Impermanence

June 18, 2014 at 3:56 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments
Tags: aneurysm, cradle Catholic, Eileen Holohan, impermanence, interdependent origination, kidney mass, NY Presbyterian Hospital, pneumonia, Sister of Notre Dame de Namur

As you probably know, I am far from being a Buddhist. I am, in fact, a “cradle Catholic”–baptized a few weeks after birth and then processed up through the massive parochial church and school system in post-war Philadelphia. When I fall, I mutter “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” on my way down.

Lately, through, I have been thinking about the Buddhist concept of impermanence. Impermanence (anicca), as Paul Knitter explains in Without the Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, means that everything that exists is in constant movement–constant flux. It’s closely linked to another Buddhist concept, interdependent origination (pratityasamutpada), which means that everything changes because everything is interrelated.

I began thinking about this toward the end of April. At the beginning of April, Keith, my husband, developed a cold, which got a lot worse after he preached six times during Holy Week (!) and then drove up to see the grandkids in Massachusetts the weekend after Easter. When I finally got him to a walk-in clinic over on Atlantic Avenue, the osteopath took several X-rays and announced that Keith had an aneurysm in his aorta and that we should go directly to the emergency room at nearby Methodist Hospital. We did, and sat there for five hours, during which time the doctors took more X-rays and announced that it could be an aneurysm but could be a number of other things and that Keith should go to his GP for a cat-scan. The next day we did that, and the following day the GP called to say that what Keith had was pneumonia; he prescribed some antibiotics.

But the doctor also told us that there was a “shadow” on Keith’s kidney, and that after he got over the pneumonia, he needed to get that checked. So ten days later Keith had an MRI up at New York Presbyterian, and the next day the doctor called to say that Keith had a “mass” in his kidney that would have to be removed. We scheduled an appointment with a renal surgeon immediately.

That same night, the hard drive on my computer crashed. I have had a personal computer since 1984, and never before had anything crashed. The next day, the phone rang and a voice that sounded familiar but subdued informed me that a dear friend, Eileen Holahan, with whom I had spoken two weeks before, had fallen in the parking lot of her apartment building, hit her head, lost consciousness, and died a week later, never having regained consciousness. The voice sounded familiar because it belonged to Eileen’s sister, who had come across my phone number in Eileen’s address book. Eileen had been a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur at my high school in the early 1960s; singing in the glee club that she directed is one of the happiest memories of my adolescence. Eileen was 85 years old, but she was in good health. I really couldn’t take in that she was dead. And her funeral was the same day that Keith had his appointment with the surgeon, so I couldn’t go, something I still regret.

Keith had his surgery last Friday, and it went really well. The growth was such that the surgeon had to take out only ten percent of his kidney. And although it’s highly likely to be malignant, they got the growth quite early–thanks to the nitwit aneurysm diagnosis and the case of pneumonia that required the cat-scan. No chemo or radiation will be necessary. How often do you get to be grateful for having caught pneumonia?  Keith is home now, feeling stronger by the day, walking around the block morning and afternoon. And even before his surgery, Keith drove me over the Apple Store on 14th Street where I got my hard drive replaced.

But as I said to a friend, I feel as if I’ve seen a ghost. The ghost of impermanence, and its twin, interdependent origination. Everything out there is in motion, bumping together, and making the future a lot less certain than it seemed. I am trying to be grateful.