I love K-drama because it teaches me so many things about the life. On November 30th, I posted the revelation of truth in the K-drama She Would Never Know. Then, on Sunday, December 1st, I read the Sunday Opinion section of the NY Times, which had a number of pieces on the challenge of facing the truth. At the heart of that problem is Jack Nicholson's famous line in A Few Good Men, "You don't want the truth -- you can't handle the truth."
The cover story of the Times' section is Sarah Wildman's magnificent, "If my dying daughter could face her mortality, why couldn't we?" Wildman describes the long journey of the family as her daughter died of an incurable cancer. Doctors kept talking of "hope" to the exclusion of time and space to talk about that other thing -- dying -- which shouldn't be but does get conflated with "no hope." It reminded me of the conversation I had with a friend who worked in palliative care. I told her doctors had said there were no more treatments for my nephew's leukemia. She said, "You know that means he's dying, don't you?" I would have to say I didn't know that, and I didn't want to know that -- but it put us in the bind that Wildman is describing, with the dying child left alone with the truth because we don't know how to handle it.
Nathaniel Rich's "A place that looks death in the face, and keeps living," was almost a counterpoint to Wildman's story of bewilderment and isolation. Rich talked about New Orleans and climate change, arguing that everyone in the city knew that the city might be swallowed by sea. They weren't in denial about this, but rather in active conversation, planning and action. He wrote, "New Orleans has a striking competitive advantage. It knows that every hurricane season poses an existential threat."
He continues:
I've never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise -- and hurricane fatalism. Yo become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.
The essay arrives at the conclusion that finite lives -- whether of a person or a city -- are not worthless. Learning to live with acceptance of limits -- taking joy in what we have, rather than thinking it has to last forever -- is the great challenge.
The truth is hard all the time. Even small truths -- we have to floss, eat green leafy vegetables and exercise are truths that many of us (me included) fall flat in accepting. In a way these are stand-ins for the bigger trrouble-makers -- the knowledge that it's all finite. How can it be that this beautiful, wonderful world and the lives we live here won't go on forever?
Despite our wish to hide or dissemble or steer away the truth, it will come to us. And when that happens we need our communities to hold us close, to talk with us about answers, to go through it together.
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