomfortable but familiar agitation.

I told a few people I work with about Alma, our dog, and most of them reacted with compassion and then told a tale of a similar experience they went through with a pet or a relative. This is how we build community. This is how we express empathy. And this is not what I needed at all. Perhaps the worst thing you can say to someone who suffers is, “I know what you’re feeling.” Because you don’t. You can’t even imagine. Perhaps in some small way you can understand sadness, but to relate someone else’s sadness to your own experience is, in a completely unintended way, in a way that honestly is meant to illustrate concern and caring, to diminish the person’s sadness and their role in the situation, a unique situation, that makes them sad. The best you can do is just listen, or maybe better yet, sit with the person in silence. That runs counter to our need to fix things, to find order, to intervene on behalf of people who don’t need our intervention, but do need our company - do need us to share the loneliness, not explain it away.

I snapped impatiently at a woman I work closely with and, in apology, explained what was going on at home. She told me I must be so tired. I must feel like she did a few nights before when she sat up all night because her power had gone out and she was worried about the food in her refrigerator. I felt a rage boil within and, with the understanding and help of my manager, I stormed out. The ride home was long, and at home I found Alma still on the floor, in the company of my wife, clutching to hope like the pieta, waiting for the inevitable end.

I’ve neglected some of the things that help me most with my mental health lately. I haven’t been meditating or reading the Psalms. I haven’t been cooking or eating healthy, and I’ve barely been exercising. I haven’t given enough attention to my wife and daughter. Other than work I haven’t done much else beside read paranoid novels of spies and dystopias that put me in a very bad place. I took my bike onto the boardwalk and rode into the decay and neglect of Atlantic City, into crowds focused on winning quickly and winning big, and suddenly realized I was missing the Atlantic Ocean, just to my right.

I felt one with the ocean, reflecting all that was around me, taking on the color of the sky and the sand and even the brightest bathing suits that sink beneath the surface, only expressing myself when I am angry, then tossing waves and spray aimed at anything I can drag down, until it all ends. And, in this moment of pessimism and pending death, it all ends badly.

We went to see The Cure a few weeks ago. They closed the first set with a long, tortured new song called “End Song.” While it was an absolute masterpiece, it could have been called “This is What It Means to Turn 60.” The lyrics were of dreams given up on and wasted time. Robert Smith lamented, “I don’t belong here anymore” and I felt the sentiment as my own. The moment was reinforced as my wife and daughter were away in line for the bathroom during the whole song. I sat alone and listened, embraced by a waxing pessimism.

In my anger over the injustice of Alma’s suffering I feel the same pessimism, the same impending doom, the same loss. Then staring at the ocean I realized pessimism is a terribly selfish state. It requires us to project our experience over the world’s, even over evidence to the contrary, and expect the worse. It struck me that to brood over wasted time is to insult all the people you loved, and have loved you, and the lives you touched in ways you may never know, all to be ruined by your whining that you could have done something else or something different. To give up on dreams is to give up on the work you have done, the world you have shaped, and condemn yourself to a lonely place where you fail to recognize the influence you have on yours and others’ lives.

To be pessimistic is to deny others their opportunity for good, and to deny yourself the healthy glow of hope amidst the raging storm of anger and loss. Unfortunately, into this storm too many of us age, and cloaked in this anger we pass on.

Alma seems to know better. I slept with her again last night and she was up again at 4:00 AM. Yet today she’s a little more animated, a little more mobile, and she’s eating. Something uplifting arises from the gloom, and while we know what is still inevitable my anger passes. Caring for Alma with my wife and vowing to keep her alive until our daughter returns from camp this evening blesses a desperate situation with the light of optimism, and none of us feels alone anymore.

All too often we err into wishing rest in pessimism instead of rest in peace, as if giving up and being miserable about it is our inevitable end. But we all do belong here. In the noise of the bleak we can find an embrace of silence and reach out to a voice that will be quiet with us, will allow us to look ahead with positive promise, and for me right now, will whimper in the middle of the night for me to carry her outside and sit in the juniper as the breeze off the bay stills into the glow on the horizon, the few stars seen here dim, and the first birds stir and make a racket into another day given freely, given simply, and given to be lived.