The doctor said that untreated, I could be in months.
It began when my phone while we were in the at the American Museum of Natural History. My 5-year-old was us with the fact that it would take 70 friends standing hand to hand to make a the life-size blue whale hanging from the ceiling.
I had been the call. broken ribs, and some that something was wrong. Still, it felt to be told I had an incurable , one that I would later find out had felled my hero, the Norm Macdonald. I felt a youthful 47, walking four miles every morning in the park and always taking the to my eighth-floor . The from the film “50/50” came to where, upon being told he had , a young man responds , “That doesn’t make any , though. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I recycle.”
The warm older doctor told me that this was not her of , so she would transfer me to another in her hospital.
The was by of kids. She told me it was not curable but was treatable and she hoped I would have many years left and, by the way, I was lucky not to have the in her specialty, since those tended to die quickly and painfully. Somehow this did not me.
“Please don’t drop me,” I . She told me my new doctor would be calling me an hour and wished me . I the late afternoon chaos of the museum and sat on a shady on that early day surrounded by Upper West Side .
It was 42 minutes before my phone again. My of questions for the new doctor had from “How do I have left?” to “Can I still drink soda water?” But the call out to be just his secretary asking if I was free on Friday of the week (10 days away) for a . I that this all rather more . She that in the I could talk to my — the same guy who had many red flags over the past of years and who was now on my never-talk-to-again of one.
And then there was no one on the line.
In “Anna Karenina,” when Levin’s brother Nikolai is dying in , Levin is so physically and psychologically repulsed that he the and dreads the it brings. By , Levin’s young wife, Kitty, views Nikolai with and for him with tenderness and . Her acceptance allows her to the grimness of with grace.
I have generally been private about my , my time as a just that reflex. I my self believed the world to be full of Levins. But I needed a doctor, so I stayed on that bench and contacted everyone I could think of who might help me find the right one — friends, some folks I hadn’t spoken to in years, ex-colleagues, a high school girlfriend, a former potential subject for a and so on.
Within hours, friends of friends were sending emails on my behalf to across the country. In the end, a doctor saw me and delivered my : With , I might just make it to a , maybe 10 years away. But , it was not just a doctor I was for but something more important.
Since that day, so many people have shown up as Kittys rather than the Levins I had . by a bus instead, I would have not only seeing people at their best but also been robbed of the to feel this — as as it sounds — for having been allowed this in the first .
A few days after I had , a dear friend of mine with his own health problems from hours away to show up at our door lugging two huge bags from his favorite restaurant. “When a friend is in , you ,” he said. I was of when Lou Gehrig, a , called himself “the luckiest man on the of the earth.”
I am not writing here to advice to you, dear , but I do your . Knowing that you are an of many rather than a few is a strong to organize my and, now, to leave this as a for my boy.
Before my , if I was going to give him one bit of advice, it would have been, “Never an to be generous; they are than you think.” I wish I had lived that more. But today I’d like to a , “Don’t be afraid to allow others those , too.”
Maybe it’s the talking, but what has to me is that without intimate human , however fleeting, we are . Everything else so small . It feels like something I had always known — perhaps something that deep down we all know — but then real life made me forget.
And all this, real life has had the to keep on doing what it does. Before split my world into Kittys and Levins, there had always been a few old jerks to with, and , they didn’t go away. I’ll those human .
But , and in those moments when we truly hear it, life’s complexities can fade, leaving behind a striking clarity.