This Vale of Tears

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

This month’s Esquire article on Roger Ebert’s lingering (and eventually fatal) sickness, which Brian so kindly passed on to me this morning, is fascinating reading. In 2006, complications stemming from doctors’ efforts to curb his invasive thyroid cancer very nearly resulted in his death. His carotid artery, weakened by surgery and by radiation treatment he had undergone years before, burst as he was preparing to leave the hospital after his doctors’ latest attempts to restore him to full health. Providentially, the medical personnel on hand for his discharge were able to step in and prevent his death.

We have a habit of turning sentimental about celebrities who are struck down – Muhammad Ali, Christopher Reeve – transforming them into mystics; still, it’s almost impossible to sit beside Roger Ebert, lifting blue Post-it notes from his silk fingertips, and not feel as though he’s become something more than he was. He has those hands. And his wide and expressive eyes, despite everything, are almost always smiling.

There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one afternoon after someone parting looks at him a little sadly. Look how happy I am.

There is much sadness and suffering in the piece. Ebert, for example, finally finds himself admitting that he has never truly recovered from Siskel’s death, not so much because of the professional toll it took on his life as because he was robbed forever (he thinks) of the extraordinary friendship that had sprung up between the two of them. Recounting a story idea he and Siskel had once pitched to Disney, he says: “It would be about two movie critics joined in a love/hate relationship. It never went anywhere, but we both believed it was a good idea. Maybe the problem was that no one else could possibly understand how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love.”

The piece is shot through with Ebert’s atheistic thinking — phrases such as “I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state” and “to make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts” are more than a bit disconcerting — but the overall impression is of a man who is suffering deeply, silently (in a way far more real than any of us will ever experience), and perhaps most strikingly given Ebert’s philosophical tendencies, happily. The salvific nature of suffering is very much on display here, and the fact that Ebert himself does not seem intellectually inclined to think of anything that smacks of salvation does little to diminish that.

Over the past few weeks, there has been much heat (and, I fear, little light) at Big Hollywood for some comments Ebert recently made on his “less-film-more-personal journal” regarding the Tea Party folks. And I myself must admit to being a bit put off by that journal’s tone of late. Now, however, I understand why; it has become Ebert’s primary means of communication, and he using it to address the questions that are more and more on his mind as he works through his final days.

This article serves as a nice counter-point to my previous discontent, as well as an excellent reminder that Ebert is undergoing a tremendous amount of suffering, and doing it with truly extraordinary good humor. Let’s remember to pray for him, that he (and his family) may be comforted in that suffering, and that it may, in the end, serve its salvific purpose.

Reading between the lines, I think it’s starting to do that already.