Considering the Alternative

Robin Williams' recent suicide had me thinking about my father.

My father, a doctor who died over 20 years ago, had Parkinson's for the last 20 or so years of his life. Every day he got up in the morning and left the modest, middle-class home he lived in and went to his medical office in the lower level of the modest, middle-class home where his parents lived a block away.

Unintentional sepia, at Shea Stadium (Margo D. Beller)

A child of immigrants and a striver. As far as I know, he never thought of killing himself.

Then again, my father was the type of man who would not let feelings like that be known to anyone in his family. He defined himself by being a respectable man in an honored profession.

But I am sure he felt terrified at what would be coming because soon after his diagnosis he contacted one of medical school classmates who was running the Parkinson's program at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NY and allowed himself to be used as a guinea pig to test what was then new and untested treatments. I'd have done the same thing.

There is no cure for Parkinson's, and while the drugs helped a lot, he got worse. Along the way his doctor-wife died, his children moved out, his parents died. He kept going to work until he was finally forced to retire. A few years later he died of complications from a stroke. He was 73.

Robin Williams was 63, a few years older than me. Like my father, Williams was, by all reports, comfortable financially and had people around him to care for him, family and those he could hire.

But I know he was terrified, too. Battling depression and addiction, a man known for manic, sometimes physical comedy, the thought of becoming rigid and debilitated must have put him over the edge.

A lot of us know that feeling. One of my friends, about Williams' age, told me if she ever gets too sick to take care of herself she wants to go out on a "sunset cruise" where she is sailed beyond U.S. waters, drinks poisoned champagne and her body tossed to the fishes. 

Some people just soldier on, like my father, until the end. Those who go to church trust in a happy hereafter for their souls. One of my friends smoked himself into an early grave and when he went it was sudden and he never saw it coming.

I'm not a church-goer and MH and I don't smoke or have children to care for us. At some point, one or the other of us won't be around to care for the other or this house and its considerable amount of stuff. I fear that day.

So do most Baby Boomers I know, the ones who believe the advertisers who tell us we can keep going (using their products) as though we are still 20-year-olds despite the increasing stiffness in the morning, the misplaced glasses, the names and dates we can't remember without notes.

Williams wasn't aging well, according to one news report. Neither am I.  As the joke goes, consider the alternative.

Many do.

I find it no coincidence that there is an increasing movement in many states for doctor-assisted suicide. After living a life of doing what we want and setting trends for generations to come (or so magazines like AARP's tell me), my generation is terrified of coming face to face with the inevitable.

"Hope I die before I get old," sang Roger Daltrey in 1965. Does he feel the same way now at 70? (Or does Pete Townsend, now 69, who wrote the song?)

When we didn't "die young and leave a beautiful corpse," we thought we'd live forever. Advertisers abet this -- like the guy in the vitamin ad I've seen who is told by the voiceover to "do what you've always done" and not let "age get in the way" of surfing that 50-foot wave despite being over 60.

But it's coming, whether you like it or not. I can't ignore the decay as I get closer to the age my mother was when she died, which is why I and others were shaken by Robin Williams' suicide. I own my comfortable, middle-class home thanks to my father, but I would not say I am financially secure. What is "secure" nowadays at our age when we are one medical catastrophe from financial disaster?

There are times when the dreariness of everyday life -- making the bed, folding the laundry, the prospect of shoveling the snow again and paying the bills on declining income - makes me want to end it. Like the man in the old song, "I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin'."

But Ole Man River just keeps rollin' along.

Groundhog Day

I have never seen the Bill Murray film "Groundhog Day" but I know the premise - you hear about it every February 2.

A weatherman finds himself living the same day over and over again. 

I would not want to relive the same day over and over again until I get it "right," whatever that is. I look at every day as an experiment. What will I do this time that is better than last time?

When you work every day and do the same thing over and over again, it isn't easy to accomplish this. When you get to the weekend it seems there is not enough time in the day.

As I write today, Feb. 2, it is 52 degrees. It feels like spring after weeks of "polar vortex." Last night I kept the heat closed and a window open, rising in the morning to find a 56-degree house. Once the heat warmed the house to a tolerable level, I shut it off and opened a few windows again, letting in some valuable moisture from the melting snow. I want all the snow gone but it takes a long time to melt the 14 inches (12+2+2) that fell from three storms within 10 days, and more is expected tonight into tomorrow.

(R.E. Berg-Andersson)

And more cold, forcing the windows shut, the heat on and my hands to return to the sandpaper they were before I opened the windows.

By coincidence, it is also Super Bowl Sunday. People say how the National Football League "lucked out" that what could've been an extremely cold championship game last weekend will be seasonable or better today. People are going to parties. They will pay more attention to the advertisements than the game because the alleged "news" reports have told them to do so. They have been told all week what an "event" this is. It has dominated the news, more so than the killings in Africa, the Middle East and even in parts of Newark.

People are "stocking up" on junk food and beer and will stuff themselves as they do on Thanksgiving -- only this "holiday" is truly secular and they can spend it with people they choose, not their relatives. They will hope to win huge amounts of money from their office betting pools.

The football game itself will be almost an after-thought.

The spectacle is the same every year, and this is as close to "Groundhog Day" as I get - not a repeat of the same day but the same events every year. If it is February, we will spend the next few Saturdays, weather permitting of course, celebrating my birthday and that of a friend - and I have a lot of friends born in February. It is like getting 3 birthday parties. That part is good.

But sitting here with the open window reminds me of another annual ritual I do not like - barking dogs and home repair noises by my more energetic neighbors (or the men they hire) and children finally allowed outside to play. The same windows that have kept in the dry, hot air that makes me sneeze and drink glasses of water also kept out the noises that distract me as I work.

Soon enough will come dog walkers (like the ones passing by now) and kids not in school and more owners with dogs in the dog park and the smell of barbeques and the roar of lawn mowers and leaf blowers.

The thought of all that happening again and again until the bitter end depresses me, like looking down an endless, dark corridor. In a sense, that is what aging is.

It is inevitable, but for now let us not go there.

Cardinal pair (Margo D. Beller)

Let us, instead, think ahead to the annual ritual of when the birds head north. Right now, my feeders have drawn an assortment including juncos, white-throated sparrows, cardinals, titmice, chickadees, Carolina wren, downy and hairy and redbellied woodpeckers. I long for the bright yellows of the warblers and to see some of the larger birds - tanagers, flycatchers, grosbeaks and ducks. I want to go out and find them on my work breaks and my weekends.

Even though I will once again be struggling with pots of vegetables and repairing the damage done by chipmunks, I want to look up and see northbound Canada geese. I want the snow to be gone. I want to complete the projects I didn't have the time or energy to complete last fall.

I want to try and do better this year.

Isn't that what spring is all about, having another chance to get it right?


(Happy birthday, Candita, wherever you are.)