It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (22 page)

One of the better antidotes I found along the way, before the actual gratitude took root, was a kind of enforced gratitude. “Thinking of those less fortunate than one’s self,” I believe the technique is called. I could have had an illness that really was incurable, not just called incurable, I tell myself. I could have come down with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – Lou Gehrig’s disease. There’s no 10 percent recovery rate there to confuse the issue. There’s only Stephen Hawking. And he can’t be said to have recovered, only to have halted the progress of the illness by fusing himself with a computer to become the first super-intelligent humanoid machine.

I could have been hit by a truck. There wouldn’t have been any questions about luck, or cures, or God then. I would have been obliterated, a few humans would have grieved, and the Earth would have continued to spin without me. I’m not a quadriplegic. I’m not homeless. Not an imprisoned Chinese intellectual. Those thoughts have all worked pretty well, at one time or another.

But now I’m able to turn to a new form of gratitude that’s not forced. I’m able to look up above my desk to see the photograph of my wife leaping into my arms the moment after we’d finished uttering our I do’s. Or the photo next to it, in which I’m casting a glance toward the wedding photographer, looking more pleased then if I’d just won an Academy Award. I can open up files of photographs on my computer to see Elisa and myself smiling and enjoying ourselves in Italy, in Hawaii, at the Grand Canyon, in Big Sur. I can know that, even if I were incapable of experiencing joy other than through revenge, I’m getting what I’ve always heard was the best kind: I’m living well.

That was a time of war. I don’t see what else you could call it. But now it’s a different era. When Elisa and I wrote our wedding vows we each included a pledge she repeated to me recently. I was feeling anxious and frightened for no reason, acting clingy and babyish, and I apologized. I thanked her for being so patient with me.

“I am your ally,” she said. “Don’t you remember? It’s what we promised in our vows. I am your ally.”

Of course, with her accent she pronounced it uh-
lie
. “I am your uh-
lie
.” So it took me a few seconds to understand. But when I did, I knew for sure not only how far I’d traveled, but where it is that I’ve arrived. Yes, I fought a war. It was long ago, but its residue remains. But when I think of Elisa. When I smile the same smile now that I smiled the day I met her. When the smile pops involuntarily over my face, itself a recognizable friend, every time she crosses my mind. Every single time. Or when I roll toward her in bed – our nest, we like to call it, to remind ourselves of the animals we are – and I simply place the knuckles of one hand against her warm skin, I feel a comfort as strong as any threat I’ve ever faced, and I know what it is I’ve found. Not only happiness. Not only joy. Not only gratitude, though it includes them all. I’ve found what I was seeking even before I endured its opposite. I’ve found peace.

I’ve found peace. And it feels good.

When bleak thoughts come anyway, when I find I can’t quite dispatch them and the best I can hope for is to counterpunch effectively, I’ve now got thoughts to turn to that offer as much comfort and protection as the fear the dark ones instill.

“I am your uh-
lie
,” I hear Elisa telling me. “I am your uh-
lie
.”

And, I swear – if only for ten or fifteen minutes – it makes me feel safe all over again.

Ever since the pregnancy Elisa and I confronted early in our relationship we had concerns about whether we’d be able to accomplish anything like it on purpose. Just this past year we decided to investigate how difficult a path toward parenthood might prove to be, so I made an appointment to have my sperm tested. We wanted to confirm our assumption that I was one of the lucky 10 percent whose sperm production had regenerated in the years since my medical treatments.

I drove myself to a strip mall in the San Fernando Valley where, after passing from my air-conditioned car through the brutal desert heat, I entered a nondescript medical office building. In suite number 302 a gruff Russian woman solicited information from me. The woman then handed me a key and a tiny, lidded plastic container. She directed me down the hall, where I let myself into a storage closet-sized room.

A reclining chair dominated the space. Facing the chair, uncomfortably close, was a television/VCR console with a videocassette dangling perilously from its lips. I looked down at the chair, the only place in the room to sit. The impressions of countless buttocks had worn dual tread marks into its upholstered surface. I sat down and pushed the videocassette into the machine’s mouth. Some of the most dispiriting pornography I’ve ever seen assaulted my senses.

I’m no prude. I have a healthy appreciation for certain stripes of porn. I believe there are a limited number of films that depict actual pleasure, exchanged between healthy individuals. The movie at this fertility clinic did not fall into this category.

What I saw were obese, seemingly drug-addicted people whose disinterest shrieked off the screen. They were plodding through gyrations in zombie-like states. You’d think a fertility clinic in the pornography capital of the world would have something better than the dregs of the genre. I snapped the television off.

The first masturbatorium (as they’re known in the andrology industry) I’d entered twenty years earlier had been furnished with a utilitarian metal folding chair. I’d found that choice inconsiderate. Faced with the faded recliner I had to admit to its equal impracticality. Remember, the object of the game is to get a few milliliters of viscous fluid, coaxed out of one’s body via strenuous manipulation, into an impossibly small container. Lying on one’s back, or even reclining slightly, is not the most gravitationally efficacious position for delivery unto the cup. Hunching forward at the furnishing’s edge doesn’t make it much easier. Neither does standing up. Truth be told, there’s no elegant way of going about it. It’s a damned difficult job.

I did succeed. I drove home with instructions to phone the doctor’s office later that afternoon. I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from the doctor before the appointed time. I was less pleasantly startled to learn the results. My sperm count was unchanged from eighteen years earlier. It was as dismal as it had been immediately after my bone marrow transplant, when I’d been quoted the “one in a million” statistic. The total count was barely one-tenth of the amount considered the lowest end of normal range, with an especially poor percentage of normally formed specimens. The doctor wasn’t opposed to Elisa and I going ahead and trying to conceive without interventions, but he was less than optimistic about our chances.

“I wouldn’t give it any more than a couple of cycles,” he said.

The supposition I’d clung to to lessen my grief over our choice to abort a pregnancy three years earlier was snatched away. The assumption I’d made in regard to the rarity of that pregnancy was revealed as what it was: rationalization. No one had given me any evidence that my fertility had recovered since my medical treatments. I’d only been given the information that such recoveries had occurred. Yet I’d seized on it as proof of my own restoration. I spent the rest of the afternoon grieving over the loss of something I’d believed was gained only three years earlier, but that had never actually been mine. Perhaps for the first time I mourned the loss of a child that had never been allowed to live.

Elisa came home from work excited and expecting good news. “Did you get the results?” she asked.

“I’m afraid they weren’t good.”

“What do you mean?”

“The count was low.”

“How low?”

“About as low as you can get without being gone.”

We acknowledged the probability of having to consult fertility specialists when we were ready to conceive. We speculated again on the viability of the frozen semen that was now twenty years old. We offered each other comfort and pledges of love and commitment. We handled things in all the best ways. But none of that changed the fact that we were very shaken, and extremely sad.

The next day Elisa reached for me in the midst of a sun-dappled afternoon nap. We’d had an indulgent homemade lunch, during which I’d uncharacteristically helped myself to two or three doses of wine during daylight hours. In spite of the buzz, and the sun, and the beautiful companion, I felt reluctant to make love. Making love reminded me of my sadness from the day before, and my sadness was doubled over the fact that one of our most carefree activities had become infected with grief. I overrode my resistance, and Elisa and I had sex.

I found it difficult to stay present. My mind fluctuated between sorrowful thoughts and flash-fantasies of fertilizing demonic beings. It wasn’t one of the most beautiful erotic experiences of my life. I found myself hoping – in spite of my knowledge that I was incapable of impregnating anyone – that no conception would result from such a session.

I didn’t share those thoughts with Elisa. I played along over the next few days as she began making jokes about what we both knew were impossible symptoms, all experienced within premature time frames. Elisa started to drop comments about tender breasts and abdominal rumblings within forty-eight hours of making love. Only eleven days after that, as we frolicked again in Santa Monica’s Palisades Park, Elisa startled me with an announcement.

“I bought a pregnancy test today.”

I’d begun to wonder at the persistence of the symptoms she’d been describing for two weeks. I was concerned as to whether Elisa might be in some kind of denial of the facts. I drove us home, trying to figure out how to handle her disappointment when it arrived.

Elisa went into the bathroom alone, as she’d done three years before. She called me to join her only seconds later in a voice that was reminiscent of the one I’d heard on Forty-ninth Street in New York. With hands that were again trembling, she passed me the slender plastic stick, with one bright pink preprinted band, and another paler one staring insistently back at us. We held the test capsule up to the light, and compared it over and over to the pictures printed on its instruction page. We tried as best we could to find disparities between the illustration for “positive” and the test we were holding in our hands.

“Why is the second line so much paler than the first?” we asked each other.

“What does it matter? The second line is paler in the diagram, too.”

“But this is impossible,” we said. And we giggled. We giggled because we didn’t know what else to do, or how to proceed with anything in the face of what seemed to be, but couldn’t be, happening.

We did the only thing we could think of, which was to tear open a second test and do it over again. The second test came back as positive as the first, just as the first had been as positive as the one three years earlier. Elisa was pregnant. We’d had sex without using birth control twice in our entire relationship, and – in spite of a sperm count that’s supposed to make such a thing all but impossible – each time resulted in a conception. That’s an astounding occurrence. It’s one in a million, twice in a row.

This time, after three years of marriage, we’re ecstatic. We’ve giggled, laughed and cried, hugged, and stopped repeatedly to gasp in wonder. We haven’t been able to stop shaking our heads. We haven’t known what to say. We don’t understand how such a thing could have happened. Twice. We’ve moved in haste to a larger home where we’ve prepared a nursery. We’ve had perfect sonograms, a clear amniocentesis, and on January 17, 2007, Sofia Clementina Handler was born.

Reproduction is a magical, mystical process, even under the least surprising of circumstances.  Miraculous, some would say. If every conception, and every birth, is a miracle, what does that make our baby?

We got to the hospital four hours into Elisa’s labor. There I witnessed something I’d never experienced. I saw medical care administered with all the gallantry, haste, and heroism we’re led to expect from television shows like
ER
. Everything I’d hoped for, but never seen, during my extended health crisis twenty years earlier was on display. At UCLA Medical Center, any woman who presents at the emergency room more than twenty weeks pregnant is immediately sent up to the labor and delivery floor. No waiting. Heart attack patients wait. Stabbing victims wait. Gunshot wounds wait. Pregnant women are given a wheelchair and an escort, and are taken directly to the elevator. (This is the plus side of a more troubling fact: that same woman, a week after delivery, would be treated with less urgency for more serious conditions. Once that baby’s born, neither she nor her mother will get such swift treatment again. We learned this the hard way with postpartum problems ten days later.)

Before a catheter could be inserted into Elisa’s spinal column, through which her epidural pain relief would flow, the physicians needed to get her “informed consent” for the procedure. A young resident read his required text faster than the most distracted flight attendant has ever sped through the safety features of an aircraft.

“Doyouunderstandthateverymedicalprocedurecarriestheriskofcomplications?”

But here the speed wasn’t due to indifference. It was due to a genuine desire to rapidly provide Elisa with the relief she’d requested. The resident paused while Elisa endured a contraction, then read the next batch of text as if he was speaking in tongues. Within ten minutes she was relaxed and pain free.

I was present for my daughter’s birth. This was a surprise, as I’m squeamish. Blood and mucus rank low on my list of favorite bodily fluids. I’m pleased they exist, but I prefer knowing they’re sealed within their intended containers. All through our labor and delivery classes I longed for the era when a man’s presence in the delivery room not only wasn’t required, it wasn’t allowed.

I also photographed the birth, another unexpected course of action (I’ve never been a fan of the delivery room slide show foisted upon me by new parents). We have photos of our daughter emerging, and of the physicians holding her triumphantly in the air. We have photographs of her first wondering glimpse of her mother, and of her staring intently into the camera’s lens when she was eight hours old. The photographs are precious, but redundant. The calm wisdom in that infant’s eyes is something I will never forget.

Sofia emerged looking just like her father, which is unfortunate. I’m generally accepting of my image, but there’s no doubt that my wife makes the better-looking woman. I hope that as Sofia grows she will resemble her mother more.

Driving myself home from the hospital before Elisa and Sofia’s discharge, I had a spell of euphoria unequaled in my life. I was alone in the car, but I was giddy with pride. I thought to myself, I must be among the luckiest men to have ever lived. I have a wife I love boundlessly. I have a healthy baby daughter. I have a home and belongings far beyond the level of necessity, or even comfort. To say I want for nothing is inaccurate. I have an overabundance of everything. The miracle of my own life was suddenly dwarfed by a new fact: I’d participated in the creation of a new one. I couldn’t be happier to have been surpassed.

When I was a kid, one family joke was that I’d been adopted. It’s not a very funny joke; in fact, in some contexts it could be considered a form of abuse. Still, I’m the one who cultivated the theory and extended its life. I bore little resemblance to my brother, sister, or parents when I was very young, either facially or in body type. Now, I probably bear a stronger resemblance to both of my parents than either of my siblings. I have my mother’s looks, and every syllable I utter, every exhalation, echoes my father’s bearing. Now I have a daughter of my own, a refracted reflection of me.

There were many years when I wondered, with good reason, whether my parents would get to see me live past the very beginnings of adulthood. There were years when I wondered whether they’d see me married. Now they’ve seen both, and they’ve seen me with a child of my own. The only thing left to wonder is what my parents must have wondered during those same years: how much of my child’s life I’ll get to see.

Since the moment of my daughter’s conception my perspective about everything has changed yet again. Just as I’ve reached a point where I’ve felt able to release the past, as opposed to trying to outrun it, every thought has turned in a new direction. Not toward what’s approaching from behind. Not even toward what’s happening right now. I’m looking to the future.

I’ve found myself energized in a way I can’t recall from any period of my life. Instead of my usual tendency to procrastinate, I’ve been seizing the tasks at hand and ripping through them. I bulldozed us through our move to a new apartment, packing nearly every one of our 180 boxes myself. I hauled those boxes up and down flights of stairs like a teenager. When paint needed to be applied, or furniture bought, or preparations made, I got the jobs done. I’m eating better foods and exercising. I’ve bought life insurance. It’s not just myself I’m responsible for anymore. It’s not just Elisa and me. There’s a little baby who needs protection. The life insurance policy cost a bit more than the average man might pay, but not as much as I’d feared. After all the difficultly I’ve had trusting in the safety of my existence, buying that policy has calmed me down more than anything else. If an insurance company is willing to bet its money on me, I figure I must be safe.

In considering all the ways I’ll need to plan for Sofia’s well-being, I realize it’s not a new passion that’s gripped me and set me in motion. It’s the same instinct that appeared twenty years ago, when mine was the life in need of protection. I intend to remain as ferocious in safeguarding this new one as I was of my own. More so.