DECEMBER 19 – GHOST STORIES
“Bruce, it’s Elise. I’m so terribly sorry.”
“Wow, Elise… Thanks for reaching out.”
“I’m heartbroken,” Elise shared. “I never imagined this outcome.”
And I never imagined this call.
Elise was Karen’s chief clinician in the Emory Phase I u31402-a-102 Clinical Trial. We shared 30 minutes of heart-to-heart. Like everyone else in my world, she was concerned for my well-being. I insisted my friends were keeping me aloft — my stock response to everyone who inquired. The truth was more nuanced. My close friend Amy, who never picked up, always greeted me with the recording, “If this is a mental health emergency, dial 911…”
“PICK UP AMY! It’s a mental emergency!!!”
Back to Elise: I was surprised at her candor. The overarching story — that Karen was sent to physical therapy for back pain and died four months later — forced some soul-searching for Elise.
Elise and I played back the tape: With each scan, we missed the obvious: Occam’s Razor: When two competing ideas conflict, the simpler one prevails. In other words, if bizarre symptoms appear in a cancer patient, assume the main disease.
My would-a-shoulda torment (second-guessing the missed signs) felt better when Elise concurred, “Diagnostics can’t pick up everything.”
We now knew that some kind of cancer growth constricted her ureter, which produced back pressure in the kidney, which became a urinoma (rupture of fluid into the body), which produced horrific pain. This was treated as back pain, then a urological issue, when in fact, cancer was the main event.
I shared my litany of let-downs – starting with Occam’s razor, then the failure to manage Karen’s pain, the inability to discuss Karen’s actual condition, and the splintered approach where each specialty focused on a symptom without considering the patient as a whole. Ultimately, we were left to figure it out on our own.
“Bruce, all I can say is I’m so sorry.”
“Elise, you see lots of patients. Do you reach out to the survivors often?”
“Karen was special,” Elise replied. “Most patients come into the trial and last a short time, but Karen was a fighter. After two years, we established a deep and real relationship.”
Karen and I coined a special word for this: “Bondo,” the ability to form deep and real relationships. I likened Karen to the plate spinner on the Ed Sullivan Show, always knowing when a relationship was wobbling and needed a spin. Reaching out was her mission.
To my surprise, Bondo began to awaken in me.
I started picking up the phone instead of texting during the medical saga. The old AT&T jingle (Reach Out and Touch Someone) became my mission, spinning the love plates to maintain connections and avoid falling into the sinkhole of grief. By reaching out, I sustained my out-breath into life.
My friend Mimi was blunter – “Karen is reaching out through you. She’s bigger than you now; she is your teacher.”
Yes, I learned that at the grave site.
The next night, I went to the pub with my buddy Daniel. We sat tucked upstairs in the Belgian beer loft.
“I feel like I’m taking over the family business.” I looked up to flirt with the waitress taking our order and stated without explanation, “I’m spinning the love plates.”
“You’re what?”
“IPA. Tropicalia.”
“Me too,” Daniel chimed.
After the beers appeared, Daniel asked, “Do you know the famous healer Olga Worrall?”
“Uh, no.”
“After Olga’s husband died, she developed psychic healing powers.”
“Is this where we’re going? This is my future?”
“Maybe,” Daniel grinned. “She was invited to speak to a group of Johns Hopkins medical students.”
“And?
“She spotted a doubter.”
“Okay.”
“So, she confronted him. ‘Young man, are you questioning my story?’ The med student replied, ‘I’ve been taught to study the evidence.’
‘It’s okay to question,’ she said pointedly, ‘but if you live in doubt, you close the door to discovery.’”
I thought about Discovery having a door while Daniel took a sip. He continued.
“So Olga asked the guy, ‘Did you have an uncle with red hair?’” Now, he was spooked. “Uh yeah.”
“Well, he’s standing next to you and doesn’t want you to be plagued by his death. He wants you to know that he fell off the roof in an accident – and not suicide.”
Daniel looked at me, kinda funny. I wondered if Karen was standing next to me.
The cute waitress broke the spell.
“Another round?”
I wanted to ask, “Any ghosts up here in the loft?”
DECEMBER 23: PRACTICING THE UPLIFT MANEUVER
Rumi tells the tale of a tanner who fainted in the perfumer's bazaar. A crowd quickly gathered, checking his heart, sprinkling rosewater, massaging his hands, and applying poultices. Someone lit incense; another checked if he had been drinking or smoking hashish. Still, another pulled at his clothes.
I felt like the tanner — holding it together but actually in a state of shock.
Rumi’s story takes a strange turn when the tanner’s brother bursts into the crowd and cries, “Out of my way. I know the source of his illness!”
The brother deftly pulled some dung from his sleeve and rubbed it into the tanner’s nose. Suddenly, the tanner began to move. The crowd exclaimed, “A wonderful charm has been performed.”
I love this tale mainly because it lines up with one of my guiding principles, “You can’t tell shit from Shinola."
Rumi explains that the remedy “consists in that which he is habituated and accustomed.” Unaccustomed to the sweet scents of rose and ambergris, the tanner became disoriented and fainted. The antidote came from the world he knew intimately.
And here I was, collapsed in the bazaar of my world.
I had written a book about UPLIFT and how an outside shock can lift your story into a higher orbit — shocks like financial loss, illness, pandemics, notoriety, divorce, bomb cyclones, and even death. They provide an instant, convulsive, and ultimately redemptive detour from one's well-worn route.
As I lay in bed, my inner GPS spun in circles as despair nibbled at my toes. The paradox of the tanner passing out from perfume came to mind. Karen’s passing transpired with angelic beauty, yet it smote me to the ground; I needed reviving. I flipped to the page in the UPLIFT book where Karen faced the shock of her diagnosis head-on. She explained:
“From the beginning, I decided to face my diagnosis head-on... It was like riding a wave. I’m going to get on top and ride it to the end. That meant reaching out, getting as much help as possible, and engaging and immersing myself in this experience. Whenever a door opened, I checked it out, even if I chose not to pursue it. Every person I met and worked with, however briefly, proved to be important.”
I pictured a giant wave and how the incoming breaker forces a confrontation with Reality. If the surfer approaches the wave with trepidation – and tries to skirt its full force – the ocean flips the board and tosses the surfer. I needed to shift my thinking. Instead of cowering at the wave, how could I tap into its energy? I pictured a spacecraft using its orbital velocity as a slingshot to escape the Earth’s gravity. If this shock was a creative impulse, how do I ride it?
I had been given some of Olga’s psychic sense by tuning into Karen's presence. During hospice, Karen apologized that her ongoing travails had hamstrung my life. I shook my head, “Karen, don’t go there! This is about us. We have traveled together.”
I feel Karen in the background, rooting, “Bruce, Bruce, Bruce! Go forth, open your heart, catch the wave. That is where you will find me. It's time to do your Bruce thing!”
Thanks for the encouragement, babe, but a knife edge separates Uplift from despair.
Years ago, Gurdjieff's pupil, Jeanne de Salzmann, offered a harsh admonition. She wrote:
“You will see that in life, you receive exactly what you give. Your life is the mirror of what you are. It is in your image.”
Given my circumstances, that’s pretty harsh. She goes on:
“You are passive, blind, demanding. You take all, you accept all, without feeling any obligation. Your attitude toward the world and toward life is the attitude of one who has the right to make demands and to take, who has no need to pay or to earn. You believe that all things are your due simply because it is you! All your blindness is there! None of this strikes your attention. And yet this is what keeps one world separate from another world.”
That’s some tough love. I have lived a charmed life. Maybe I’ve been blind to suffering. My thoughts smoldered as I lay in the empty bed. How can I reopen my heart, keep my inner radar attuned, and keep Karen's supportive presence alive? Like that tanner, where is my antidote? My Uplift?
JANUARY 6 – ESCAPE VELOCITY
In celestial mechanics, Escape Velocity is the minimum speed a moving object, like a rocket, must achieve to break away from the earth’s gravitational influence. The force of gravity, the atmosphere’s resistance, and the rocket’s size and weight conspire to pull the rocket back to Earth and crash. With sufficient speed, the right orbit, and the slingshot effect from the planet, the craft can pull away from this world.
I spent most of the night awake, considering escape velocity.
What kind of thrust will propel my life into a new incarnation of Bruce?
Before you admonish, “Dude, her body’s still warm,” the kinetic energy of a rocket launch begins slowly, and it’s beginning now—not in some imagined future. Failure to act could cause the launch propellant to burn up before reaching escape velocity. The dreaded Second Law of Thermodynamics states, “The net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase.” That’s longhand for things devolve.
Last week, I presented a slide talk about Karen’s passing titled, “What does it mean to be healed?” It was based on a book my Sufi teacher, Reshad Feild, wrote about his friend, John Cooke, who died of cancer.
In the final scene, Reshad wrote:
“Suddenly, John’s body started shaking; ripples passed through every muscle and fiber. I could see he was in great physical pain, yet he was so conscious he was beyond the pain.”
“Using the last of his strength, he moved his head so that he could see through the open window. The blood moved on, a spreading red river. We turned to look with him. The sky turned red in the sunset. The first star shone over the top of the pine tree. The last bird had ceased its calling.
“I love you,” he said. “There is nothing else.”
That final line left an indelible mark on me. I was young, in my twenties, and had no real experience with death. And now, seasoned by Karen’s passing, I found Reshad’s semi-fictional account melodramatic. Yet, something about the passage stayed with me all these years.
Reshad asked us one night:
“Do you understand that John had been healed?”
When Karen died, I finally understood what Reshad meant — to be healed is not the absence of illness. Healing is the culmination of the narrative arc of your life — to be released into love.
Reshad did not write about the survivors. I’m not sure he understood the grief part.
From the perspective of the soul, down is holy ground.
Beyond Kubler-Ross, Francis Weller is guiding a new generation through a deeper understanding of grief as:
“a time of descent that takes us down into a different geography. In this shadowed terrain, we encounter a landscape familiar to the soul— loss, grief, death, vulnerability, and fear... This is a season of decay, of shedding and endings, of falling apart and undoing. This is not a time of rising and growth. It is not a time of confidence and ease. No. We are hunkered down… From the perspective of soul, down is holy ground."
I wasn’t ready for that.
Plus, it was New Year’s Eve. Nine years earlier, Karen collapsed in my arms in an elevator; yes, on New Year’s Eve — the auspicious start to this saga. Tonight, I cried in my cups that nobody called, nobody invited me for a beer.
“Shouldn’t there be some tiny recompense?” I protested to God. (As some kind of strange perk, Jews get to protest to God).
For decades, Karen and I staged elaborate New Year’s parties, even hiring a salsa teacher to give dance lessons for one memorable event. We always ended in a circle, arm-in-arm, the room swaying to Tom Jones’s sexy, sweaty rendition of “Danny Boy.”
Earlier in the day, my neighbor sweetly texted five beguiling words, “Martini will be offered soon.” Life suddenly held promise, but mysteriously, the martini was withdrawn.
Sackcloth and ashes for you, Bruce Miller!
I drove my son to meet a friend at Ovidiu’s house. Ovidiu was the widower who shared the harsh truth about grief at my Shiva. Rather than dropping off and pulling away, I parked outside and gathered my feelings. I’m not going home; I’m going in.
I knocked on the door, and Ovi received me with a hug. Another orphan from loneliness, an out-of-work Spanish teacher, soon joined us. For the next three hours, we had a magical evening — including watching the University of Georgia triumph in the Peach Bowl. From the news wire:
At the stroke of midnight, Georgia football saw Ohio State miss a 50-yard field goal to send the Dawgs to their second straight national championship as the Dawgs beat the Buckeyes 42-41. What a dogfight for the Dawgs to come back and win.
Down by 14 at the start of the fourth quarter, there was a chance, but the way Georgia’s defense played all game, not many gave the Dawgs a shot in the dark to win. However, the heart that this Georgia team has was enough, and by a miracle, the Buckeyes shanked the kick and the championship. The University of Georgia won by a single point at the stroke of midnight.
I sat in the car past midnight, thinking of the Dawgs and their heart, and letting the frigid newness of the year envelop me with promise. The next-door martini didn’t happen, but the Peach Bowl miracle did. Why? Because in the cold of the night, I knocked at the door.
Luke 11:9 - Ask, and it shall be given; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
Amid beer and football, I forgot to make a resolution. Now was my moment.
I closed my eyes and envisioned the collision of hydrogen atoms in the core of the sun — how, with heat and gravitational force, amid the dance of particles, two lucky protons might fuse into helium and release the heat, warmth, and light to power the universe.
I thought of gene flows creating new forms of life — pollen blowing to a neighboring field or migrants crossing borders filled with hope.
I thought of the British Invasion of 1965 when I watched The Beatles play in Comiskey Park—a rock and roll transfusion that swept into the hearts of screaming teens to birth the cultural upheaval of the Sixties.
I thought of 76-year-old Jannie Jones sitting quietly at a funeral in Hopkins, South Carolina, spotting Representative James Clyburn standing against a nearby wall and having the temerity to beckon him toward her pew with her finger.
“I need to know who you’re going to vote for,” Jannie asked. That was the moment Clyburn decided to endorse Joe Biden for President, swiftly changing the course of history.
I remembered my flippant note to Reshad before my trip from LA to Santa Cruz, when I wrote: “And while you’re at it, set me up on a date.” Yeah, the flippant note into the void that brought a Tennessee girl into my life.
Knocking, blowing, fusing, transfusing, beckoning, and flippant note-writing — the universe isn’t cold and harsh. It likes to dance — improv with temerity!
A single word came into my heart: CIRCULATION. I vowed for the next 12 months to say yes to every invitation, request, suggestion, and opportunity — regardless of my distance, distaste, or demeanor.
What will this accomplish? Because I trust that the stream of life is inherently beneficent, intelligent, and purposeful.
Olga Worrall, also a widow, said, “If you live in doubt, you close the door to discovery.”
And beloved Karen, now my teacher, gave the marching orders: