In her remarkable memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage, Frost Medal recipient Grace Schulman writes this of her husband of 57 years, Jerome Schulman, an epidemiologist, as he struggled with a terminal disease:
Jerry was crafty at hiding, even from himself, the gravity of his illness. That skill, famously called denial, had obvious drawbacks, but did offer a way of going on. Although he knew that his heart was pumping at a small fraction of the minimum, Jerry phoned in February of what would be his fatal year for tickets to see a new play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the following autumn. He ordered new novels online, and bought tailored, no-iron chinos for the following summer.
Reading this paragraph reminded me of my beloved father-in-law, Peter Kostares, a World War II veteran, who from his New York Hospital bed as he was dying of stomach cancer with hours to live talked about how he was looking forward to attending his niece's wedding five months into the future. We have at least two ways of looking at Schulman and Kostares. One is to say they were ridiculous optimists unable or unwilling to face the inevitable end of their life; the other is to say they were experiencing life at its most intense fullness, a mindset that looks forward to the future in a never-ending, life-affirming present.
Grace Schulman's prose, like her award-winning poetry, inspires us to realize that regardless of our circumstances, we want to go on. We want to plan as if we will live forever, which is not a bad thing, provided we experience life as if we have only this moment.
