Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Much ado... or not... or maybe just "grace"

Last night I caught a few minutes of a "House" episode where one character had some weird thing going on that they couldn't figure out for (surprise!) an hour. Big deal, right? Same story, just how long will they go before they realize it's not Lupus. It's never lupus. But that's not what I came to talk about.  It was that the main bed-ridden character had low testosterone levels. (They didn't say how low, so one, well, ok, I was left to wonder, and get competitive, "Was it lower than mine?")
So, they gave him testosterone shots.  And he turned from this wonderfully sensitive man into a complete jerk, from, one thinks, the massive bump in testosterone.  Interesting, but schtupidt (do an Arte Johnson voice from Laugh-In and you'll get it).  I mean stupid in the sense of the jerkoid factor of the character being completely driven by the hormone.

It's not that easy. I'm not playing down the factor the hormones have because I've been through something of that picture myself. But I didn't like the implication that the shift in the TV character was all hormone-driven.

Of course, I'm arguing. And I'm still in the throes of trying to understand how I was changed by a lack of a hormone and identifying what that means for the future "me".  It's not that I haven't come back to some sense of what I was before the treatment regimen (so, sex drive *does* return, happily and, surprising as it seems, annoyingly).  But having been through that treatment I am not the same, no matter if my blood tests say I'm inside the envelope now.

Oh I don't know what I'm trying to say... but I'm still trying to say it.  Why is it that I try to put words to something that has no words?  A friend of mine recalled the words of the Greek playwright Aeschylus:
     Wisdom comes through suffering.
     Trouble, with its memories of pain,
     Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
     So men against their will
     Learn to practice moderation.
     Favours come to us from gods.     (fm. Agamemnon)

...which she quoted more along the lines of Robert Kennedy's variant...
     Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
     falls drop by drop upon the heart
     until, in our own despair, against our will,
     comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

During that same discussion, somehow, the term "grace" came up.  My friend had heard the term defined by a caller on a radio show (I think) and it goes something like this:

"Grace is an event that happens, unbidden, against your will, in the midst of struggle, free to all. And after that, you're never the same."

Even if there isn't an original thought in my writing there is this: a shared experience across the ages. And so it goes.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Remembering Tom Jackson

I went to Tucson recently on one of those mixed blessing trips: a memorial gathering honoring the life of a dear friend and long-time colleague, Tom Jackson. The memorial occurred on what would have been his 60th birthday. He passed away in August, 2011 after being diagnosed in October 2010 with stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme, the same diagnosis that claimed the life of another close friend, Andreas (I wrote about losing Andreas here).

I don't remember when our paths crossed the first time, but it was certainly at work and I think we were both managers at the time. But our friendship came when we had both stepped out of management into technical positions. We shared a similar responsibilities, but it was (I think) the similarities in our sense of humor that became a true bond.  There were other things.  We both used our middle names. Our birthdays were close together. We shared a sense of irony and a sense of the absurd that just clicked and provided many laughs.  We shared an eclectic taste in music, and he introduced me to such edifying tunes as Mojo Nixon's "Don Henley Must Die" and Ten Wheel Drive's "Morning Much Better".  In a highly competitive environment we managed to maintain a friendly sense of competition.

I was on leave of absence from work when he called me and told me about his diagnosis.  He referred to the brain cancer as another step in our years of competition.  And I think I told him he had once again taken this competition too seriously.  And we cried on the phone.  Because of my experience with Andreas, I knew the statistics. Yet we had hope to beat them somehow.  And he differed wildly (from Andreas) in that his first surgery didn't take away a lot of who he was.  But I secretly worried that the tumor would return.  And it did.  I won't walk through the steps he took all the way, because it isn't that important now.

What matters is that we had a connection and let it grow into something fine.  I was fortunate to have shared some part of the last steps of the walk of this life with him and his family. We got to say what we needed to say and I treasure my memory of him.