I sometimes tell my students about "Gus's Threefold Path to Happiness". I always preface it by saying that there is more than one path to happiness, and you should always run screaming from anyone who claims there's only one path, because that person has an agenda, and whatever it is, it probably isn't in your best interest. Mine is just one possible path- I can't remember if I've written about it before, so here it is:
1) Learn to love people.
Not all of them individually- there are a LOT of assholes out there. But people in their messy aggregate. Because doing so keeps you optimistic, and makes your heart strong. Otherwise, you end up cynical and unhappy, and that's a terrible way to live.
2) Learn to love learning.
Because doing so keeps your mind strong, and because if you do, then you can never be bored, because there will always be something else out there to learn about.
3) Learn to love baseball.
Because it's a metaphor for life. Here are just a few of many ways in which this is true: you start at home, and you spend pretty much most of the game trying to get back home in one way or another. Like life, most of baseball is fairly routine, but if you learn to appreciate its subtleties, even the routine stuff is interesting in its way, and the routine bits are punctuated by moments of the greatest joy, and moments of the most crushing sadness and disappointment. Baseball, like life, is a curious mix of individual performance and performance of the others that individual relies on. And finally, as with life, you know precisely when baseball starts, but you have no idea when it is going to end. Sure, there's a statistical average length of a baseball game, and most games are going to be around that long, but sometimes games go into extra innings, and last a lot longer than you thought.
And sometimes, a game you were really excited to see gets rained out before it even really gets a chance to begin.
This is a story about one of those rainouts.
MK, who is one of the most amazing people I know, got married almost 2 years ago in NYC to Carrie, who is also amazing. Keiko and I went to the wedding and had a blast, as expected, since those two are always a riot. A couple months after the dinner party in CA where Ed almost killed himself, they discovered that they were pregnant with twins. Natural ones- no fertility treatments involved. From the beginning, it seemed like a tough pregnancy, but MK & Carrie fought through it with their typical wry senses of humor.
This summer, they found out they had Twin-to-twin Transfusion Syndrome. TTTS occurs when one twin is essentially starving the other by taking the lion's share of the nutrients in utero. This situation does not typically end well for one or both of the twins, but MK & Carrie went to Philadelphia to get a cutting edge surgeon to do an operation to try and save both twins.
And miraculously, it worked. Both twins made it through.
Thus, Fisher and Truman were eagerly anticipated. The plan was to keep them in until the 3rd trimester, and then get them out of there and into incubators. The surgery would serve to make it possible for them to live long enough to make it to the 3rd trimester.
And on October 15th, Fisher and Truman were born. Obviously, they were super primi babies, but they made it into the incubators, and we were all thrilled for MK & Carrie. They had many funny stories about it all, which MK blogged about. I will include the link to that blog at the end of this post. It's worth reading.
So began the wait to see how they would do in the incubators, and after a month, it seemed like they were doing well enough that talk began to shift to a discussion of when they would finally be able to come home from the hospital.
Then, on Monday, Fisher was diagnosed with necrotizing endocolitis (hoepfully I'm spelling that right). Basically, bacteria was eating his intestines. It was pretty serious, and no Tuesday they did a major operation to try and save him. As a result of his diagnosis, they also checked Truman, and he had a similar issue, but not nearly as advanced. In fact, it was caught early enough that he could simply go on antibiotics and not have to do an operation.
Fisher made it through the operation on Tuesday, but was looking at needing at least another one. And on Wednesday, in his mother's arms, surrounded by family, he died, barely more than a month old. But in so doing, he may well have saved his brother's life.
It is moments like these that can cause a person to wonder: what is the point of it all? Is it that there's no point at all, as many an atheist would claim? Or is it "God works in mysterious ways yada yada yada insert cliched judeo-christian nonsense here"? Or is it that somewhere out there, there is a vast reservoir of consciousness, which you can call God or whatever you want, and from that reservoir bits of consciousness come to earth and are born, in order to accomplish some task?
I don't pretend to have answers to such questions, but I do know that Fisher saved his brother's life, and in doing so, accomplished more of significance in his one month of life than many people will in their entire existences. I wish I had gotten to meet him- I assumed that eventually I would. His passing serves to remind us all that the most important thing of all is spending time with those we care about, because it is not given us to know how much time they or we have left. It's altogether too easy to forget that little lesson in the daily routine of life.
And so, Fisher, I bid you Godspeed, on whatever journey awaits you on the other side. I will look forward to meeting you there someday.
MK's Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Blog:
http://twintotwintransfusion.blogspot.com/
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