Some Philosophy to Distract Myself from a Nightmare

My brain’s newest variety of hell is creating vivid dream worlds where my mother still lives but my other family members are dying instead. This time it was my younger brother. There is fear surrounding that. Fear so thick I can taste it….

My little brother was born with a freakish blood condition where, every once in a while, his white blood cells randomly decide that his platelets are enemy bodies. There is no cure, but thankfully, the body’s immune system usually snaps out of its deadly delusion given enough time and proper care in a hospital ward. Still, it took a month for his first episode to end. He was a little boy then, so little he barely remembers it… but I remember.

I remember spending a lot of time in that hospital waiting for him to get better. And I remember the adult in his ward with the same condition who didn’t get to go home at the end of that month because sometimes, the body doesn’t just snap out of it. He has only ever had the one episode, but there is no way to know if or when he might have another one.

Now let me be clear: this disorder could easily kill him. At any moment. Especially because time is of the essence at the beginning of an episode and he lives alone now so he might not notice right away if the tell-tale painless bruises appear on his back or somewhere else where he can’t see them immediately.

So I’m up at 4am trying to convince my stupid bastard of a brain that there is really no need to call my brother in the middle of the night and ask him to look at his back in a mirror. Because my brother already thinks I’m insane and doing that wouldn’t ease his mind on the matter. The truth is that my brother lives his day to day life not thinking about his disorder. How could anyone do otherwise? One cannot sit and wait for death and still live a normal life. My mother and I proved that over the summer.  

There is no omen in this. I tell myself firmly. It’s a freak dream and it upsets me because I love my brother. Yet I find it’s still hard to go back to bed, because it turns out that given a choice between a dream world where my mother is well again but my brother is dying or a real world where my mother has been dead for some time and my brother is fine…I’d rather not sleep. I’ve learned how to cope with this loss in my waking world, I am unsure of how to cope with the twisted mirror image of it that I am enduring in my dreams.

It’s an impossible choice and an uncomfortable question hovers just under it. Seeing my mother alive and well again is a wonderful thing, but not at the cost of my sibling. That doesn’t mean I love my mother less, right? Of course not. But as I wake up, I find myself wondering if some part of me is trying to prove it does. Or rather, trying to prove that what did happen this summer is still better than some of the alternatives.

Five years ago, I was gently told that my mother would die—by my gods. Because that was five years before the doctors made the final diagnosis. “But mommy can’t die!” was my refrain almost from that moment until the moment of her actual death. No matter how much I gave myself over to that phrase, no matter how much I convinced myself that the pain would be too great to survive and that surely, surely my gods wouldn’t do that to me…it happened anyway. And the pain was not too great to survive. 

So when I tell myself that in the absence of my mother, with my father and brother being all I have left, that surely, surely my gods would not take either of them from me because the pain would be too great to survive… I know just how empty that assertion is. Forget astral not caring. Life don’t care. And the reality is still that, in the universal order of things, the pain isn’t too great to inflict on me and there is nothing to stop the world from dealing out that hurt.

We bargain and plead and cast spells and throw salt over our shoulders and in the end, none of it is enough to stop the tragic from happening if the universe wills it. We might be able to tip the scales but only in the lighter matters when our metaphysical finger is strong enough to fight the weight. The rest of the time our efforts go unnoticed, our pleas fall on deaf ears, and no amount of pledging ourselves can buy life away from death. As mortals we are ephemeral beings no matter how much power we may acquire from the other realms.

The strongest part of us, the most eternal note in the song of our soul, is that thing which keeps us from checking out early. That thing which burns inside of us and bids us go on. Viktor Frankl had something to say about that—a holocaust survivor and psychologist, he had a unique vantage point from which to view the resilience of the human spirit. He found that even those who had lost everything could continue on if they still had that one thing inside them giving off light. He observed  that when the horrors of Auschwitz became too much for someone, their light went out (apparently it was dramatic enough a change to be visible in their eyes) and death quickly followed. But for every soul that failed, dozens of others survived the windstorm of pain to shimmer on into that endless night. He saw it as I do: a triumph of humanity.

That luminescent thing inside is different for each of us, but it is never tied to something which can be easily taken or destroyed, for as Frankl said “What is to give light, must endure burning.” I am one of millions—no, billions—of human beings alive today who are inheritors of that light. Grief is pain without doubt, but pain which, while intense to the person experiencing it, is ultimately very survivable by universal standards. My inner flame does not so much as flicker—and that doesn’t mean I love my family any less. Just that I recognize that I can go on even if I lose them all.

That doesn’t make sleeping tonight any easier. Nor does it make the threat of my brother’s silent condition any less frightening. It does remind me, however, that even if the worst were to happen, for all the pain it would mean, I would not be destroyed by it. 

That’s a far cry from comfort, but it’s enough to keep me from chasing false omens until some reasonable hour after dawn.