Chapter Seven

Divinity, Part One — Understanding

I think I’ve felt death more than most people my age, dozens of deaths. I didn’t witness their actual passing, except for Hope’s, but experienced their deaths prior to their passing. Each was accompanied by the sad, disheartening, and gut-wrenching thought: not another. Young people, old people, and some very famous people, most in their forties or fifties. Several stand out in my memory.

The cascade began with a fifteen-year-old hockey player I coached. Tears streamed from my eyes, hidden by sunglasses, as I was selected to be one of the pallbearers escorting his casket down the aisle in the packed church. Afterward, at the cemetery, I’ll never forget watching his father leaving the gravesite only to return and kneel as if asking his son to come back from the grave. He performed this ritual of return to the fresh-dug grave time after time, as if trying to hold on to his son. I drove away from the cemetery emotionally exhausted.

I looked into the eyes of a famous musician in his early forties, the eyes of supreme creativity. His stare was not of the music he made, but of his final goodbye. He died a few days later.

It was the same gaze I saw from little Ally, in her twenties. She was curled up in a fetal ball and glanced at me for the briefest moment. That stare, oh, that stare.

And Sharon’s, the first stare I didn’t recognize, and I mistook it for rudeness when really she had just found out her fight was over. Immediately after Sharon left the doctor’s office I was told of her fate. I felt so ignorant and self-centered that I hated myself for days for this misunderstanding, which was reinforced when she passed several days later.

I never got to see the stare of a famous movie actress. Ann Bancroft and Hope shared the same doctor. During Hope’s first major surgery, her room was directly across from Ms. Bancroft’s. I hugged her husband, Mel Brooks, a famous comedian, director, and producer, minutes after Ms. Bancroft passed. I’ll always recall his stare and his words as he looked me in the eyes and said, “This will not be your wife’s fate,” and then hugged me tight like I was his son. How could the brilliance of a stare be so wrong coming from such a revered genius?

Hope was in the hospital for well over two months. A mutual friend moved into a room next to hers—not to recover but to die. Over the next week we saw less and less of her husband Rob. I slept on a cot next to Hope every night. We could feel death waiting through the walls. Then one evening, at around 2:00 am, a wail of emotion pierced our shared wall. As our friend had just passed, I jumped out of my cot and snuggled in next to Hope on her gurney. We cried with them, hugging, kissing, and cherishing each other. We couldn’t see their stares, but they painted a ghostly tableau on the wall of our room.

Once you learn the eyes of death, each one is different and unique. Each person’s stare is his or her personal communication of death as they try to tell you a final farewell without having to utter those terrible words. At this juncture, each person has no choice but to accept their personal choice of the Divine. I never asked anyone if they believed in Divinity at this moment, not even Hope, but with each person’s passing I question Divinity for myself. I use Divinity deliberately rather than use the word “G-d,” which is too absolute. Divinity permits this supreme power to remain open to question until we find out upon our own passing.

My belief in Divinity can be summed up very easily: Divinity is either omnipotence or modern physics. Divinity and science are approaching a singularity. When I die, I believe I will know which, if either, is correct, but till then it’s a question without an answer. Nonetheless, I’m convinced that an energy of unparalleled force influences, interferes, and plays—sometimes gently and sometimes ferociously—in our lives. I genuinely believe that everything happens for a reason. It is for the participant to discover the reasons for each occurrence.

How does this figure into the central idea behind this book? We are about to discover, through my personal experiences, what I believe were the reasons why Hope died. The pain of life also carries the seeds of its pleasures, and I believe this concept somehow plays a role.