On my father’s birthday, this essay

 The Meaning of Life

Not many people talk about the meaning of life, at least these days.  But my father did.  He was always seeking the One True Answer.  Waiting on a supermarket line, he’d look around, and comment, “Is this all there is?  Really?  Maybe.”   

Most adults didn’t speak that way to children-- my guess is they still don’t.  The funny thing was that he expected me, all of seven or eight, to figure it out. Perhaps he reasoned that when it comes to metaphysics, children know as much as anyone else.  I was his equal in the quest for meaning, even though The Velveteen Rabbit was more my speed in those days.

“It’s not so bad,” I said.  He gave me his wistful, disappointed smile. We both knew mine wasn’t a good answer, but neither of us had a better one.     

When I hit the grand old age of twelve, he handed me a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian. “Honey, you need to read this.  It tells it like it is,” he said, using what he imagined was popular lingo. 

Of course, I accepted the book with thanks.  What else could I do?

It was a strange sort of gift for a child, even a supposedly precocious one.  Did my father worry that I’d take to daily prayer? At best, I had seen the inside of a synagogue or church once or twice—our family hadn't yet begun its steady stream of funerals. Our library was filled with leather-bound editions of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Tolstoy, but not a single copy of the Bible.  To me, God only appeared in Hollywood spectacles about miracles, and I knew that life didn’t offer miracles. Tragedy, wars, genocide, illness, but never miracles.

“Religion is the biggest source of evil in the world,” he said gloomily.  

“I guess so, Dad,” I replied. I was no rebel, and besides, I wanted to prove I could read Bertrand Russell. 

Well, I skimmed the book.  It’s hardly gripping fare for a twelve-year old, and anyway, atheism was old news to me. I'd been well-trained as a Non-Believer from kindergarten (although my mother once confessed, in a tense whisper, that she just might be an agnostic after all. You never know, she said.)  There had been a year, or maybe longer, when I had asked a higher presence for help, never for myself, only for my family. But I didn't get results, so I gave up praying. It’s one of those use it or lose it things. 

But I think my father did miss prayer.  I think he missed faith.  Yes, he had a scientist’s contempt for the blindness, the irrationality, of faith. But I could see that he desperately craved what religion promises:  a sense of moral order, a sense of belonging, purpose.  Everything he craved but denied himself.  Instead he watched films like Kurosawa's Rashomon, pondered the multiplicity of truths, the unreliability of narrators.  “That film says it all, doesn’t it,” he said.

Inevitably, I became a philosophy major in college. It was a natural progression. I hoped, or part of me hoped, to answer the big questions, the nature of reality.  But it was the era of semiotics, deconstruction, and I got distracted by the mind-body problem. I forgot about the meaning of life, which I’d decided was relative and had something to do with Einstein.  

My father looked mildly surprised at this.  “Einstein says energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared,” he explained. Only he imagined that I could understand that equation.  To him, I was that brilliant.  Really. 

He added, “I am enjoying your Nietzsche books.  That guy has a lot to say.” 

By sixty, my father’s dreams had died.  He had gone bankrupt, endured a grueling surgery and seen his only son – my older brother—die a sudden, painful death. And just as my father had found relative peace in a new job, he was diagnosed with a rare cancer.  One of those freaks that hit one in ten million, something like that.  It fell to me to deliver the news,  don't ask why, it's just the way things were in my family.  We sat on his hospital bed—he and I—he was recovering from exploratory surgery, but he looked robust, younger than his years.  He waited for me to tell the truth.  The plain, unvarnished truth. He could trust me for that.

“It's a malignant tumor,” I began. 

He nodded.  Cancer had killed my grandfather when dad was six.  My father never mentioned cancer or his father—or, for that matter, my brother. 

“Chemo?  Radiation and all that?” he asked.  

“No, the arm has to be amputated. They have to cut the tumor out.”  I touched him where the tumor was, to show him just how high the surgeon’s knife would go: high enough to lop off his shoulder.  I felt a sharp pang picturing my father, no longer the handsomest man in the room.  He’d lost so much already; it was hard to bear. 

“Well, that’s that,” he said, and he cried.  He wondered if his missing shoulder would make “the guys at work” awkward. At his age, he couldn’t afford to lose this job—money was tight, he wouldn't get another chance.     

“It will be like diving into icy cold water.  After a while, you're just swimming,” I said.  I offered him the disappointed, tolerant upside-down smile that we shared.  I’d acquired his habit of leaving jobs, and I knew what failure tasted like.

He grew calm.  We talked about his youth – he’d been a great dancer, a tennis player, he loved swimming.  “How many years could that last?  Ten?  Everyone grows old.  I can still play chess, play bridge, read, listen to music, take walks, drive. I can work. It’s all a trade-off, a life for a limb, isn’t it?”

My father returned to his job a month after his surgery.  

Decades of intense pain lay ahead:  phantom pain, the grim joke that the mind plays on the missing limb.  Not one doctor had warned him. He tried meditation, he tried drugs, but the pain only worsened: a feedback loop, he explained.  

Yet, in spite of everything, he seemed happy. He stopped asking about the meaning of life. I suppose, by then, he knew what it was: it’s the opposite of dying.  Life breaks your heart, but it’s too beautiful to leave. Much too beautiful.  

Astonishingly, he started to read the Bible.  “It’s an amazing work,” he said, “you should read it, honey.” 

Soon, I promised him, soon.