Upon the rack of this tough world...

Time stood still this week here on the Village Green as the clock ran out on my father's life. He fought a brave battle against ILD (interstitial lung disease), living years past anyone's best prognosis. We thought he'd overcome the latest set-back -- after all he'd fought his way through various bouts of pneumonia and bounced back from a lung cancer operation only last year.

But it was not to be this time, and in the wee hours of February 25th, his pulmonary specialist called us all back to the hospital. The fibrosis was not going to be stopped this time. There were only two choices -- ventilation in order to stay alive, or allow the disease to take its deadly course.

Dad was glad to have us there. He said he'd chased the preachers out of his room twice -- politely, of course -- just as he used to turn away the religionists who knocked on our front door when we were kids. My parents raised us in proper Agnostic form -- we learned early on to question authority and to be skeptical of magical thinking. We are a godless family, but that doesn't mean we don't have family values. The difference is that our values were not all pre-written in some holy book and forced upon us by custom or convention, but rather were the outcome of diligent philosophical study and rational weighing of evidence.

My dad was lucid and clear in his instructions not to take prolonging measures. Ventilation was not an option. He turned to the doctor and said, "Well, let's get on with it then." "It" being the process of loading him up with morphine and other painkillers so that as his lungs worked harder and harder in an attempt to bring in oxygen through the thickened walls of his lungs, he would not feel any pain and would gradually drift off into unconsciousness and finally death.

No one could tell us how long it would take -- each ILD sufferer gasps his or her way to dusty death at an individual and unpredictable rate. There are a number of causes of ILD, including environmental and occupational exposures. My dad was born and raised in Akron, and grew up breathing rubber fumes along with everybody else in the city. He worked in the construction trade as a stone mason, mixing mortar and breathing in clouds of cement dust and whatever else was in the air on countless construction sites.

It seemed to take forever for the morphine and other pain meds to have an effect. His entire body was struggling and heaving on each breath, while his arms and legs kept moving in a display of resistance to the inevitable. The family members present held on to his hands, rubbed his head, shoulders and feet for hours, and he was still communicating from under his oxygen mask. He eventually drifted off, and I left to go tend everybody's pets around 5 AM. When I got back around 7 AM he was still thrashing and plucking with his hands, but seemed to be unconscious. However, he suddenly woke up around 8 am and looked at us with an expression of amazement -- he was still alive and we were still there with him. He asked about Obama and was it time for "Morning Joe" -- the Joe Scarborough show that he loved to hate on MSNBC. But the next time he drifted off into morphine-induced sleep, he stayed under until around 3:30 PM when his vital numbers went through a rapid drop and he died peacefully at last.

Before he died, I thanked my dad for being the best dad I could ever hope for. I told him how much I appreciated all the gifts he gave me: love for theatre and all the arts, for science and philosophy, for literature and history, for books and book collecting, and for Shakespeare! I am like my dad in so many ways. I love to work out a design, to make things with my hands. I am project oriented, and once the project is finished, I want to move onto something completely new and different.

When we were young, my dad was often home during the long winter months when it was too cold and snowy to be out laying bricks. Dad always had a project for those winter months. He built a life-sized replica of an Egyptian mummy case, carved a replica set of medieval chessmen, constructed marionettes, designed landscapes for around the house, and worked in his own dark room making prints of his wonderfully artistic photographs.

The best winter was the one in which we hung out together studying sailing ships. My dad started carving a hull for a model clipper ship. It was about three feet long with three masts and it was to be fully functional, with rigging and canvas sails sewn on an old Singer sewing machine by my mom. Finally the day came for it to receive its final coat of paint. I walked around it in awe -- and finally noticed that on the prow of the ship, a name had been painted -- my name! We took it out on Hinckley lake, and it sailed beautifully! Dad photographed it and the resulting images make it look like a real ship out on the rolling sea! We sang sea chanteys as we oared our way behind it in a row boat.

I loved to follow my dad around the garden, and I picked up his love for tending beds of flowers and vegetables. We would often have deep philosophical discussions while we worked outside. I remember asking him once, "Daddy, what is a miracle?" He asked me to imagine a giant ice cream cone dropping down from the sky and landing point down in our back yard. I duly imagined it, and he asked, "Now what are the chances of that actually happening?" I said, "Not much of a chance at all." Then he talked about how miracles are usually claimed by other people, but he'd never witnessed one with his own eyes and that until he did, he would remain skeptical.

Another philosophical discussion that made a deep impact was one about how in life, we need not always see things in absolutes, that not all questions can be answered in terms of black or white. He asked me how many shades of grey are there, and I immediately realized there were too many shades to begin to count.

My dad was very fond of literature, and could quote at will from many sources. The title of this post is from King Lear, which Dad quoted in the hours before his death:

O, let him pass! he hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

He loved Dylan Thomas and used to recite the following poem to me when I was young. He continues to teach me, beyond his final breath, how to live life to its fullest and how to face death with courage. I will always think of him when I read this poem:

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Groping for the words...

...to describe what it feels like to have some stranger's hand unexpectedly squeeze your private parts. Yes, it is a violation and in my case, it brought about extreme rage. I turned and screamed obscenities at the grinning and rapidly departing face of the young man who had stuck his hand between my legs as I had turned away from the street to unlock my door.

This incident occurred many years ago, in the Adams Morgan area of Washington, D.C. But it can happen anywhere at any time to any woman of any age. It happened to two women at the Chapel Hill Mall this week, as reported in today's ABJ. One woman states that upon feeling the grope, she turned and hit the man:

``His whole body just brushed up into mine,'' she said. ``And then he grabbed my butt. It felt intentional. It was not just a bump. I turned around and I said, `You just groped me,' and I punched him in the arm and the shoulder.

``He was just shocked and ran out. I was so angry that he could just get away with that. I thought, he just walked in here grabbed me and then walked out.''

Good for her! I wish I had done the same so many years ago.

Not only did she strike back, she got the authorities to arrest the guy and during the process another young woman appeared who said the same man had groped her while she was shopping at Victoria's Secret. Neither woman knew each other. The accused perp in this case turns out to be an assistant pastor at The Chapel in Akron who claims to be innocent of the charges. What he was doing in Victoria's Secret and Charlotte Russe stores at the mall remains to be determined.

Ever since the day that I was so rudely handled by a strange man, I have learned some self defense techniques that can come in quite handy. A feminist friend of mine uses reverse discrimination on out of control perverts. She screams all those negative foul words that have been created to keep women in our places. If you want to see something amazing, look at the faces of men who are unespectedly addressed as "whore," "bitch" and "cunt." They literally freeze in their tracks and don't know how to respond.

I prefer to use my old trusty friend, William Shakespeare. There is a fabulous monologue in Richard III by Lady Anne, one of history's saddest victims. Shakespeare gives her some marvelous passages to show us how much hatred she has at the beginning of the play for Richard. Try screaming the following at any man who is harassing you in public:

Foul devil, for God's sake, hence and trouble us not;
For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell,
Fill'd it with cursing cries and deep exclaims.
If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds,
Behold this pattern of thy butcheries.--
O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry's wounds
Open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh!
Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity;
For 'tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells;
Thy deeds, inhuman and unnatural,
Provokes this deluge most unnatural.--
O God, which this blood mad'st, revenge his death!
O earth, which this blood drink'st, revenge his death!
Either, heaven, with lightning strike the murderer dead;
Or, earth, gape open wide and eat him quick,
As thou dost swallow up this good king's blood,
Which his hell-govern'd arm hath butchered.

When performing this, be sure to include various invisible characters in your actions. That will put the creep on edge, for sure. I have used this technique on the streets of Akron and invariably the male who was intent on bothering me backed off and made a rapid exit.

For those women who are determined to take back the streets and walk upon them whenever and wherever they choose, I would also encourage lessons in self-defense and some kind of concealed pepper spray and/or alert whistle.

Honour is a mere scutcheon

Shakespeare's history plays are all too timeless. Contenders and pretenders elbow each other for the crown, grasping and grappling for the patriarchal staff of authority. Somehow they manage to convince thousands of men to face each other on a field of battle and go at it with swords and pikes until enough blood has gushed away on one side or the other.

Sitting in the enveloping darkness of the theatre tonight watching Henry IV Part 1, the following speech brought all of my senses to attentiveness. The actor, alone in a pool of light, gave us the following words -- in a delivery so profoundly true to the moment that I felt a burning tear in the corner of my eye:

"Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air - a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon - and so ends my catechism."

A scutcheon is the shield that is painted on a coat of arms. It offers no real protection. Staying the course may sound honorable to some, but the warriors would prefer they have body armor.

The words the leaders use to send the young men off to war may have changed in form over the years, but the end result remains the same. Young people die for no good reason, while others bear wounds that will never heal.