The Nakedness

A dread that crept under me for much of my life finally revealed itself. It was a night that I will never forget. My sister and I had both driven home from Penn State for our week long spring break. We had not seen our parents in nearly two months, though we had spoken on the phone. When greeting my parents upon arrival, I instantly knew something was wrong as soon as I saw my father. The dread began to rise.

He looked old – just so old. How could his appearance change so quickly since I last saw him? As my sister and I unpacked the car alone, we both agreed on just how old he looked! “He has been dieting,” my sister told me. This was true, and a drastic weight change could make him look older, although his hair was noticeably thinner as well. My father also had been reportedly sick lately, and I know that this could also contribute to his drastic weight loss. Despite this, my family and I spent a pleasant evening together. We ate dinner and watched the film Captain Phillips, the story of a captain and father kidnapped by Somalian pirates, and his quest to stay alive.

It was when the film finished, and my sister and father both went to bed, that I stayed in the living room to chat with my mom. It was there that I inquired about my dad’s condition. I knew he had been ill, and that he has been having trouble with “back pain.” I was concerned. I urged that my dad should get himself checked out by a doctor, for what if his condition was something worse than what we realized?

“He has seen the doctor,” my mom told me.

“Well, what did they have to say?” I asked.

And it was then that the sorrowful secret could not be concealed anymore. My mother’s nonverbal betrayed her in those moments, and I knew then that there was something wrong. The dread filled the brief seconds before her reply:

“Dad has cancer,” the tears flowed through her eyes.

 It was a moment suspended in time, obliterating me raw.  

In the hours following such a cataclysmic revelation, there were a number of things that occurred. First there was the panic – the physical ill, the nausea, the shaking, and the physiological manifestations of the trauma. Then there was the release, the flooding of tears that simply cannot be repressed any longer. The tears came when I was alone; when the weight of my father’s impending mortality came to full realization.

Then there was the loneliness, a loneliness that penetrated to the core of my being. It was a loneliness that shocked me into awareness of my existence -- that stripped me bare before myself. I am reminded of Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, describing the essence of such moments:

“It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream -- making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams... No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence -- that which makes its truth, its meaning -- its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream -- alone...”

This isolation of our consciousness is perhaps true in all moments of our existence, but this reality of my loneliness was felt the deepest in such a moment of devastation. What I was facing was shared by my family, and shared by all others in the world who have faced devastation – and some much worse than my own – and yet the experience of it is always our own and no one else’s. Always our own to make sense of. My initial response was to reach out to someone – anyone – that I was friends with, to find some comfort, to cower away from this new reality. Any comfort was fleeting. It was a nightmare, a continuous state of disbelief that I couldn’t wake up from. I was forced to confront a world that I did not want to accept.

In those moments where I recognized my father’s own mortality, I also came in sight of my own, exposed finally in its nakedness. At first this nakedness brings an exhilarating freedom. All previous struggle and fear are reduced to trivialities, if not eradicated entirely. Past struggles become merely an illusion that is now liberated from the self. My lack of faith in a higher power – a lack of faith of an authoritative being or defined purpose to my existence -- is something that did not leave me in despair but only fueled my liberation. I scoffed at my social anxieties and fears of rejection. How could any of that matter in the face of this? It is a feeling of freedom that could inspire the world of man entire to do the greatest and the worst of things in such a moment. I felt like I could do anything. I felt reborn.

And yet this overwhelming liberation was simultaneously crushed by the devastation that enacted it. The cancer of my father was the one thing I most wish I could vanquish, yet my freedom as a being in the world was powerless to do so. Of course, I possessed the ability to campaign for a cure and other such projects, but it only goes so far. I now faced my ultimate master: death. I was both at the precipice of freedom and tyranny in their totality, all in one moment.

Days passed and my mind came down from these heights. Part of it was likely due to denial of my family’s situation, but some of it also came from coming to peace with everything. Unfortunately, the exhilaration of freedom soon left me. The social anxieties, fears of rejection, and the multitude of stresses of the world and all of its struggles came back to me, but not without a greater understanding of what was at stake. I wish I could greater harness that exhilarating sense of freedom – that understanding that we only have this life to live, and we must construct the world we wish to fulfill in the limited time we have. Deep within me I felt a strange fortune for all that transpired; not for the suffering of my father or family, of course, but for reaching a moment so early in my life where I understood the urgency of my existence.

And so where does this leave me now? I worry about my father’s health on a daily basis. I avoid close contact with him when I am sick. I examine him closely, a body once strong and healthy now rendered frail by his treatments. Every sneeze could be a cold, and every cold could be his death. A sense of uncertainty looms over my family. It is clear now that the only certainty is our death – a comforting guide of direction to our lives, albeit one with apprehension of its arrival. I lived a life of blanketed delusion, where my father’s health and being in this world was seen as a certainty, a pillar of my existence, when in truth this certainty never existed. The blanket had been removed; the pillar was but thin air. His future being in this world has an end, as does mine. It can come at any moment. And if we are to be eternal in this world, it can only be through others.

Don’t you see? My life in actuality has not changed. Total freedom and total tyranny have always met in my life as one, for it is inherent in my condition and in yours, and it always will be. Perhaps we only have the freedom to un-wrestle ourselves free, as Sartre put it; but we must embrace and reconcile our doom to push back against this fatalism, and to create with what we can. We often mask our nakedness, always hiding from the shock of ourselves. But when we are confronted with devastation, confronted with our mortality, all illusions of our condition dissolve.