meditation: loving what is gone

We know a parent’s overall mood will have an effect on their children. I’m happy with how Isaac’s turning out; he appears to be smart and well-natured. Cooperative and agreeable. Talks a lot and seems relatively competent for his age. I wonder though about my overall mood and the effect it might have on him as he grows up. His mother was diagnosed with cancer and projected to die before the end of the year when he was two months old. Isaac doesn’t live with a father who’s really chosen his circumstances; I can sometimes feel quite bitter about my life. But I take my duties as a parent seriously, and since those duties include securing a child’s emotional well-being and that a parent’s mood can play a role, a negative disposition may be an inadvertent violation of those duties.

It’s been clear from the moment I knew Ale was going to die that I had an obligation to accept what was happening and the circumstances that would arise from it, but I don’t think accepting something means as much as we might like to think. I think if you just accept something, then you’re able to carry on your life with a clear understanding of the reality of a situation and redirect your practical reasoning fully taking it into account. It might mean that your practical reasoning doesn’t change at all, like in a case where some trauma doesn’t actually physically restrict you from doing any of the things you need to do to function in life. In this case, if you accept it, then you understand that that trauma doesn’t have implications on any of the decisions you would have made before it happened, and just carry on. Some sort of assault that leads to no permanent injuries can serve as an example. But I don’t think that means you don’t resent what has happened. It doesn’t mean that, if you believe there’s a god, you wouldn’t hate it with every inch of your being for allowing it to happen, or that, without such a belief, you find yourself miserably accepting the inescapable conditions of continued existence (including the mere fact that you live in a world where such a thing happened to you), effectively souring or altogether removing aspects of your life that make it enjoyable. You may not trust people as much. You may have memories you’re unable to forget. You might pass by places or hear songs that remind you of what happened. Your life is just worse now. Acceptance means that you can acknowledge this, but it doesn’t mean you’re happy. There are psychological consequences that take a lot of work to deal with. I would even say that you could easily doubt that someone has truly accepted something if they weren’t able to acknowledge and lament that they’re now worse off.

Accepting the death of a loved one can be especially difficult if the two of you were intricately involved in each other’s lives. An immediately family member, for example, is essential part of the family’s flourishing, and if a member dies, the trauma inherent to the death is not all there is to it. In addition to accepting (i.e., understanding and deliberating upon) the tragic facts, you also need to reorient yourself to a new normal, which means understanding that your old vision of the future is destroyed and that now a new vision is necessary. You need to be realistic about things and figure out how you’re going to operate now that they’ve died. The new state of affairs is decidedly worse than the old one in which they're still alive. Your life is worse then not only for its psychological consequences, but also for its practical ones, which of course compound the psychological consequences. You might need to solve a number of problems, only so that you can establish stability in your new, inferior life.

Considering this, while the bereaved may manage to accept their loss, they may never really escape their grief. If accepting a loss entails an acknowledgement that your life is worse than it was before, then being right with it doesn’t seem to be compatible with this, at least not without some sort of twisted psychology. How can someone have a positive attitude toward something regarded as categorically negative? I can conceive of someone who becomes right with a loss, maybe after a long time has passed and they’ve had time to rebuild their lives and even reinvent themselves, such that the good in their lives outweighs the bad. Maybe their tragic past has become a backstory to what has become an overall enjoyable life that an outsider might regard as worth living. These are big maybes. But what seems clear to me is that the conditions to be met before we say someone has accepted something shouldn’t include a lack of bitterness that they should have to endure a comparatively dark fate. I think we should regard accepting something and being right with something as distinct tasks. There’s accepting a loss, an achievement that takes firm resolve to face new, difficult circumstances and an ability to function in life in spite of them, and then there’s another, separate achievement of somehow coming to a positive attitude toward their circumstances, despite their acceptance of the tragic facts of their lives.

I think I can safely say I’ve done the first of these. I accepted Ale’s death early on because I figured that doing so would make the next two years of my life easier. The original plan was for the three of us to live together in our one-bedroom condo apartment on Park Lawn and, when Isaac was a year old, move to a two-bedroom. We knew that all three of us living in the one-bedroom for a year would be a bit cramped, but we had decided we would just make it work. We were motivated. We loved being together, so I felt we’d be okay. But when she got sick, she couldn’t take care of Isaac and neither could I. She was supposed to take care of him while I went to work, and now it looked like I was going to be the only parent that would be financially supporting him as he grew up. Even supposing she didn’t die so quickly, she’d certainly remain incapacitated for some time, and the likelihood that she’d be able to recover and generate a second income wasn’t something I could bank on. So when the grandparents became Isaac’s primary caregivers (using a legal term here meaning taking care of him more than 50% of the time), I started thinking ahead about the conditions that needed to be met before he could move back in with me. Little consideration was or is given to the idea that he wouldn’t, nay, shouldn’t end up returning to me, as I believed and still believe that no one is better suited to raise a child whose mother died than the surviving husband that suffered her loss. I have no interest in providing arguments to support this belief here; however, I would try if anyone in a similar position needed persuading. What’s important here is that I wanted my son back, and the sooner I accepted the situation, the easier it was going to be for me to get the ball rolling.

I knew if I was going to be in a situation where I could live with Isaac, a lot of things needed to change. I had a lot of shit to do over the next two years. In addition to that, while Isaac wasn’t old enough to really form any long-term memories, I believed there was a potential psychological problem for Isaac. He was a happy kid, and he loved spending time with his grandparents. Taking him away from them might’ve come with other types of problems. I figured it had to be done soon. I considered then not only the bare minimum of what I needed to do (i.e., what would be legally required), but also what would be prudent to do to guarantee that nobody would prevent me from getting him home. Now I should state openly here that I didn’t have good reason to believe that I would be met with resistance when I was ready and able to take him, but people will tell you that parents can have difficulties obtaining full custody of their own children, even when such a transition is to occur among family. I identified four conditions that would be considered necessary for a parent to be favoured in a potential custody dispute: (1) regular employment, (2) a place where the child can live and sleep, (3) a good relationship with the child, and (4) a place I could bring him legally during the day while I worked. So for two years, I worked on satisfying these conditions. I remained employed as a teacher, the result of which led to what they call a “conversion” to a “staff-appointed” status that entails higher pay and benefits. Condition (1) not only was met but it was also guaranteed to continue being met indefinitely. It doesn’t look like I’m going to have problems supporting Isaac. I then sold my apartment and found a two-bedroom apartment that’s a 10-minute bike ride from work. Condition (2) met. After this, I started picking up Isaac from his grandparents Friday evenings and keeping him with me at the new apartment until Sunday, when I’d bring him back to the grandparents’ place and have a discussion with his grandmother about my observations. I felt here that, in addition to building and maintaining my relationship with Isaac, making him feel comfortable with the apartment that he would eventually move into, it was important that it appear that this was happening, so that when it came time to take Isaac home, this would be encouraged and celebrated. Condition (3), over a course of 7 months with virtually no day off from work or childcare duties (save for an Easter weekend when he got pneumonia), was met and appeared to the rest of the family to be met, too. So when the Friends Daycare contacted me about a spot opening up at the beginning of July last year, thereby satisfying Condition (4), June 27 (which I now dub Isaac Day) became the day I would go to pick him up, bring him home, and keep him home. The fireworks that went off that Canada Day weekend had a special meaning for me. The war was over. Isaac was home. My family was fully supportive of this, and Isaac was happy. The job was done.

I think this is accepting it. My actions are my acceptance. I’ve adjusted to a new sort of life—one that involved breakfasts and dinners for two, transportation to and from daycare, bath times, story times, walks to the park, bike rides to the High Park zoo, bus trips with no destination—all sorts of fun things. It’s stressful, I guess. It’s not as easy as life before Isaac was born. But Isaac is a joy in my life. I also operate now under much more certainty about my future, namely, with the guarantee that I can live with and raise my son in the way I know that he needs. I think these outcomes prove my acceptance of the situation, as I’ve reoriented my life trajectory and established stability.

But am I happy about the situation overall? The answer is no. I resent that I needed to get him home at all, and that it brought with it this prolonged state of uncertainty and anxiety. I resent that my day-to-day routine completely consumes my energy, to a degree that Ale’s existence would have significantly decreased, precluding the pursuit of other important goods in life. And of course I resent that I must raise Isaac without his mother, who I loved and desired and whose love and desire for me, for obvious reasons, made my life so much better than it would have been otherwise. Sure, I did decide to have a child, but I am now obligated to raise that child into adulthood without the woman I decided to have him with. What man would have a child knowing they would be without a mother, and that he’d be responsible for raising him to adulthood without her? The challenge of somehow being right with these circumstances seems insurmountable.

But I’ve had some thoughts recently that I think help me to at least approach a lasting positive attitude about things. I say “lasting” here because attitudes can be fleeting; one can be right with something one day and not right with it the next. A positive attitude can come about by caprice or a night of euphoria-inducing drugs and have no strong foundation that would sustain it. It’s not this sort of thing. Nor is it some positive perspective on the tragic facts of the case, which might be defined as a way of looking at things so that things don’t seem so bad. This also carries with it a sense in which the mental state is temporary. But this lasting positive attitude I’m approaching is not based on some special way of looking at the facts; it’s based on knowledge of these facts themselves that strongly suggest that I’m better off having been in a relationship with Ale and having a child with her in the last four years of her life.

One might expect that these facts relate to Isaac as an individual, to my bond with him, or to the good he provides in my life. Surely, one might say, you love Isaac and Isaac loves you. Isn’t this enough to be right with his mother’s death? But this would be a mistake because I would have loved Isaac whether she died or not. If anything, this contributes negatively, since his mother’s absence makes both of our lives worse. Any amount of love I feel for Isaac will only strengthen the case against a positive attitude toward her death. In fact, my relationship with Isaac, as it strengthened, worked to sour my attitude towards my life circumstances generally, since for every one of those moments that parents will tell you make it all worth it, while they may contribute to my bond with Isaac, and my love for him, in addition to that, they also speak to the magnitude of what Ale, and everyone else in her life, has lost by dying. Isaac’s mere existence does not therefore do anything to make this situation less tragic in any way—only more so. In attempts to provide solace to me, some uttered phrases like “but now you have Isaac”; these are the words of a person that does not understand what has happened.

One of the facts is that Ale almost certainly would have died whether or not I met her. We have this on good authority. Serge is a doctor that was running a hospice when Ale was dying. He knows the relevant details of Ale’s case; I was in frequent contact with him after I found out what was happening to Ale. I told him about the things I was seeing and asked him for his opinions about her condition and prospects. I showed him pictures of reports and described the things I saw. Not only does Serge agree, but he also seemed pretty comfortable assenting to even harder case, where “almost certainly” is removed from the sentence. He said, “She had it when you met her.” “She would have died from this whether or not you met her.” “She had it brewing when you guys met.” Given what we know, there’s no way she could have died from colon cancer if she didn’t already have it four years before.

When pressed, he did add the phrase “most likely” to his claims, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable removing the phrase “almost certainly”. I would never say that Ale’s death was necessary in any sense. I wouldn’t say that about any event. Every event happens contingently. I’d also say that, even for every event C that causes some other event E, neither C nor E is necessary. That is to say,

◇¬C

and

◇¬E.

But it’s necessary that E occurs if C occurs, and nothing happens to prevent E, i.e.,

□[(C ∧ ¬P) → E],

where, applied to this case, P represents an event (or set of events) that would have prevented Ale’s death. Therefore, it is not possible that C (i.e., all the physical facts related to Ale’s cancer) occurs and that P and E don’t, i.e.,

¬◇(C ∧ ¬P ∧ ¬E).

So there is a possible world in which Ale is alive today, living with me and Isaac, but I believe that this world is so distant that its becoming a reality is beyond any reasonable expectation, since by the time I met Ale, C had already occurred (if Serge is right), and the chances that P happened (assuming even that they were even nomologically possible, which is something we don’t actually know) are extraordinarily remote. The idea that Ale could’ve gotten screened, for example, and found out that she had cancer is not a realistic one. Yes, I met her four years before she died, so maybe that was enough time to do some tests and find out something was wrong. Maybe then the rapid decline that occurred four years later could have been prevented. Maybe she could’ve lived a lot longer. But I think here we need to factor in the unusualness of Ale’s illness. For the time we were together she showed no signs of serious illness. I guess there was a period during her pregnancy when she wanted to sleep a lot, but we figured that was normal. For the most part, her pregnancy went well. Every ultrasound showed that the fetus was developing normally. The midwife examined her post-partum and felt something unusual. She said she needed to get checked out but indicated no suspicion of anything serious. At least not to me. And Ale didn’t seem too worried either. Objectively speaking, she would be considered to be in a very low-risk group. The report that says she had stage 4C colon cancer (the most advanced stage) included a note that it was unusual and not in accord with how she presented. Only afterwards did she start to significantly deterioriate in health. There were simply no signs. Doctors won’t start recommending screenings until you’re 50—40 if someone in your family had it, which is not the case with Ale. Ale was 38 years old when she died. 34 when we met. There was just no reason to think that she needed to be screened, and given everything we knew, we were justified in believing that no screening was necessary. After Ale died, I asked my doctor for a screening just because of what had happened; he permitted it, but he said to me, “Lightning strikes.” I think this was just as much an explanation of what happened to Ale as it was a reassurance that I had nothing to worry about. But any reason we might have today to think, with no screening result data, that I don’t have cancer applies equally to Ale when she was alive and in my life. Without any signs, there’s no reason to get screened, which makes the possibility of finding out about Ale’s cancer an extraordinarily distant, albeit nomological, possibility.

Even if we granted that we could have attained knowledge of her cancer earlier, Ale happened to have strong personal beliefs that predisposed her to deny having cancer at all and to refuse any treatment that might slow or reverse the disease. I don’t really feel a need to delve into this here, but I think this fact makes the possibility of her survival even more remote.

I think understanding the remoteness of P’s possibility has an effect on how I feel about my current life circumstances because significant constraints on possibility affect how, and the degree to which, you might lament something. If you’ve trained to run in the Toronto Marathon, but you couldn’t participate because you were mistakenly told that it was starting in the wrong location, or you went to the bathroom and the race started early, you’d probably be a lot more upset than you would be if an earthquake completely destroyed the course and prevented the marathon from happening at all. In both cases, you’ve put in the investment, but in the latter case, you’re not missing the race because of some preventable contingency. You’re missing it because of an extraordinarily unlikely event that no one had reason to think was likely to happen. I think it would be harder to deal with Ale’s death if she had been murdered, or if she had died accidentally, where her survival doesn’t seem to violate any nomological laws or defy any statistical likelihood. But the possibility of escaping this fate feels comparatively remote, and there’s a sense of calmness that comes over me when I consider that her death feels more like a necessary condition of continued existence than a nomologically contingent event that could have been otherwise.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the apparent inevitability of Ale’s death is sufficient for me to be right with the situation I’m in. It’s definitely not. The cancellation of the marathon will be disappointing, to be sure, but I think it would be a bit easier to put things in perspective if there were really nothing anybody could’ve done to prevent it. There are stronger forces at play. So I think that the tragic facts of Ale’s death lack something that might cause other tragedies to be especially upsetting, namely, the fact that, in a certain practical sense, something really could have been done to alter how things turned out. In my case, there might’ve been some event or set of events that could act as P, effectively preventing E, but given the nature of the disease, the lack of signs, and Ale’s personal beliefs, we have no way of knowing whether those events were within the realm of nomological possibility, nor do we have any way of knowing, even if they were possible, whether we could have found out about them or, if that were possible, why we should have thought that we needed to find out about them. While this nescience and its resulting powerlessness in changing the course of events seems to help to considerably narrow down the list of possible worlds that are imaginable to me, it doesn’t prevent me from considering, motivated maybe by loneliness or a love for her that still remains in me, a possible world in which, somehow, for reasons I cannot explain, she is alive. This cannot be stopped as long as my memory remains functional.

A new question arises here: What if I had no memory of Ale? Would that be better? What if I never met her at all? Ale was going to die no matter what, right? By the time I met her, the event (or set of events) C that led to her death had already occurred or were occurring, knowledge of which, we’ve established, was beyond reach. Any event (or set of events) D that happened after and/or in conjunction with the events of C (in this case, we can suppose D is my meeting, becoming romantically involved with, and marrying her), since D has no bearing on whether C or P occurs, cannot have any bearing on E, which means both

[(C ∧ ¬P) → E] → [(C ∧ ¬P ∧ D) → E]

and

[(C ∧ ¬P) → E] → [(C ∧ ¬P ∧ ¬D) → E].

If Ale was going to die no matter what, then maybe I’d have been better off if I hadn’t gotten involved with her at all (¬D)¹. This isn’t that difficult to imagine. I had a party and Ale ended up coming with a couple of other people I had invited. We talked a lot during the night. She told me that she had just gotten back from Africa, and I told her that I had gone there too, when I was 16. The Lion King was in theatres, so I suggested seeing it the next day (a drunken suggestion to be sure, but she was down, so I went with it). The next day I texted her to confirm. What if I had just stayed in bed that day? That was completely within my control. I could’ve turned my phone off. Ale would have thought, “Okay, I guess there’s no movie happening,” and gone on with her life. I would have no knowledge of Ale, so I wouldn’t have fallen in love with her, and her death wouldn’t have any significant adverse effect on me. I wouldn’t have remained in touch with the mutual friends through which we met, so I likely wouldn’t have even been aware of her death. Why exactly, then, should I regard my involvement with Ale as a good thing? Why should I be happy that I’m in the world I’m in, instead of a possible world in which we had never met, or a world in which I texted her the next day and got no response. Why should I not prefer these other worlds, in which I most certainly would have had other opportunities for companionship and family-building?

While Ale may have died, my love for her hasn’t. Since she passed, I’ve experienced moments I wish she could’ve enjoyed with me. I’ll hear something that Isaac says, for example, or see something he does, and it’ll occur to me that it was something Ale would’ve valued in some way. Maybe she would’ve been impressed, or proud, or amused. It would have been a good, basically, that she and I would have regarded as worth having. Other goods I’ve enjoyed, like selling our apartment and getting a promotion, I know she would’ve been happy about, as they would’ve been important in helping her and I have the life we wanted to have. This wishing that she were here to experience these moments occurs because of a love for her that remains inside me. Harry Frankfurt’s got it right when he identifies wanting the person you love to flourish as a defining characteristic of loving someone². These things I wish Ale could experience are things she would’ve regarded as an important part of a good life. She wanted these things and would’ve regarded these as contributing to her flourishing. She wanted to live with me and Isaac and raise a family. I still want these things for her; she no longer exists, but my love for her still does.

Because of this, considering a possible world in which we never met deeply depresses me, because I did help her flourish as much as I could have in the last four years of her life. And this is where all the facts come together to support an overall positive attitude about the situation: She was going to die no matter what, right? So, if you love someone who has four years left to live, then wouldn’t you want them to flourish as much as they can? It’s not enough time to raise a family, but it’s certainly enough time to start one. She can get pregnant, she can bring the baby to term, and she care for him as an infant. We also did a lot of things before that: We traveled together. I bought an apartment, and it was there she began painting landscapes of the lake. We got married. It was a beautiful sequence of events that culminated in Isaac’s birth. I didn’t want her to die, but given that she had to in a certain sense, then, because I love her, I prefer the world in which I could help her achieve the things that would make her happy. When I consider this, my grief becomes trumped by the idea that I’ve triumphed over doom, since through my love and good will alone, in spite of her fate, Ale could carry out her will, and in turn, so could I.

I suppose it’s worth noting that someone else could have done the things that I did. Maybe we don’t go out the day after we meet, but a week later, she meets another guy who ends up doing all the same things as me—he buys her an apartment, marries her, gets her pregnant, and, after she dies, takes it upon himself to raise their child without her in his life. Ale would have borne a different child (an inferior one, to be sure) and I’d be free of the misery associated with losing her. However, my love for her plays multiple roles: while, yes, it does motivate my wanting what she wants, it also motivates me to be the one that gives it to her. I didn’t just want Ale to get pregnant; I wanted to be the one that did it. This may be more of a function of my desire for her than my love, or maybe some combination of the two, but whatever the case may be, I prefer the world in which I loved her and I gave her the things she wanted. In short, in a world I don’t become involved with her, either she doesn’t do the things we did or she does with someone else, but because I loved her, neither of these alternatives are preferable to the actual world.

It's also worth pointing out that the timing of Isaac's birth relative to the timing of her death is also probably optimal, as Isaac will never actually experience a deprivation of a mother, whereas if we imagine a world in which I never met her and someone else decided to give her a child as soon as they met (totally unlikely, but let's suppose it for the sake of argument), so that she would have enjoyed her child for a longer period of her life, that child would have suffered her loss in a way that Isaac couldn't have. It's better, in other words, that Isaac today has no emotional attachment to Ale. If she's going to have a child before she dies then, it's probably best she has it immediately before dying, which is actually the case. They coexisted for only 157 days.

This meditation can now come to a close, as I think I’ve expressed the ideas that I think really help me to be right with the tragic facts of my life. I think I’m always going to struggle with it though because I find myself wishing she were here, or she could be with Isaac and me. That doesn’t seem to be something I can reason out of, since a love still remains inside me. I can see her in Isaac’s face, and when I do, I long for a world in which she’s still here, despite its implausibility. But it is this same love that, in light of the metaphysical facts discussed here, motivates a preference for the actual world over another in which, in all likelihood, she died of cancer and we didn’t share any of our lives together and never did any of the things we did. Considering that, I’m glad, even relieved, that things happened the way they did. For Isaac’s sake, I vow to keep this in mind.

Footnotes

¹Here, I'm exploring the possibility that C occurred and D didn't (i.e., she had cancer, but I never met her), but the possibility that D occurred and C didn't (i.e., I met her, and she didn't have cancer) is worth mentioning as a footnote. Up to now, I've been considering the inevitability of Ale's death at the point I met her, which is four years before her death and therefore after the event (or set of events) C had taken place. But I haven't discussed the possibility that C never occurred at all. We could go back 20 years, say, before the cancer took root. But this hasn't occurred to me really because I don't think of cancer as some modular physical attribute that can just be turned on or off without there being other effects on the rest of one's physical reality. I see it, like every physical attribute, as something that's interwoven with the other physical attributes that make up her existence. To alter one physical attribute, especially one with this interwoven nature, is to potentially alter the person, which means that to imagine a world where Ale's cancer was absent from her body is to potentially make her into a different person from the one I actually met and loved. It’s not clear to me how exactly the absence of cancer would have altered her, but it seems far-fetched to me to think that you could remove that attribute and assume every other event in the world would occur exactly as it did in the actual world. Admittedly this is easier to see with a visually observable attribute such as hair colour, since events would have been different as soon as that attribute became apparent. The world would have been different from that point (from birth, I suppose), and the probability of events of the actual world occurring in that world would become increasingly remote over time. There’s also the psychological impact that this difference will have: different events entail different experiences, which impacts one’s thoughts and attitudes, and even one’s character. You’d be a different person. While we’ve established that Ale showed no signs of cancer, it’s possible that some events occurred as a result of it (e.g., going to bed earlier due to fatigue), and it’s also possible that some events played a role in the development of her cancer (e.g., exposure to carcinogenic substances). There’s much we can’t know here, but I think it would be naive to regard Ale’s cancer as a metaphysically negotiable property—as if we could hold all other events fixed, and yet somehow she doesn’t have cancer. If you just take away the cancer, you have no idea what else you’re changing, and you have no idea if Ale will be the same. I loved Ale as she was, not as she might’ve been. In short, in addition to the unlikelihood of everything remaining the same in a world where she didn’t have cancer, I also don’t know how her not having cancer would change the person I ended up falling in love with and whether this would’ve altered how I perceived her. There’s no guarantee, in other words, that the world would not have also been changed to a degree such that we would not even have crossed paths. For similar reasons as stated above, the remoteness of this possibility makes it practically irrelevant, even if it’s possible in some obscure, theoretical way. But I do still wish to provide it here with some philosophical care. ↩

²Frankfurt, Harry G. “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love.” Chapter. In Necessity, Volition, and Love, 129–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ↩