In the last fifteen years, there has been so much talk in our culture about what is and is not therapeutically acceptable, and what we do and do not have to put up with from other people. Unfortunately, we’ve left little room for one thing, and that’s our human nature. We have so little patience for the things that make us human, and even less understanding of these things. It bothers me that instead of dealing with what’s really going on with people or helping them heal, we tend to just recommend they pay someone else to hear about their problems or go on medication. The truth is, most people don’t need medication. They need understanding and help.
Take my mom, for example, who was with my father for five decades before his death last year. Growing up, I remember them being deeply into each other—they were partners. When he passed away, my mom was struck down. Her insides were crumbling. Yet when she went to see a doctor, he told her she was depressed and prescribed antidepressants and sleeping pills. When I heard about it, my first thought was, I’m going to sue this motherfucker! When the love of your life—the person you’ve spent forty-two years building your whole world around—is gone, grief is a normal, healthy response! How can anyone want to live in a world where normal means crying for a week after your love of half a century dies, but then feeling great because you’re on Wellbutrin? This has become normal nowadays. But that’s Stephen King’s world—that is not God’s world.
All these medications we’re so obsessed with nowadays aren’t real solutions; they’re just temporary, inadequate aids that separate us from our friends, our personalities, and ultimately our being, constructing a plexiglass shield between our soul and the way we express ourselves. Our soul is put behind a partition, left to mime in vain. Unless you’re clinically depressed or bipolar or the kind of person who runs around naked singing “When the Saints Go Marching In” while waving a chain saw, maybe you don’t really need to be medicated. Sometimes the easy way out is not the best yogic move. There are plenty of times I too want to medicate myself through my troubles, so I can go through life above the fray, not feeling anything uncomfortable or painful and not offending anyone. There’s just one problem: I’m living!
At this point in my life, when I call people friends, I pretty much mean that I intend on knowing them for a long time. I may not call them every day, and I may not even see them for a year or two, but I am going to be there for them in some capacity if they ever need me. I know that even I can’t say, “Oh, you have this strange brain disease. I’m going to quit my job and be with you every day,” or “You just broke up with your boyfriend? Let me take a week off.” We all have to be productive in our jobs and in society. Our lives will always be time-consuming, and there will always be more things that come up with our friends than we can personally handle. But I also believe there is a greater requirement to true friendship than going to a nightclub a couple times a week trying to score dudes. We need to tend seriously to our friendships on all levels—physical, social, emotional, psychic, and spiritual, and in fact if we see a breakdown in any of these elements, we need to step up our game. Swoosh!
Chapter Eight
Seasons in the Sun
I cannot think of death as more than the going out of one room into another.
—William Blake
Let me tell you something. All the people you love are someday going to die. I’ve already lost three of the people I’ve most feared losing: my grandparents and my father (Ava and my mother are the other two; I don’t fear my own death anymore). But it was only last year, at my father’s deathbed, that I finally got it.
Death is like birth, and the soul entering the body and leaving it are equally beautiful and celebratory events, filled with work. When you die, your soul is literally in labor, trying to separate itself from the body and move on to its next phase. (Like giving birth, it can take a while.) Rolling Ava around SoHo in her stroller when she was a baby, I’d often bump into elderly people being pushed in their wheelchairs by caretakers, and it was hard not to notice that the beginning and end of life have a lot in common. We don’t have teeth or hair, and we rely on someone else to meet our physical needs.
My question is, why don’t we celebrate these life events with equal sincerity? The normal way of celebrating death in our culture is to deny or outright avoid it. It’s unfortunate that physical death—the one thing guaranteed us in this world—also happens to be most people’s greatest fear. I’m evolved enough to know that my physical body can die at any minute, and that spiritual practice is no guarantee I’ll live to be ninety-four. Sometimes the good really do die young, and sometimes evil motherfuckers die old. Most people are afraid of what happens at the end, so they try not to think about it; they don’t want to see dying people, and they shield their children from them. They refuse to acknowledge that from the moment we’re born, “death is stalking us,” as the philosopher Carlos Castaneda wrote.
But if anything, my father’s death made me realize that loved ones’ deaths should be VIP events! Let’s think about this. How many times have you been invited to a great birthday party, a really fun wedding, an engagement party, or a baby shower? Well, when was the last
