The Useless Tree

Sunday Modern Love: A Taoist Moment

    Today's Modern Love column in the Sunday NYT is a beautiful reflection by a pregnant woman, Rhonda Kaysen, on whether or not to have an abortion.  The possibility of a child has emerged at the wrong time: they are young, just starting out in careers, taking a chance in a new country, Mexico.  A baby just doesn't fit; it doesn't make sense for their well laid plans.  The father is ready to terminate.  She, at first, also cannot she her way through to having the child.  They make an appointment for an abortion.

     But then something happens.  It is not so much that she thinks about it, which she does, as she comes to see it in a different light.  She stops pushing against where life is taking her, and she follows:

...What had seemed like the end of something just days earlier began to feel like the beginning of a different path entirely, one that would still involve visits to Tarascan Indian villages and treks into cloud forests, but would also include monthly prenatal exams and a new Spanish vocabulary, like the word for stretch marks (estrías).

      How marvelously Taoist!  What seemed like an end is a beginning.  A new path, or Way (Tao), had opened up before her and, instead of walking away from it, she moves along it, embracing it, wherever it might take her:

Through it all, my swollen belly has been less a liability than a passport to a whole new world. I’ve found fresh conversational terrain with Mexican women. My hairdresser loves to rub my belly and feel the baby kick, and recently she showed me the scar from her Caesarean section. As I type this, our baby’s new clothes are drying on the balcony in anticipation of his imminent birth. I can’t wait to see where he’ll take us.

 "A passport to a whole new world..."  Yes, that is what Way can be.

        I experienced something similar to this with Aidan, but it took me longer - months, years - to let go and just follow where he would take us.  It was not at all what I had expected or planned for, but it was sublimely  transformational.

Still Against Valentine's Day

     We're getting ready for a big snow storm here (I ran out today to buy a new snow blower to replace my broken one).  Tomorrow will be taken up with digging out and trying to do what is possible with two feet of snow all around (that is what is predicted).  So, I am going to reproduce below my Valentine's Day post of last year.

Against Valentine's Day

    I think I have always been against Valentine's Day: so obviously constructed to play upon our romantic insecurities to sell cards and flowers.  And when I see stories like this one, from today's China Daily, I am only confirmed in my opposition:

Florists, restaurateurs and jewelry makers have pounding hearts waiting a year for this huge business opportunity.

Romantic gifts at astronomical prices are popping up in China's big cities - commercialism is in the air, overshadowing the love.

In Beijing's Guohua shopping mall, a rose made of platinum was priced at 199,999 yuan (US$24,691). The life-size rose, weighing 258 grams, attracted curious buyers but no buyers.

     Ah yes, the sweet smell of commercialism in the air.  It's really rather pathetic.  If you have to buy things to demonstrate your love, then that love does not run very deep.  Confucius would surely scoff. For him, love must be performed everyday in the fulfillment of our duties to those closest to us.  And Taoists would shrug.  For them, love has a natural flow that cannot be altered by an array of material goods.  So, who do I call to complain that taking on the claptrap of Valentine's Day runs counter to deep Chinese traditions?

    Of course, after all of my protestations, I am trapped by the social expectations created by the "holiday," and I will buy my wife a plant, a flowering plant that she can put in the ground outside as soon as spring is far enough along. But I am still against Valentine's day...

Modern Love: Another Taoist Parent

     I have blogged before on Taoist parenting and I have found a new example.  Although she may not intend to be, Suzanna Paola, writing today's NYT "Modern Love" column, comes pretty close to being a Taoist parent.

    Her essay reflects upon her adopted eight-year-old son's decision to change his name. It is a bit mystifying and she wonders whether we can ever really know our children.  Indeed, from the very outset, she reveals a Taoist sensibility in recognizing our inability to influence the unfolding of Way:

But I suppose the arrival of children should clue us in that we must abandon any sense of certainty about how things will unfold.

     This was not my own first impulse.  I thought that, when Aidan was born, I knew exactly what I was doing and, within certain limits, precisely where we were going.  I had to learn - Aidan had to teach me - how wrong that impulse was, and how right Paola's understanding is.

    But if we cannot shape the unfolding of Way - of our futures, our destinies - then what are we supposed to do with children, who obviously need guidance and assistance in apprehending the world around them and finding their places in it?  A Taoist parent does not completely let go of his or her child.  Oviously, there is much that must be done.  What might distinguish Taoist parenting, however, is the recognition of certain limits.  There is only so much you can do - and sometimes perhaps you should do less - when it comes to influencing your child's life.  This recognition of limits comes through in Paola's appreciation of what she cannot know, and thus what she cannot do:

I suppose I’ve come around to the beginning, to the anxious and delicious waiting and who-is-this-going-to-be? We know these children in the way we know the heavens, basing our knowledge on the lights that arrive in our orbit possibly already extinguished at the source.

Like a star’s light, the flickerings of a child’s mind may well be gone by the time they reach our understanding. We fumble with our faulty equipment to find that they love dragons as they discover Bionicles and robots. We remember their care for animals as they suddenly become, like a niece of ours, a poet. We besiege their fort with our questions, little harmless arrows breaking against the portcullis. I find myself doing it.

   Children are not now what they will become.  Way is dynamic and fluid and we, all of us tossed by the shifting currents of Way, cannot know our circumstances of the next moment.  Perhaps we cannot even see what we are right now.  Instead of assuming static consistency over time, we have to embrace the inevitability of personal change.  Instead of attempting to impose a preconceived notion of a "good childhood" or a "bright future" on our children, we need to step back and take time to see them as they are in this moment.  It may not be what we thought this morning; it is almost certainly not what they will be a in year or two. 

    As parents, we want to think that we are leading them.  Taoism would tell us to follow.

Modern Love: Fade to Black

   A beautiful piece this week by Patty Dann.  She recounts her husband's diagnosis of, and ultimate death from, a rare brain cancer.  There is a deep sadness in the story, but an elegant wisdom as well.  Dann does an extraordinary job carrying forward the life of her husband, Willem, in the clarity and love of her writing.

    There are Taoist and Confucian resonances here, even if not of Dann's intention.

     She found herself being very straightforward with the doctors and wondered about it afterward:

I don’t know why I was so blunt. Of course there are miracles. Of course there are exceptions. But I wanted to know the worst-case scenario. For me that made me feel more in control, even though I was acutely aware I was in control of nothing.

“Live in the moment.”

“All you have is the day.”

“We’re all terminal.”

These phrases ricocheted through my head....

    Becoming aware of our lack of control: a Taoist notion. She does not say if she came to accept that lack of control.  If "live in the moment" passed through her mind, was she then able to let go of her expectations and desires?  There is a certain peace in the tone of her writing that suggests that somehow she did find a way to let go.  And in that letting go, she has preserved her voice and, through her voice, Willem's spirit.

    But there is something Confucian here as well.  What strikes me is her loving work to maintain the social bonds of the family as she struggled with Willem's demise:

A week before his fourth birthday, Jake announced that he wanted a cake in the shape of a fire truck. I am not a baker. I have the urge to bake perhaps twice a year, and that usually results in an apple or pumpkin pie with, I confess, store-bought crust.

But my son wanted a cake in the shape of a fire truck, and in that way that mothers are able to lift cars off their children’s feet in an emergency, I somehow made one. I used practically a whole bottle of red dye in the frosting, which in earlier days would appall me. But now I reasoned that if Willem grew up on the purest whole-wheat bread and beet salad, perhaps junk food was the key to a long life.

I decorated the cake with care — licorice hoses, peppermint wheels, butterscotch headlights and a lattice of thin pretzels for ladders. It was my offering to my son on what I knew would be his last birthday with his father.

We had the party in Central Park. Friends helped push the party favors and food in carts. Willem was able to walk there slowly, but with elegance, holding my hand, wearing his navy blue Nike headband.

The children sat at a picnic table for cake. Jake blew out the candles on the fire truck cake and made a wish. During that period of our lives, he made wishes whenever candles were lighted, and on eyelashes and fluffy dandelions. “I always make the same wish, Mom,” he’d say, “and you can’t ever ask me what it is.”

 She found ways to support her son and maintain her husband's dignity, all of which created and reproduced the identity and meaning of each member of the family.  They all extended their humanity in that work and in those loving bonds.   However hard it is for a child, I am sure that, as he looks back on his own life, he will remember his father with warm affection.  And that is what a family is ideally supposed to be.  Beautiful.

Letting Go

     A haunting story in yesterday's Modern Love column in the NYT.  Katherine Friedman recounts an airplane mishap - a scary plunge, the oxygen masks come down, a crash seems imminent - that suddenly reverses, leaving her and her new husband safe but shaken at a Cancun wedding:

At the beach, children shriek and tumble in the gentle surf, their hair braided tightly into cornrows affixed with plastic beads. Everyone rejoices in the delights of this paradise, but I feel as if I am visiting purgatory.

There are meals to eat. Tours to take. There is a wedding, beautiful in its simplicity. Vows are exchanged and a marriage begins. There is dancing and music. We drink a little too much. My husband has a cigarette for the first time in months.

That night in bed I cling to him, much as I did on the plane, and he tells me the same thing as when we were falling through the sky: “We’ll be O.K.”

We try to talk about what happened on the plane, try to reconstruct it, and then we stop. He wants to move past it, I can tell. “We’re lucky,” he repeats.

I nod. But the truth is, I don’t feel lucky. Or even alive. I feel indifferent. All I can do is watch everyone around me experience what I should be feeling. No, it’s worse: I watch them and condemn them for the utter uselessness of their joy.

      She describes her unease as letting go.  In a way - and this is my interpretation of her piece - she had to let go of the certainty that the next moment will be there, that her life as she knows it will continue.  The converse of this is an acceptance of uncertainty.  Maybe I will be hit by a bus tomorrow and others will find a way to carry on without me.  This kind of feeling for her is destabilizing:

And here I remain — among friends and loved ones, at the beginning of my marriage and all the fierce entanglements of life. Yet in letting go, it seems I created a break between my former and current selves that isn’t so easily bridged.

At home, I go to the grocery store, rub the dog’s belly, fold the laundry, return my mother’s calls — all the routines and rituals that are supposed to give life structure and meaning. But week after week I am still in that other place, a half step removed, wondering when and how I am ever going to come back from this.

 I have some sense of what she is talking about.  When Aidan was born, and his profound disabilities unfolded before us, I was dumbfounded.  All of my expectations were shattered, my visions of my family and myself scrambled.  As time went on, I learned to let go -  the Taoism helped - of what I thought life would be and found a way to marvel at life as it is.  Letting go for me was liberating.  It worked.  I was able to see Aidan in a new light - or, rather, he made me see myself from a new angle.  I found the good and tolerated the bad.

      The big difference between Friedman's experience and mine is time.  Her shock came and went suddenly.  At one moment she thought herself near dead, and the next she was perfectly fine.  My life with Aidan came on more slowly - it took weeks and months to understand fully the extent of his disabilities - and defined my life forever.  I do not mean, in this comparison, to belittle the trauma Friedman suffered.  Rather, I am trying to understand why it is she would come to the opposite conclusion as me about "letting go."

     Perhaps the virtues of letting go, of accepting our lack of control over our lives, reveal themselves in the fullness of time.  It took a long time for me.  And, it seems, after some time, Friedman, too, regains her perspective; her father has a heart attack and this reorients her:

And it is not until I am beside him in the intensive care unit, gripping his hand as he battles his weakened heart for each breath, that I feel my own heart pounding again for the first time since that day. It’s all so familiar: the panic, the terror, the threat of imminent loss.

But this time I don’t let go. My father, laced with wires and unconscious, is pulling me back.

     But notice how she now resists "letting go."  Her impulse, ultimately, is opposite of mine.  That is not to say it is worse, just opposite.  For her, letting go is a descent into emptiness and disengagement.  For me, letting go is an acceptance of something fundamental about Way.  For her, it is constricting; for me, liberating.   I imagine, however, that, at some point, she will have to let go again.  And when that happens, I hope she will find some freedom and solace there, as Chuang Tzu suggests:

If you serve your own mind, joy and sorrow rarely appear.  If you know what's beyond your control, if you know it follows its own inevitable nature and you live at peace - that is integrity perfected.  Children and ministers inevitably find that much is beyond them.  But if you forget about yourself and always do what circumstances require of you, there's no time to cherish life or despise death.  Then you do what you can, and whatever happens is fine. 

Modern Love: Learning the Limits

   A sad yet beautiful column today by Wendy Paris.  It is sad because it chronicles her two miscarriages.  She had waited to try to have children, waited for her career to take shape, for her relationships to sort out, for her life to take the form that she wanted.  It is a classic tale of believing in our ability to control the course of our lives, the course of nature, only to learn the hard way that we cannot: 

I don't know how I got to be so old without having children. When I was 28 and my cousin had her first child, at 31, I thought, “I certainly won’t wait that long.” But then my freewheeling, career-centric life lasted another decade.  

Sure, fertility starts to decline naturally at about 27. But who’s bound by nature now? We have scopes and drugs and petri-dish unions that seem to stretch fertility to menopause. I wanted kids eventually, but I was determined not to be one of those anxious clock-watching mothers-to-be.

    "Who's bound by nature now?" - this seems the perfect summary of our modern conceits.  It was certainly something that suffused my subconscious before Aidan was born.  I felt like I was in control.  We were well situated for a child.  All would be well.  But then life happens and reminds you just how much you are not in control.

    There is still a great deal we do not control.  I would even venture to say that we cannot ultimately regulate the major forces that shape our lives: our health, the health of our loved ones, the possibility of unforeseen disaster.  I don't want to sound paranoid here; in fact, I am far from paranoid (I think).  Rather, I just want to recognize the unpredictable turns of Way that can change our experiences so profoundly.  Best just to give ourselves over to the contingencies and uncertainties, rather than trying to push against them and control them.

     And that is the beauty of Paris's piece: in the end she sees herself in a different light:

A few months ago, I was at a party in Manhattan, listening to a smart, attractive younger friend detailing a steamy relationship going nowhere. She has a good career, which she puts above family, as I did at her age.

<“You know, just as an alternate route, you could focus on finding a real partner and creating a family life sooner rather than later,” I offered. “I’m just throwing this out there. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. It’s much harder, actually, to start a family when you’re older.”

Another friend interrupted: “I know so many women who have gotten pregnant at 38, or 40. I just got an e-mail about someone who had a baby at 42.”

Of course she did. I received that e-mail message, too. But I think we overplay the success stories of older women, wanting to believe the exceptions are the norm. We don’t want there to be limits to what we can do. It’s not impossible to have a child later, but often it’s very hard, and “very hard” is much more difficult than I understood.

I still believe I’ll have a child, but this belief doesn’t lessen the cataract of discouragement that washes over me nearly every month I don’t conceive.

The problem, I now believe, is not that childbirth has become too scientific. The problem, particularly for those of us who have waited so long, is that even with all our science and technology, conceiving and bearing a child is still too natural an act.

    She is right.  We do not want to believe there are natural limits on our lives and we can dazzle ourselves with technology and money into thinking that we can always overcome such limits.  But we can't.  Sometimes you just have to find a way within the limitations that surround you. 

    I would differ with her on one point, however.  I don't think childbirth is "too natural an act."  It is what it has always been.  It is we who have come to create unnatural expectations that make nature into something it has never been.   Maybe it is her use of "too" which makes it sound, to me at least, that nature is the problem, and not us.  But, as Paris has shown us in her story, we have to change to suit nature, nature does not have to change to suit us.

Sperms and Fathers and Ashes

    Two stories today about fatherhood and family.  The first is the Sunday Modern Love column in the NYT, by Victoria Loustalot, in which she reflects upon her gay father, who left the family and then died when she was young.  The second is the big front-pager of the NYT Magazine, Gay Donor or Gay Dad, by John Bowe, that explores the alternative family arrangements, some quite complicated, that evolve when gay women couples chose gay men, either singly or couples as well, to be sperm donors and "fathers" or a sort.   There are several issues here and I don't know if I will touch on them all tonight but, here goes...

    To begin, I was immediately reminded, when reading the magazine piece, about my own short article on sperm donors.  I was a bit unhappy with how I had ended that piece.  I argued that "providing a sperm does not make a father."  I should have said something like, "in and of itself."  I did not mean to imply that sperm donors could never be fathers.  Rather, sperm donation by itself is not a conferral of fatherhood.  The very last sentence of that piece sums up my position: "Parental rights and responsibilities are personally and socially performed, they are not biologically determined."

   And that is what the two pieces in today's Times are all about: socially performing parental roles.  In the case of the gay sperm donors/fathers it is evident that the men and women in the magazine article are thinking seriously about their duties.  The men provide sperm (sometimes in the most traditional of ways!) but, then, stay in the lives of the children they conceive.  There are clearly difficulties in working out specific relationships but, I think, with enough good will, good parenting is possible.   The big question is: how much time and commitment is enough to fulfill something like a fatherly role?

Modern Love: Kidneys and Commitments

    I have not blogged the NYT Sunday Modern Love column is a while, but today's is too good to ignore.

    Angela Balcita writes a marvelous piece about her health problems and how they bring the best out of, first, her brother, and then, her boyfriend.  When she was a freshman in college she was diagnosed with a serious kidney ailment.  Her brother stepped up and offered one of his kidneys for a transplant, in an act of pure sibling love.  Some years later, her kidney failed again and, this time, her boyfriend, who knew about her earlier operation and the possibilities of future complications, also stepped up to offer his organ for transplant.  It worked and they have lived happily, unmarried, ever after.

    The beauty of this story is the depth of the commitments involved.  To some degree a brother might be expected to give up a kidney for a sister.  Balcita does not dwell on this aspect of the story, perhaps because it is ethically somewhat less unusual (though she gives him due props).   But I am sure that she would agree that we should not overlook the humanity of her brother.  He did the brotherly thing - and, sad to say, not all brothers do or would.  He fully realized his moral duty as brother and, as such, should be recognized as exemplary in a Confucian sense.

     There is a link here to the conference I just attended.  In thinking about how Confucianism might be applicable to modern (postmodern) life, some people, most notably Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, are working on a notion of "role ethics."  This is an adaptation of Confucianism that, I imagine (they only provided a preliminary sketch of their thinking), runs something like this: our moral duties are defined not just by universal obligations (say, against killing innocents) but also, and significantly, by our social roles.  If you are a father, there are certainly fatherly things you must do (care for you children and wife); if you are a brother, there are certain brotherly things you must do; etc.  How we conceive of ourselves as moral persons, and how we are judged by others or society at large, as moral persons, must therefore include consideration of how well we fulfill the specific duties that attach to the various social roles we have.  I, for example, am a son, father, brother, nephew, husband, son-in-law, teacher, colleague, friend, among other roles.  Any calculation (can we call it that?) of my ethical accomplishments or failings would, from a "role ethics" perspective, be some kind of summation of my moral standing in all of these particular roles.

    So, the brother is good because he fulfilled his brotherly role.

    The boyfriend is a different story, however.  Should a boyfriend be expected, in his role as boyfriend, to go so far as to provide a kidney for transplant?  I think the short answer is "no."  But Balcita's boyfriend, Christopher, did.  This would seem to exceed the ethical imperatives of boyfriend-ness and be, as such, exceedingly good.  Or, it could do something else: it could challenge an overly formal definition of "role."

    Obviously, in this case, the boyfriend was acting in the manner of a husband, who would, if the medical conditions were right, be expected to provide a kidney.  All that was missing here was the formal commitment of marriage.  Balcita reflects upon this:

Christopher’s version of our fairy tale has always been a bit different from mine, a little more pragmatic. When I say: “Marriage? What do we need marriage for? The fact that you gave me your kidney should show the world that we’re destined to be together,” he says, “Well, maybe we should get married so my health benefits can pay for your lab tests and maintenance drugs.”

    What strikes me here is that the commitment is prior to, both temporally and ethically, the institutionalization of the relationship in marriage.  And I think this is quite in keeping with Confucian sensibilities.  Just going through the motions of formalized personal duties is insufficient for Confucian ethics.  One must be truly and genuinely committed to cultivating our closest loving relationships because it is there that we create and extend our own, and ultimately the world's, humanity.  In a sense, then, marriage matters less than commitment.

    Interestingly, Christopher's comment shows how commitments may need to be institutionalized if they are to be fulfilled.  Gaining access to better health insurance is something that marriage might facilitate; thus, the formalization of the commitment allows for the commitment to be better lived and realized.

    But the bigger point here is, I think, commitment.  That is what matters most here.  That is what makes this story beautiful.  And it should tell us that how we define "roles" is not simply a matter of formalized social positions and expectations, but may also be shaped by the distribution of our personal commitments.   

Modern Love: Late-Onset Fatherhood

     Rand Richard Cooper has a nice piece in Sunday's NYT "Modern Love"column on being an older father.  He was 46 when his wife, nine years his junior, became pregnant with their first child.  Many questions popped into his head:

The belated father faces a daunting gamble. Will a baby indeed keep you young, open up some replenishing new vitality? Or will it do just the opposite? Will I have the energy to be an older father? The patience? The knees? In the unsentimental terms of evolutionary psychology, would becoming a father prolong my peak and delay my plummet — or, as a middle-aged man playing a young man’s game, was I merely setting myself up for an even bigger fall?

    He is especially attuned to the physical side of things.  And, in what must have been his worst nightmare, his body conspires against him almost as soon as the baby is born:

...Our very first day home from the hospital, fetching Molly a glass of juice in the kitchen, I bent over to take an ice tray from the freezer, when, wham! Someone kicked a dagger-toed boot into my lower back. I went down, ice trays flying. These were the same back spasms that felled me on the basketball court a year ago. I couldn’t get up, couldn’t even sit up. The pain was too intense.

“Not now,” I thought. Not when Molly still had her stitches in, and needed to be resting with our baby. Not when I intended to wait on the two of them, hand and foot. I wanted to be the do-everything guy, and now I was going to be the do-nothing guy, bedbound for the next three days: an invalid, whose wife would have to bring him his medicine and carry his urine to the toilet in a bucket.

Lying there, I writhed in a misery that verged on despair. For 72 hours life had been serving up sweet joy and exaltation, but right now all I could think about was my failure as a father. I recalled years of boyhood sports fun with my own father — epic battles of one-on-one basketball, marathon tennis matches on hot summer days, followed by a race to the beach and a leap into the water.

 I had a similar experience.  Though not as "belated" a father as Cooper (I was 34 at the time), my injury came as Maureen was pregnant with Aidan.  I ripped my patella tendon in a volleyball game, landing me on crutches for six weeks during her sixth and seventh months.  I hobbled about after that for her eighth month.  Instead of my helping her, big daddy style, she had to take care of me.  It was terribly frustrating.

   But the physicality of things is not nearly the most important aspect of fatherhood.  From a Confucian perspective, what matters is not the bodily challenge of sports, but the ethical lessons of life.  There is no physical limit to fatherhood.  As long as one can be engaged in the moral education of children, teaching them to recognize and live up to their personal responsibilities and duties, then one can successfully perform the role of father.  It can be done from a wheelchair as well as on a basketball court. 

      So, for all of his frustration and embarrassment, Cooper needn't worry about what he calls "late-onset fatherhood."  He may, through his personal experience and maturity (assuming he has attained a certain ethical maturity) be better prepared than other, younger new fathers for the real challenges of raising a child.   Older might be better, though he still has to fulfill his own responsibilities and duties.  That is what really matters.

Modern Love: The Form of this Body

       This week's "Modern Love" column is a very poignant piece, by Jennifer Glaser, reflecting on her boy friend's untimely death.  He was dying of leukemia and they made love as they could until the illness separated them physically.  She found that the sex gave meaning to the time they had together:

We flirted, canoodled, talked about sex, and had sex when he was sick because, well, sex wasn’t death. It was the antithesis of death, and damn if it didn’t feel good to forget for a while that nothing we could dream up could act as an effective talisman against the iceberg floating into our sights.

     The carnality of it all leads her to something like celebration, with a hint of "I Sing the Body Electric:"

Eulogies praised his imagination, writing prowess, generosity and warmth. I praised those qualities, too. But, praise be the body, I told them. It is only in such praise that I could give my boyfriend back what leukemia took from him, trace the contours of what he had lost: his material form, with its capacity for messy emissions, spontaneous erections, parted lips, enveloping bearhugs and leg cramps — beautiful all.

     The contrast of the physical form of the body and death is also to be found in Chuang Tzu.  Here he echoes Glaser's celebratory tone:

We're cast into this human form, and it's such happiness.  This human form knows change, but the ten thousand changes are utterly boundless.  Who could calculate the joys they promise? (87)

       Our physical form is a process of constant transformation: we grow, we develop, we strengthen, we come into our own.  These are the joyous changes, opening up for us exhilarating facets of our humanity, sex included. 

    But, of course, not all of the changes bring joy.  There is another side to the physical story, as Glaser knows all to well.  Here is Chuang Tzu's take:

Once we happen into the form of this body, we cannot forget it.  And so it is that we wait out the end.  Grappling and tangling with things, we rush headlong toward the end, and there's no stopping it.  It's sad, isn't it?  We slave our lives away and never get anywhere, work ourselves ragged and never find our way home.  How could it be anything but sorrow? (20)

     We are trapped in our material form, doomed to inescapable demise.   Inevitable physical deterioration means that we can only "wait out the end."

      This seems quite depressing.  But, Chuang Tzu is not really so pessimistic.  There is a way out, and it is pretty much what Glaser and her boyfriend did: give yourself over to physical reality and live as fully as you can within those limitations.  Here is Chuang Tzu, speaking through a character whose body is falling apart in old age and infirmity. 

"Why should I resent it?" [he] replied. "If my left arm's transformed into a rooster, I'll just go looking for night's end.  If my right arm's transformed into a crossbow, I'll just go looking for owls to roast.  And if my butt is transformed into a pair of wheels and my spirit's transformed into a horse, I'll just ride away! I'd never need a cart again!

"This life we're given comes in its own season, and then follows its vanishing away.  If you're at ease in your season, if you can dwell in its vanishing, joy and sorrow never touch you.  This is what the ancients called 'getting free'."

     None of us ever really escape the sorrow of losing a loved one.  But it sounds like Glaser and her boyfriend came pretty close to "getting free."