“It is no fun to be alive…”
His name is Gerry and he was born the day after I was in 1921. For those counting, that will be 100 years ago this coming April. We entered St. Paul’s Grammar School together the same day and eight years later we proudly graduated together. We had shared classrooms and instruction from the Holy Cross Sisters who taught us how to read and write and compute and pray.
We were born in the shadow of the Great War, experienced and survived the challenges of the Great Depression, and came of age during WWII. I often danced with his pretty sister at parish dances and generally he and I were good friends through the years. He became a successful sales executive, gifted with a clever Irish wit and an outgoing personality. Though deeply gregarious, he never married, preferring to devote himself to a career in business.
Today, December 8, 2020, he and I talk by telephone, with a bit of fantasy and bravado, about how we will have a riotous joint celebration next April 3-4 to mark two old guys reaching the coveted Centennial milestone. What a blast we will have!
I say “fantasy” because Gerry is lying on a hospital bed in a military facility, which has been his world for the last year. He never leaves the room.
Part of his leg was amputated and he gambols about with a government-issued prosthesis. The doctors have warned him that the other leg may suffer the same fate. He is almost blind and has very limited hearing. He is totally confined to his room, fully dependent on the caprice of staff. And in a moment of pain he says, “It isn’t any fun to be alive.”
But digging deep into his soul, he still manages to remark on the bright side: “They treat me very well here,” he says and, “The food is good.” He constantly looks for some kind of positive element in his deadening, unwavering routine. Every day, it’s the same thing. No change. Same faces. Same commands. Each day he feels he loses more and more of himself. Each day he becomes more broken and dependent. Immersed in boredom. No future…so, no fun to be alive.
He and I were raised in the same milieu: just a notch above tenement living. We had no money. We were street kids majoring in stickball with excursions to nearby Central Park for “vacation.” The Paulist Church was the center of our lives. Spiritual lives lovingly shaped by Holy Cross Nuns. Now many decades later, Gerry with his woeful existence and I with my rubbery legs supported by my faithful walker and bedeviled by BPPV (vertigo), we are two broken down old war horses trying to make it through “just today.”
But we both heard that message as kids that transcends all university degrees and worldly know-it-all-isms; every one of those holy nuns imparted it to us: “It is not up to us to decide when we shall die, that belongs to God.” We know that. Nor is it up to us to decide how we shall die, that is also up to God. We know that. Every life in the eyes of God is precious. Everyone has a special destiny designed by our Heavenly Father. We know that, too.
We know and have endlessly practiced the wisdom of St. Therese of Lisieux who showed us the “Little Way” for the little people who are swallowed up by the colossus of modern living. We learned the pragmatic style of “offering it up,” of never letting a cross or pain or brokenness go to waste. We learned how to transfer the “merit” we gained to someone else. We learned that we could always help someone else—someone we loved or someone who needed help. We learned that living “one day at a time” is what matters.
Oh yes, Gerry and I and hundreds of other dirty-necked kids in the San Juan district of New York City knew it all. The Sisters and the priests were very thorough in instructing that our primary goal in life (“Prima Primo!” “First Things First!”) was to please God and accept His Holy Will. We were to strive to become saints. This was all clear us to intellectually.
Although we did indeed have dirty necks and wore hand-me-down baggy clothes, we knew the truth and we were up to the mark spiritually. But putting into practice what one knows to be true is not necessarily easy. We boggled where everyone else does: in managing our own emotions. In those days no one spoke (or barely knew) of emotional intelligence or “EQ.” We assumed that once you knew truth and the realities, life just slipped into its proper slot. All one needed was a clear mind and strong will. That ought to do it!
But, alas, life isn’t that easily explained. In fact, there is a whole universe operating within us—outside of our usual awareness. It is called the world of feelings. Call it emotionality or whatever suits. A world of power and possibility—often unused.
That is why Gerry and I and anyone who experiences the “Cross,” in its various forms, can suffer great interior pain in spite of understanding spiritual dynamics.
Gerry knows the eternal score and so do I. But knowing the spiritual side does not make life the proverbial “piece of cake.” Suffering indeed may be part of the meaning of Life.
Perhaps, it is only by and through the Cross that life ultimately makes any sense. I hope that Gerry can make his Cross not only bearable, but also beautiful, by uniting his suffering to Jesus on His Cross. He needs God’s grace to do this.
Would you say an Ave for my friend?