The knife enters you
from behind, while you are fast asleep—or, rather, with your own consent,
unconscious—having been guided into what the poet Robert Frost once referred to
as “the dark of ether.” It enters you, you imagine later, somehow cleanly and
immaculately, held by what you have assumed to be the warm and capable hands of
the one you have yielded yourself up to, like a penitent to a priest. But now,
as the surgeon Richard Selzer has observed, there is no wine, no wafer… the
priest of this theater holds not a chalice, but a knife. And you are lying
there, in this mock-death of yours, his meat.
When I was young and
arrogant and— I was sometimes generously told— still relatively attractive, I
always assumed that life’s end would sneak up on me with a bold stroke—a heart
attack on the tennis courts, a brain hemorrhage while making love… something
quick, dramatic and lyrical, like the death of the Metropolitan Opera’s great
baritone, Leonard Warren, who fell lifeless onto the stage while intoning an
aria from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino.
Until several months
ago, in fact, I had tended to think of myself, both physically and
aesthetically, as a well-above-average sixty year old, someone whose good health,
at the very least, consisted of what the English writer and entertainer Quentin
Crisp once described as “having the same diseases as one's neighbors.” I
didn’t, of course, actually know what diseases my neighbors had, but I
consoled myself by assuming, at the very least, that I was among their more
fortunate.
But then, just a few
weeks ago, and for the first time in my sextegenarian existence, came the
surgeon’s knife —a veritable knife in the back. “Surgeons must be very
careful/when they take the knife,” wrote the poet Emily Dickinson, [for]
“Underneath their fine incisions/Stirs the Culprit—Life!” But, for me,
it wasn’t merely life that stirred beneath the surgeon’s cut: it had been pain… months and months of unbearable, tear-wrenching pain— more tears, even, than
failed love ever had brought… more tears, even, than thoughts of death. Nor did
I want to accept without a fight Crisp’s rather dour prediction that “the life
of anyone who lives to be sixty cannot really have a happy ending, since
the happy time is earlier than this.” Maybe Crisp was right, but I, at least,
was determined that there were some happy times still ahead.
The first surgery of
one’s lifetime is a kind of loss of virginity: There is, of course, the
anticipation of relief and future pleasure, but it is comingled with
uncertainty, dread and, yes, the fear of ineptitude as well. The contract
between a patient and a surgeon— even in our modern age of relatively
immaculate, high-tech incisions with names like Lumbar Micro Endoscopic Discectomy—is
a special sort of agreement. “For the special congress into which patient and
surgeon enter,” Richard Selzer has written, “the one must have his senses
deadened, the other his sensibilities restrained.” Nor is it for no reason that
the operating room is referred to as a “theatre.” Within it, life and death,
cure and failure—just as surely as in Hamlet or Macbeth—engage in their mortal
combat.
“In a surgical
operation,” Selzer writes, “risk may flash into reality. The patient knows this
too, in a direct and personal way, and he is afraid.”
Afraid. That’s indeed what I
was: afraid. Waiting in the pre-op room, inhaling the antiseptic odors
of God-and-the-doctors-only-knew-what, surrounded by men and women wearing
H1N1-like masks, listening to the beeps, hums and reverberations of machines I
had no name for, I realized that, as Selzer puts it, I had made a declaration
of surrender. It was not for sleep or love that I was allowing myself to be
laid prone and various magical fluids injected into my body: It was for the
sake of cure… for a second stab at being young.
A little more than an
hour after relinquishing myself to the netherworld to which I had been escorted by a Greek anesthesiologist,
I awoke from my drug-induced haze into the magical half-world of the recovery
room, having to pinch myself twice to make sure I hadn’t died. “In pain and
nausea,” Selzer has written, “you will know the exultation of death averted, of
life restored.” And if you are very lucky, as I was on this particular day, you
might even gaze through the hazy mist of your now-more-mortal life—a bit older,
a bit more tenuous, a bit wiser, you’d like to think— and see the face of
someone you love: a merely human face, of course, but the kind of human face that
assures you it is worthwhile going on.
So you rise once more,
an abbreviated phoenix. You are alive, but must now take your place firmly
among life’s wounded. “Life,” as Quentin Crisp also put it, [is] “a funny thing
that happened to me on the way to the grave.”
You gaze up into your
wife’s kind and loving face. You will never, you know for certain, be the same
again.
You are blessed.