In maudlin moments, I find myself speculating that I have been some kind of “tragedy magnet” in this life.
This is ridiculous, of course. My life is perhaps more tragic than the lives of some others, if one wants to inspect it on those terms. But it is still so much less tragic than many, many lives. It’s just a life.
Humans, collectively, are perhaps better conceptualized as tragedy magnets than any individual. We perceive tragedy, and that allows us to draw tragedy around us like a proudly worn, tattered cloak.
13 years ago this week, my wife Michelle committed suicide. We were separated, but talk of divorce wasn’t at that moment on the table. It was a complicated time, and painful.
In my more self-punishing moments, I could imagine that I brought her suicide on, myself. Or that she and I, together, brought that tragedy on ourselves. After all, she and I chose the lives we were making… or failing to make.
But then life went on, after that.
In that same kind of self-punishing moment, I wonder how much of my current cancer (now that the doctors are calling it that without circumspection) is the result of “incorrect thinking.” I don’t mean that I’m conceptualizing this newly discovered illness as a kind of punishment for sins, because I don’t believe in sins – but rather, I’m talking about psychosomatic processes: a somatic expression of my broken psyche.
Of course there are senses in which this is true. There are senses, though, in which it is not true.
Scientifically – medically – psyche plays a role (via the way that stress impacts the body, if nothing more), but there are many other factors: genetics, pollution in the environment, bad habits of diet or tobacco (when I was much younger, if referring to me specifically) or lack of exercise, or even random stray cosmic rays zapping just the wrong molecules of DNA at just the wrong moment.
But cumulatively, my psyche has a job to do, too, and so I sometimes imagine I’ve brought this onto myself.
Should I just let it run its course? Is this creature meant to be fought?
Such a futile thing: to purchase a few more years, of uncertain quality, in exchange for a price of a vast amount of treasure and energy and willpower and yes, pain. I really don’t like pain.
Below, an utterly random and definitely unseasonal picture from my archive: the frozen Lake in Ilsan in January, 2009.
Those footprints in the snow on the frozen ice… There I go.
