Dear Larry,
I’m not sure how much you remember about the day of your disaster. I remember it mostly in images and feelings. None of them are happy—or at least they were not happy at the time.
After undergoing heart surgery several days before, you were scheduled to be discharged from the hospital that afternoon. I arrived in the morning, planning to visit you before I left for New York. I expected to find you recovering, tired but smiling. I thought we would reminisce about the class where I had been your teaching assistant.
I was mistaken.
Instead of a recovery room, you were in an exam room being prepped for admission to intensive care. Something had gone terribly wrong. An infection had spread through your body, though no one seemed to know why, or how to stop it. The room was full of hospital personnel, all deathly quiet. P— looked stricken. You, if I may say so, were drugged to the gills and almost entirely delirious.
I sat in the corner with my elbows on my knees, hands clasped in front of me, rocking back and forth a little.
In came a doctor, who I hated immediately. He was middle-aged, sandy-haired, and a condescending ass.
In the voice one would use to address a dim-witted, petulant child he asked, “Larry? How are you today?”
“Shake my hand,” you replied, sticking your hand out at him.
He did nothing.
“That’s bad,” you said, very woozily, “if you won’t shake my hand something’s wrong.”
“Larry,” he tried another tack, pointing over at me. “Is that your friend?” He gave an exaggerated nod. “Is your friend here?”
“I’m his student,” I said. I have worried, ever since, that it sounded like I was disavowing our friendship, but I needed him to understand that you were someone who other people respected, who other people listened to, who didn’t deserve to be addressed like a child. This was not how things were supposed to be.
Looking back, I believe we were caught in a tragic scene. It was like a something out of the plays you’ve spent decades teaching and writing about: here was a sudden reversal of fortune, an overturning of entirely reasonable expectations for happiness, a devastating disaster that included not only physical injury but, what was almost worse, so much insult as well. And nothing could put it right.
I don’t even remember what happened next. The nurses must have ushered you into intensive care. I must have boarded a train for New York. The train ride itself is a blank, except for one phone call. I was informed that things had gone from bad to worse. You were in a coma. The doctors were apparently asking P— about end-of-life decisions. That could only mean one thing. There were no good options left. This was it.
I knew I ought to pray for you. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to pray for something like your “peace and comfort,” because that wasn’t what I really wanted to ask for. I wanted you to live. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask for what I wanted most, because I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t going to get it. I refused to be both disappointed and self-deceived.
When I arrived in New York I took the subway up to Columbia University. St. John the Divine, the great cathedral, was only a few blocks away. I resolved to go there and light a candle for you, achieving by ritual what I couldn’t do in thought.
Here, too, I failed. The sanctuary was dark and deserted. There were a few rows of candles in a corner but no matches, and the gift shop was closed. I’m not sure what annoyed me more: that the cathedral had a gift shop, or that it wasn’t open.
The whole thing felt like the butt of a bad joke. I wandered around the neighborhood in a heavy daze, sure that you wouldn’t live through the night.
But you did. You survived. You lived through the night, and then the next one. Contrary to all my expectations you kept living and then, over time, recovered enough to teach and write again.
How shall we understand this? This overturning of every reasonable expectation, but happy instead of sad? Another word for it would be comedy. As Kierkegaard points out, “The tragic and the comic are the same, in so far as both are based on contradiction; but the tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical, the painless contradiction.” I agree in principle but would go further than the melancholy Dane. The comical isn’t just painless. It is a joyful contradiction.
Naturally, Kierkegaard takes this observation in a religious direction. The pagan poet knows tragic irony: the sudden reversal that brings someone low, an unforeseen, devastating, and irreversible disaster. The religious comedian takes the story one step further, by seeing it all come out right again anyway.
Another word for that would be: grace.
You had tried to tell me this before.
One day, years before the disaster, I was in your office, complaining. I was complaining about teaching, and the undergraduates, and lamenting that I couldn’t make them like the books or talk intelligently about them, and maybe even the ones who were acting engaged were just doing that, acting, and they didn’t really care at all! The irony of it was that no matter how much I knew about the subject matter, and no matter how well I planned my lessons, there was no way to make sure it turned out well. And wasn’t this our horrible lot in life as teachers, maybe even our horrible fate?
You shot forward in your chair. Your eyes were wide behind your glasses and your hair even wilder than usual as you exclaimed in the loudest whisper I have ever heard:
It’s all grace.
Don’t you see? It’s all grace. You will never know. You will never know who you’ve reached, or how, or why, or when. Maybe they’re bored now but one day years in the future they’ll realize what the class has meant to them. Or maybe they will never realize how it’s changed them even though it has. You can’t control what happens or what it means—but something wonderful can happen anyway.
I regret that I can’t be there with you tonight, at your big celebration. I wish I could see not only you, but also everyone else who you’ve meant so much to. They are a cloud of witnesses who can testify to the grace and laughter you have brought into their lives. And even they can only know in part, for now.
You have spent your career studying tragedy, but if I may be so bold, I would like to suggest that your life on the whole has been a grand comedy.
And how glad I am to say: la commedia non è finita!
Paul