Iivo sent a link to a commentary on a movie we had seen together on his birthday last December: "The Light Will Die." The way I looked at it then, Interstellar was one of those very sic-fi phantasies. Apparently, our world was doomed, once again, and some heroic astronauts went out into the universe to look for a place where our race could find a new living space. It was along the line of Jules Verne and by its routine and repetitiousness of subject, it was not even as great a phantasmic vision as those Jules Verne presented to us a long, long time ago.
Then came Iivo's link to this commentary, and it once again showed me how shallow my own everyday thinking has become and how I should look with more humility at the creative efforts of others. A modern movie might just as well contain some deeper thoughts than the flickering images of human events might let you know. The story line of this movie is not about space flight at all. That part is just a prop to the deeper thoughts about dying and death, about religion, and, as this commentary points out, "metaphysical and emotional themes about fatherhood and survival."
This commentary was published in The Aquila Report, a paper that I have not paid any attention to before, but Iivo's heads-up prompted me to browse a little farther and another commentary caught my eye and kept me reading and thinking until late into the night. This one, by David Robertson, carries the title "What Happened When I Almost Died."
Now this Robertson is not to be confused with the baseball player, I think, because right in the beginning he relates what "happened after he conducted a wedding." Baseball pitchers very seldom conduct weddings, so this must be a member of the ecclesiastic league. What happened to him was that he collapsed and was taken to the hospital and found to have two bleeding ulcers, one of them over an artery, which of course spurted blood most profusely and brought him to the gates of the promised land. He was brought back by the medical arts and prayer from people who know him and heard of his desperate situation and prayed for him. I wish you would search The Aquila Report and read this commentary for yourself. For me, it brought back memories simply because of the close similarities with what happened to me last summer.
I got up in the morning as usual, and had my usual breakfast of raw bits with banana and milk, and went on the road to do a bit of shopping down in the valley. Somewhere near noon time I began to feel so terribly thirsty that I stopped at a grocery store and got me a big bottle of spring water. This is very uncommon for me. I have been known to go days without a drop to drink. After all, we consist of mostly water and evaporating a few percentage points is no big deal. Or is it? By mid afternoon, I had almost finished this bottle, but drinking water did not make feel any better, so I pushed myself back up the mountain and home. That evening, I decided not to have any dinner. I just felt so blah there was no interest in food or even a thought lost on my usual glass of wine. I finished the water, took a tall glass of fresh water, and went to bed early.
Later that night I woke up with the need to go to the bathroom and while there I started feeling rather very lightheaded and was glad to get back to bed and stretch out. The trips to the bathroom were repeated in the dark maybe three or four times during that night, and on each of those trips the lightheadedness got worse as soon as I stood up, until I passed out during my last trip. I came to again after a while, crumpled up on the floor, but feeling better, and I stretched out on the carpet to regain some strength, which appeared to have left me almost completely.
After a while I thought to have gathered enough energy to make it back to bed, and I actually reached it, but very unstylishly, lurching into the bedroom and falling like a log over to foot end of my mattress, where I rested for some time until I could grapple into a more formal sleeping position.
About that time it occurred to me that I might need some help. I got my cell phone and got to turn it on and dialed 911 and the friendly voice on the other end of these areal wires led me through the procedure by a lot of questions and eventually announced that the crew was on its way.
It occurred to me that the rescuers had no way to get in to the house. I toyed with the thought to direct them over to Chip's house to get the emergency key, but Chip's sleeping and waking habits are such that I discarded this idea very quickly. It was probably between two or three in the morning when all this went on. So I asked the dispatcher to 'hold a second' and crawled out of bed and over to the front door and got the latch unlocked and crawled back to bed. By that time I had realized that this awful lightheadedness hit me every time I lifted my head a bit higher than my heart, and that is where the crawling came in. It allowed me to stay about as close to horizontal as is possible.
The EMT crew came and found their way in and took me to the hospital, where the doctors found out that I had two bleeding ulcers...
There is a page on the internet that says 'an average man of 150 lb. will have around 8 pints of blood. Not many average men I came across since I left boyhood weigh 150 lb., but if I prorate this given weight to my 200 pounds that would grant me shy of 11 pints of blood and the doctors at the hospital said I had lost between four or five of them before I came to the ER.
When I came to the hospital the bleeding had stopped. Actually it had stopped some time ago because that urge to go to the bathroom had not returned to me since the last downfall I mentioned above.
I am sure nobody prayed for me but there absolutely must have been some protective hand over me, even if you admit the scientists' explanation that the bleeding stopped when the pressure in my veins dropped so low that the opening in my artery closed on natural tension alone. That's one thought I have often: my fate was not in human hands.
The other thought is a bit more complex: I have watched so much death invade my family, and sat for so many days and nights at the side of the beds of loved ones, that I began to see death as not only unavoidable, but as desirous. We talk so much about 'the promised land' and 'going home' that the thought of being the one who's going holds no terror.
There are times when the awareness of being alone is overwhelming and I pray to get passage to the promised land.
And yet, when the time came and I could have stretched my hand out for my ticket, I hesitated and called 911 instead. Why? There was no pain nor the sense of real discomfort. There was no conscious thought about picking up that phone. There was, so I think, a will to live that is stronger than man's desire to 'go home'.
To once again quote from Dylan Thomas' poem:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day:
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Then came Iivo's link to this commentary, and it once again showed me how shallow my own everyday thinking has become and how I should look with more humility at the creative efforts of others. A modern movie might just as well contain some deeper thoughts than the flickering images of human events might let you know. The story line of this movie is not about space flight at all. That part is just a prop to the deeper thoughts about dying and death, about religion, and, as this commentary points out, "metaphysical and emotional themes about fatherhood and survival."
This commentary was published in The Aquila Report, a paper that I have not paid any attention to before, but Iivo's heads-up prompted me to browse a little farther and another commentary caught my eye and kept me reading and thinking until late into the night. This one, by David Robertson, carries the title "What Happened When I Almost Died."
Now this Robertson is not to be confused with the baseball player, I think, because right in the beginning he relates what "happened after he conducted a wedding." Baseball pitchers very seldom conduct weddings, so this must be a member of the ecclesiastic league. What happened to him was that he collapsed and was taken to the hospital and found to have two bleeding ulcers, one of them over an artery, which of course spurted blood most profusely and brought him to the gates of the promised land. He was brought back by the medical arts and prayer from people who know him and heard of his desperate situation and prayed for him. I wish you would search The Aquila Report and read this commentary for yourself. For me, it brought back memories simply because of the close similarities with what happened to me last summer.
I got up in the morning as usual, and had my usual breakfast of raw bits with banana and milk, and went on the road to do a bit of shopping down in the valley. Somewhere near noon time I began to feel so terribly thirsty that I stopped at a grocery store and got me a big bottle of spring water. This is very uncommon for me. I have been known to go days without a drop to drink. After all, we consist of mostly water and evaporating a few percentage points is no big deal. Or is it? By mid afternoon, I had almost finished this bottle, but drinking water did not make feel any better, so I pushed myself back up the mountain and home. That evening, I decided not to have any dinner. I just felt so blah there was no interest in food or even a thought lost on my usual glass of wine. I finished the water, took a tall glass of fresh water, and went to bed early.
Later that night I woke up with the need to go to the bathroom and while there I started feeling rather very lightheaded and was glad to get back to bed and stretch out. The trips to the bathroom were repeated in the dark maybe three or four times during that night, and on each of those trips the lightheadedness got worse as soon as I stood up, until I passed out during my last trip. I came to again after a while, crumpled up on the floor, but feeling better, and I stretched out on the carpet to regain some strength, which appeared to have left me almost completely.
After a while I thought to have gathered enough energy to make it back to bed, and I actually reached it, but very unstylishly, lurching into the bedroom and falling like a log over to foot end of my mattress, where I rested for some time until I could grapple into a more formal sleeping position.
About that time it occurred to me that I might need some help. I got my cell phone and got to turn it on and dialed 911 and the friendly voice on the other end of these areal wires led me through the procedure by a lot of questions and eventually announced that the crew was on its way.
It occurred to me that the rescuers had no way to get in to the house. I toyed with the thought to direct them over to Chip's house to get the emergency key, but Chip's sleeping and waking habits are such that I discarded this idea very quickly. It was probably between two or three in the morning when all this went on. So I asked the dispatcher to 'hold a second' and crawled out of bed and over to the front door and got the latch unlocked and crawled back to bed. By that time I had realized that this awful lightheadedness hit me every time I lifted my head a bit higher than my heart, and that is where the crawling came in. It allowed me to stay about as close to horizontal as is possible.
The EMT crew came and found their way in and took me to the hospital, where the doctors found out that I had two bleeding ulcers...
There is a page on the internet that says 'an average man of 150 lb. will have around 8 pints of blood. Not many average men I came across since I left boyhood weigh 150 lb., but if I prorate this given weight to my 200 pounds that would grant me shy of 11 pints of blood and the doctors at the hospital said I had lost between four or five of them before I came to the ER.
When I came to the hospital the bleeding had stopped. Actually it had stopped some time ago because that urge to go to the bathroom had not returned to me since the last downfall I mentioned above.
I am sure nobody prayed for me but there absolutely must have been some protective hand over me, even if you admit the scientists' explanation that the bleeding stopped when the pressure in my veins dropped so low that the opening in my artery closed on natural tension alone. That's one thought I have often: my fate was not in human hands.
The other thought is a bit more complex: I have watched so much death invade my family, and sat for so many days and nights at the side of the beds of loved ones, that I began to see death as not only unavoidable, but as desirous. We talk so much about 'the promised land' and 'going home' that the thought of being the one who's going holds no terror.
There are times when the awareness of being alone is overwhelming and I pray to get passage to the promised land.
And yet, when the time came and I could have stretched my hand out for my ticket, I hesitated and called 911 instead. Why? There was no pain nor the sense of real discomfort. There was no conscious thought about picking up that phone. There was, so I think, a will to live that is stronger than man's desire to 'go home'.
To once again quote from Dylan Thomas' poem:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day:
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I enjoyed that birthday movie very much, and I thought about it a lot afterwards. Beyond the exciting action while watching it, it opened up pondering about the nature of life and death and survival. Reading your words about your experience that night has done the same, and I, for my part, am very glad that you did not on that night extend your hand into the Other Hand and leave us for that final adventure into eternal life. I'm not ready yet to see you go--are we ever, really, ready to let anyone we love go?--and I'm thankful for more time together this side of eternity. After reading these words, I beseech you once again to come live with us! May we never read again of your lying in the floor alone, with no one to call out to and come running to your aid!
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