To state the obvious, I had learned so much over the years from Russ Roberts's podcast Econtalk. Thank you, sir.
What makes it even closer to my heart is that I used to listen to his long podcasts every time I took Max to his oncologist. The roundtrip was over five hours and I would have listened to 2 or 3 of his interviews while driving.
For the rest of my life, that starting music and Russ's announcement would bring back memories of driving with Max to give him more time and spontaneous eruption of a cocktail of emotions containing despair, hope, agony, pain, optimism, depression, anger, helplessness, happiness, fear, and courage. As a habit, while driving I still look in the back seat of the car, hoping to see Max laying down with his sparkling eyes looking at me.
One of Russ's latest episodes is with Dr. Azra Raza, author of the new book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last.
I used to get surprised during my younger years but not anymore. When you are into books, there is always a timely and apt book somehow "knocks" at the door.
To set the tone - Dr.Azra Raza is a practicing oncologist. She is also a cancer researcher. She lost her husband to cancer. The title of the book has an ominous ring to it, the genesis of the first cancer cell in the body is an ominous signal with little to no hope of a cure. It has been this way for centuries and we are not doing anything about it.
She covers so much ground from cancer research, current treatments, future treatments, to personal pain. Those grounds, unfortunately, overlap so much with my life so before even reading the book, this podcast interview has given me a lot to ponder about.
In this first part, I want to cover the immediate pain and loss of losing someone close and how our society doesn't "get" it. Excerpts from the interview (you can listen to the full interview here):
For the record, these people were never my emotional friends, and to be fair to them, they were forced into my grief. They would have been happy and content sending a card or text.
Nevertheless, they were forced into my grief and I never wanted them to be part of grief. I knew for years that they never understood nor attempted to understand my bond with Max.
To top all this off, Max passed away on the first day of the holiday season. Some people had this sense of "accelerate impatience" for grief. God forbid if they miss the holiday season and Christmas, shit would come out their mouth instead of arse.
Note: Call it randomness or a window into complex systems - the impossible happened within 100 days of Max's passing away and within his first birthday without him. The simple, quiet, and ordinary life we lived and happily embraced for almost 14 years was forced unwillingly upon the entire world. The eerie similarities between our lifestyle for 14 years and the current lockdown protocols across the globe and the timing of all of it make me feel that this the Earth's way of grieving for Max.
The worst part is the smile. Remember, the current fad is all about being happy and society preaches smiling like a nutcase irrespective of the situation. I guess we are already in Hurley's Brave New World or maybe, this is a different recipe of sociopaths.
Smith's wrote about this almost 300 years ago - On Acting for Others:
This was the worst day of my life and if someone cannot shut up and unable to communicate emotionally then all I can say is - see you in another life.
It is nauseating to see people who cannot even emote. In order to reason, to be intelligent, to be caring, to be kind and to have a sense of gratitude for life - we need to shed a tear when we - hear a piece of beautiful music, lose ourselves in nature, read a beautiful sentence, watch a movie scene and myriad of other things outside of our self-centered lives and families.
These uni-emotion creatures probably have rewired their brains to multi-emote only for themselves and their family. The irony is these people have, are, and will depend on other living beings for most of their lives.
The easiest way to identify and flush out these uni-emotion creatures during normal days is by simply observing them use sarcasm, pointless joke, or stupidest smile while discussing emotional and deeper topics. They will move away from such discussions as fast as a fart in the air. Some would "outsource" it to God.
Once again, Smith brilliantly captured these uni-emotion creatures "thought process" in the little finger analogy:
Those reactions had limited words and the tears in their eyes were deafening to my eyes.
I have seen my dad cry only twice in my life. The third time, I heard him cry when Max passed away. He said to me that Max was your soulmate. Little did I know that my dad felt that way. I will never forget that sentence.
An old lady who knew us for more than a decade, I went to her house a couple of days later to tell her about Max. The moment she opened the door, she saw my eyes, she started crying and hugged me and said - "I know, I know." I didn't even have to tell her about Max passing away. I will cherish that moment until my last breath.
I have known my current boss for only 6 months and he never met Max. When I went back to work after the holidays, he asked me how were the holidays. I said, I lost Max and started crying. He came running to me and believe it not - he started crying.
Few weeks before the lockdown, I had a conversation with him about his crying spontaneously after I told him about Max. Let's just say that it was one of the important conversations of my life.
There were so many tears from others I hardly knew, handwritten long notes and cards from Max's numerous vets and nurses, our fellow dog-walking friends, and surprisingly touching emails from readers of this blog whom I never met. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You all have touched me so deeply. Thank you.
These were beautiful moments. Real emotional connection and deep intelligence. No fucking amount of money, fame, and mindless busy-ness can bring peace than these little ordinary emotional moments.
Years ago I wanted to end my life. But Max came into my life and made me look at the beauty of life. Then I lived for him and thought, maybe I will live until he does. These beautiful moments and numerous other ones taught me the importance of being alive, the importance of action, and acting with limited speech, and now, it has given me the courage to see through this life without Max until the end.
If you are suffering any absurdities, please speak up. It doesn't matter if you feel angry, sad, or maybe you have a big forgiving heart and can even smile it off. But please speak up. It is important to bring this to the surface and bring a change in society. These are basic and fundamental emotions that need to be emoted. Otherwise, we homo-sapiens will diverge and evolve into a different mutated version of sapiens.
Passing laws might change "protocols" of cannibalism to slavery to factory farms. But they don't change minds. Without changing minds, we are sitting on a ticking time bomb. What changes the mind is a deep emotional realization of how rare and precious life is in space and time. A loss of one life is a huge loss. All atrocities and unspeakable sufferings arise from this human inability to emote.
If you have no one in your life and suffering in silence, reach out to me. Max inside me will help you in whatever way I can.
Maybe some of the absurdities I encountered weren't huge after all (thankfully), but many wouldn't be as lucky as I was. They need us.
I will close, with this beautiful Tamil song from a movie titled "Language". It's a story of a deaf and dumb girl falling in love.
What makes it even closer to my heart is that I used to listen to his long podcasts every time I took Max to his oncologist. The roundtrip was over five hours and I would have listened to 2 or 3 of his interviews while driving.
For the rest of my life, that starting music and Russ's announcement would bring back memories of driving with Max to give him more time and spontaneous eruption of a cocktail of emotions containing despair, hope, agony, pain, optimism, depression, anger, helplessness, happiness, fear, and courage. As a habit, while driving I still look in the back seat of the car, hoping to see Max laying down with his sparkling eyes looking at me.
One of Russ's latest episodes is with Dr. Azra Raza, author of the new book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last.
I used to get surprised during my younger years but not anymore. When you are into books, there is always a timely and apt book somehow "knocks" at the door.
To set the tone - Dr.Azra Raza is a practicing oncologist. She is also a cancer researcher. She lost her husband to cancer. The title of the book has an ominous ring to it, the genesis of the first cancer cell in the body is an ominous signal with little to no hope of a cure. It has been this way for centuries and we are not doing anything about it.
She covers so much ground from cancer research, current treatments, future treatments, to personal pain. Those grounds, unfortunately, overlap so much with my life so before even reading the book, this podcast interview has given me a lot to ponder about.
In this first part, I want to cover the immediate pain and loss of losing someone close and how our society doesn't "get" it. Excerpts from the interview (you can listen to the full interview here):
Russ Roberts: In the aftermath of your loss of your husband, you write about the profusion of inappropriate things that people say in attempts of consolation. I think about this from time to time: I think people blunder badly. In Jewish practice, when you go to the home of a mourner, Jewish law says that you're not to speak until the mourner speaks. I think people find this very difficult and some of this makes us uncomfortable; and we tend to blurt out things that often are worse than being silent. You talk about that as an example in your own personal situation. What I've always thought about this, is--this is one of those rare examples where a black and white rule like that is actually quite helpful. Sometimes those rules are just the best we can do. But the idea to sit in silence with a person who's suffering and saying nothing--that silence is yelling at us often, 'Talk, talk, talk. Say something.' And, just to sit there and let the other person speak first.For the sake of humanity and non-human animals, I have to record some absurdities that I heard after Max passed away. Thanks to Dr. Azra Raza for nudging me to open up. I didn't talk about it until now thinking it might be that my pain and anger made me filter reality. I now realize, it is very important to talk about it since it was indeed an unfiltered reality.
And, I've always thought of that injunction is about allowing the--is to keep you from saying something inappropriate. But I think it also has a deeper meaning, which is it's to get you to listen. It's not just 'Don't talk.' It's, 'Listen.' I like that rule. I think it's a really helpful rule to start, but I'm curious what advice you give people in situations of tragedy for how to behave and how you--you don't have to go into the ones that didn't help you, but I'd be curious if you would talk about some of the ones that did help.
Azra Raza: I mean, there were some wildly absurd reactions from people. Like, somebody came after Harvey died and offered to take me out to singles bars. Another person wanted to console me in a way, but the manner in which he did it was quite outlandish. He said, 'Azra, I'm so sorry Harvey died. But, don't worry. You'll join him soon and you two can live happily after ever in heaven.' That was really breathtakingly strange to me.
Russ Roberts: And, then there was that one of, 'He's gone but you look great.'
Azra Raza: Oh yeah. That one.
Russ Roberts: 'Congratulations. Don't be sad. You look fabulous.' I think there's a terrible challenge in our culture these days that no one's allowed to be unhappy. Mourning is against the rules. So, if you look sad I've got to try to cheer you up. I can't ever just let you be sad. I've got to find something. 'Your food's delicious. Your house looks great. Lovely outfit.'
Azra Raza: But, it's actually the inability of people to communicate with each other. I mean, especially emotionally.
So, what you see around you are people who are unable, in fact, not just to communicate with each other but then to give sympathy and to receive sympathy, also.
For the record, these people were never my emotional friends, and to be fair to them, they were forced into my grief. They would have been happy and content sending a card or text.
Nevertheless, they were forced into my grief and I never wanted them to be part of grief. I knew for years that they never understood nor attempted to understand my bond with Max.
I wasn't sure I should come or not.
(I am thinking - Fuck... really? and I have seen you wired up emotionally when it comes to your relationships and subjective stuff like green papers)
I have heard so many deaths in the past few weeks."I am thinking" part forced me to look at the absurdity while I was in deep pain. That is not right. Please don't do that anyone and keep your fucking mouth shut. Please shove your intelligence, your self-centered busy lives, and whatever the fucking purpose on the earth into the ass at least for a few minutes. Or just don't show up and go away.
(I am thinking - Fuck statistics. I have seen you fucking cry for stupid subjective bullshit)
To top all this off, Max passed away on the first day of the holiday season. Some people had this sense of "accelerate impatience" for grief. God forbid if they miss the holiday season and Christmas, shit would come out their mouth instead of arse.
Note: Call it randomness or a window into complex systems - the impossible happened within 100 days of Max's passing away and within his first birthday without him. The simple, quiet, and ordinary life we lived and happily embraced for almost 14 years was forced unwillingly upon the entire world. The eerie similarities between our lifestyle for 14 years and the current lockdown protocols across the globe and the timing of all of it make me feel that this the Earth's way of grieving for Max.
The worst part is the smile. Remember, the current fad is all about being happy and society preaches smiling like a nutcase irrespective of the situation. I guess we are already in Hurley's Brave New World or maybe, this is a different recipe of sociopaths.
Smith's wrote about this almost 300 years ago - On Acting for Others:
For Smith, good wishes don't count for very much unless they're followed by the hard work it takes to realize the object of our wishes. It's too easy for that kind of person to feel good about himself just because he feels bad for others. But Smith thinks there's nothing to admire in that. What really deserve our praise and admiration are not the warm feeling we can feel in private or in a passive state, but the "action" and "exertion" that take effort and energy. And Smith leaves no doubt that the work will be hard, telling us in the line that follows that someone who wants to live up to this will have to "call forth the whole vigor of his soul" and "strain every nerve." Living this sort of life will not be for the faint of heart.The craziest thing is that it is considered "impolite" to talk about these uni-emotion creatures chewing a poor animal's dead body in their mouth but it is polite to talk absurdities.
This was the worst day of my life and if someone cannot shut up and unable to communicate emotionally then all I can say is - see you in another life.
It is nauseating to see people who cannot even emote. In order to reason, to be intelligent, to be caring, to be kind and to have a sense of gratitude for life - we need to shed a tear when we - hear a piece of beautiful music, lose ourselves in nature, read a beautiful sentence, watch a movie scene and myriad of other things outside of our self-centered lives and families.
These uni-emotion creatures probably have rewired their brains to multi-emote only for themselves and their family. The irony is these people have, are, and will depend on other living beings for most of their lives.
The easiest way to identify and flush out these uni-emotion creatures during normal days is by simply observing them use sarcasm, pointless joke, or stupidest smile while discussing emotional and deeper topics. They will move away from such discussions as fast as a fart in the air. Some would "outsource" it to God.
Once again, Smith brilliantly captured these uni-emotion creatures "thought process" in the little finger analogy:
When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.On the brighter side, Max had touched so many lives and a majority of other reactions touched my heart.
Those reactions had limited words and the tears in their eyes were deafening to my eyes.
I have seen my dad cry only twice in my life. The third time, I heard him cry when Max passed away. He said to me that Max was your soulmate. Little did I know that my dad felt that way. I will never forget that sentence.
An old lady who knew us for more than a decade, I went to her house a couple of days later to tell her about Max. The moment she opened the door, she saw my eyes, she started crying and hugged me and said - "I know, I know." I didn't even have to tell her about Max passing away. I will cherish that moment until my last breath.
I have known my current boss for only 6 months and he never met Max. When I went back to work after the holidays, he asked me how were the holidays. I said, I lost Max and started crying. He came running to me and believe it not - he started crying.
Few weeks before the lockdown, I had a conversation with him about his crying spontaneously after I told him about Max. Let's just say that it was one of the important conversations of my life.
There were so many tears from others I hardly knew, handwritten long notes and cards from Max's numerous vets and nurses, our fellow dog-walking friends, and surprisingly touching emails from readers of this blog whom I never met. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You all have touched me so deeply. Thank you.
These were beautiful moments. Real emotional connection and deep intelligence. No fucking amount of money, fame, and mindless busy-ness can bring peace than these little ordinary emotional moments.
Years ago I wanted to end my life. But Max came into my life and made me look at the beauty of life. Then I lived for him and thought, maybe I will live until he does. These beautiful moments and numerous other ones taught me the importance of being alive, the importance of action, and acting with limited speech, and now, it has given me the courage to see through this life without Max until the end.
If you are suffering any absurdities, please speak up. It doesn't matter if you feel angry, sad, or maybe you have a big forgiving heart and can even smile it off. But please speak up. It is important to bring this to the surface and bring a change in society. These are basic and fundamental emotions that need to be emoted. Otherwise, we homo-sapiens will diverge and evolve into a different mutated version of sapiens.
Passing laws might change "protocols" of cannibalism to slavery to factory farms. But they don't change minds. Without changing minds, we are sitting on a ticking time bomb. What changes the mind is a deep emotional realization of how rare and precious life is in space and time. A loss of one life is a huge loss. All atrocities and unspeakable sufferings arise from this human inability to emote.
If you have no one in your life and suffering in silence, reach out to me. Max inside me will help you in whatever way I can.
Maybe some of the absurdities I encountered weren't huge after all (thankfully), but many wouldn't be as lucky as I was. They need us.
In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.
- Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and EncountersPlease don't be afraid of your emotions and please do emote when necessary. Please understand our emotions are the driving force behind our goodness. It is not easy. No one said life is easy. But as Annie said if you go inside the deeps where psychology has warned us and ride the monsters, you will find beauty. You will find peace. And you will find the importance of our complex and inexplicable caring for all creatures that we share this planet with. No laws can force you to do it. It's a personal journey that one has to embark on willingly. So, bon voyage from Max and me.
Is the language of the wind sound or music?
Is the language of the flowers colors or fragrance?
Is the language of the ocean waves or surf?
Is the language of love the eyes or the lips?
If we understand the language of nature
we don't need the languages of humanity
If we understand the language of the heart
humanity wouldn't need any language
When the wind blows, there's no direction
When love talks, there's no language
Like you can understand spoken words, you can't understand the silence
The words that the eyes speak, God doesn't know
The wandering wind that defies direction, cannot be given a form
All the languages that speak love, cannot be constricted to the world of sound
The speech spoken by the sky will be shown through raindrops
The speech of the rainbow will be shown through colors
If the truth is silenced, tears become a language
If femininity is silenced, her shyness will become a language
When all sounds are asleep, little stars become the language
In the heart where desires lie, restlessness becomes a language
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