Category: love

Two Inches

~ thoughtsatlarge ~ 3 Comments

Light travels at 671 million miles per hour. The sun is 93 million miles away from the earth. That means that if the sun exploded, we would not see it for 8 minutes and 19 seconds. A light year is the distance that light can travel in one earth year. This equates to 5,878,625 million miles, or roughly 6 quadrillion miles. The universe is estimated at about 93 billion light years across. How insignificant do you feel?

An electron is less than 1/1000 the diameter of a proton. A proton has a diameter of approximately 1/25,000,000,000,000 inch. Consider that there are about 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 electrons in the average human body. How colossal do you feel?

Cancer is the unchecked growth of mutated cells in an organism. Once established and supplied with their own blood source, these neoplasms or tumors replicate out of control. It typically takes 1,000,000,000 cancer cells in a tumor for it to be detectable using physical examination or conventional radiology.

It is against that backdrop that we humans can feel like the center of the universe in one breath and like cosmic dust in the next. We can feel like masters of our own dominion on the inhale and poker chips in a biological warfare game on the exhale. We spend our lives pushing against both our physical and mental limitations, shaping the imaginary form of what we can control in an effort to appreciate our daily lives and mollify our aspirations of significance, if not eternal life through posterity.

We all begin life believing we are the most important creature on earth. Over time, we struggle to accept that we must share this public stage; that the applause we hear is only ours to share. Eventually, we realize that the mark we make on the world is ours to carve and that we may use no tools save those of our own intelligence. We claw with our fingernails at an indifferent earth, paying the price of birth, baring the scars of experience (the blood-stained reminders of our successes and the rescued wisdom gleaned from our defeats) before giving way to those behind us. Life is a disorderly queue and each surviving generation steps ever forward to take the place of those who have gone before us.

And yet, with all of the collective knowledge humanity has amassed, cancer , biology and the march of time relentlessly cuts us down with concern for neither our individual accomplishments nor mankind’s self-appointed importance. None of which prevents us from fighting it. We bargain, promise, diet, pray, in essence, delude ourselves into thinking that chemistry, physics and biology are somehow under the purview of our control. Nowhere is this more evident than when disease or chance affects those we love the most. A willing suspension of belief absorbs us; we somehow seek mystical ways of trading places with our afflicted loved ones, to take the proverbial bullet on their behalf, ignoring the axiomatic in favor of the absurd.

It is this hopeless sensation that I feel when embracing my wife, whose cancerous tumors lay two inches below the skin’s surface, bent on their suicidal quest to metastasize beyond her lungs. Were I able, in that enveloping hug, I would pull the cancer out of her lungs through her back and into my fingertips, freeing her of the daily pain and altered future demanded of her illness. Willingly, I would cut off my hand, burn the cancerous appendage and celebrate the event in song and dance if it would help my wife.  All for the sake of two inches. How long would it take light to travel those two inches? How many electrons, were they capable of being paused and lined up, would it take to traverse those two inches? For the sake of those two inches, I am helpless.  Two inches.

Road Rage

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I must admit to a certain bias.  Not to open the age old rift, but I fancy dogs more than cats. While I can accept the anthropomorphic attributes of wisdom, solitude and supremacy that we impose on cats in an effort to embrace them as something other than the self-centered, personality restricted, hangers-on that they truly are, I rather prefer the capricious, attention seeking, connection of a dog. The dog yearns to become part of a family, to participate in activities, offers affection and seeks attention.  Is this any different than me?  And while I anthropomorphize them and admit to attributing human emotion to their actions and reactions, I will not apologize.

I confess that I was fortunate enough to have been raised with dogs, and while their names (Bozo, Booker and Pandora) mean nothing to you, they engender warmth and familiarity on par with that of siblings to me.  Their deaths were no less painful than those of my grandparents, having occurred during the same era of my life. Now, as a father, the addition of our dog Delbow to our family offered no less enchantment.  When we welcomed him into our hearts, he was only eight weeks old and my twins were only nine years old.  Missing only the white picket fence, our future was a pastoral Rockwell painting.

Unfortunately, the past nine years has seen us leave our wonderful home, family and friends in Rhode Island and move to Texas to fight my wife’s aggressive, single-minded (though unfathomably suicidal) breast cancer, forced my children to uproot their lives and face parental mortality sooner than should be required and witnessed the various medical afflictions with which our beloved dog has had to endure (from blindness in one eye due to a retinal detachment, to emergency surgery to save the other, to two tibial plateau leveling osteotomies following two ruptured cranial cruciate ligaments, to surgery and radiation for a cancerous tumor in his neck).  In short, the life we had planned vaporized with the unwelcomed arrival of that insidious cancer and we have done our best to remain a family, drawing strength from each in our times of weakness under some unnecessarily painful and harrowing conditions. My wife fights on, my children pursue their lives and Delbow continues to offer his boundless affection.

It is against this backdrop that I share with you now my vexations at the way in which dogs are treated here in Texas (or at least in the area I travel daily to and from work). Not a week seems to elapse without my seeing the body of a dog lying by the side of the road. My anger comes in waves, my heart breaking.  Unanswerable questions flood my mind.  What home did this dog belong to? What must the family be thinking? Do they know their dog is missing? Do they know he is dead? Are there children in the home, facing the loss of their beloved boon companion? How could they not have secured their dog? Did he escape by accident? Did someone leave the door or gate open and now must endure the timeless misery of guilt?  Why does he lie there, day after day? Does no one care to retrieve him?

Sometimes the dog looks like he simply put his head down on the side of the road and slipped into a peaceful eternal slumber.  Other times, the carnage left by the accident leaves me hoping that pain was inhibited at the moment of impact. Either way, there is no excuse for these creatures to remain in their final repose for weeks on end. Soon bloated and fetid, and eventually transforming into a fur bag holding only bones, accumulating the dust and road grime wafting ever over them each day, they seem to linger there, pleading for exemption, crying in silent strains for finality as I hurry on my way, unable to avoid the scene, unable to look away.  Like some highway of death, this well-traveled road tears anew the gash in my heart every time I see the next victim.  Left there to die, and just left there.  Will I become accustomed to this over time?  Will I no longer see death’s hand by the side of the road?  Will I no longer have all of these questions surge through my mind?  I hope not. To have your heart broken requires a heart to begin with and and while mine tears anew, I defend against the nerve dulling scars and callouses that repetition imparts.  I am grateful for my Delbow and yearn to get home to give back to him that which he freely offers.