The word transcend means, from Latin, to cross over and to exist apart and not subject to the limitations of human experience . Somewhere within that definition lies hidden the punch-line to The Cosmic Joke. Transcendence has been sought by humankind since antiquity, and by this human since at least 1965. Like many before me, my quest began with chemicals purported to be mind expanding. I found that tripping and peaking were always followed, without fail, by coming down hard. I was left agitated, fuzzy-headed, and more confused. No enlightenment found; no questions answered. And I usually lost something on the trip: my keys, brain cells, the car. The Cosmic Joke: A trip is not the same as a journey. Mind expansion can be mind numbing.
Recently I found a scrap of paper with an anonymous quote I had taped haphazardly into my diary in 1979; an echo of the next phase in my search for transcendence:
And it is not even granted to know
What the Task is
The Task is to find out
This
You may not give up.
Not only had I not found nirvana, by the seventies I had forgotten what I was seeking. The Cosmic Joke again: There are no answers. There are many answers. What was the question?
After that I sought transcendence through intellectualizing the idea of transcendence; I read the Old and New Testaments, digested the philosophies of Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Lao Tsu, Maya Angelou, and Hunter S. Thompson. I prayed at the alters of Aretha Franklin, The Beatles, Gil Scott Heron, Percy Mayfield, Albert King, Koko Taylor, and Jefferson Airplane. From this broad perspective I was able to enjoy some measure of peace. My mind expanded a little, maybe. No transcendence came forth.
By the eighties, sure transcendence could be found in career choice, I shed the chrysalis of a successful career in banking and business, became a student and emerged a nurse. My first nursing job was on a cancer research hospital unit specializing in treating adults with acute leukemia. Unlike me, most of the nurses there were in their twenties and lasted on average about two-and-a-half years before leaving to have babies and to seek less dangerous and less heartbreaking work. I was forty, my baby was twenty-one and gone to be a soldier, and my heart had already been broken. I thought my new career would lift and carry me, on gossamer wings, toward transcendence.
I didn’t become a nurse with the intent of working with cancer patients. I just wanted a career that felt more grounded, more hands-on, more physical, and more spiritual than banking and business. I was thrilled to be selected to work in a university-based hospital, on the vanguard of medical therapies for life threatening diseases, drawn to the opportunity to hit the floor running in my new career. Our patients came from all over the world to receive the new experimental Bone Marrow Transplant treatment. I embraced, thought I understood, the challenges ahead of me. Here I would gain immediate experience in how to respond to all conceivable systems failures. Fleetingly, far back in the dark folds of my mind I wondered if I was drawn to working with people who had life threatening disease as a way to try to access and understand my feelings about my own death. The Cosmic Joke is cruel and has no conscience.
Acute leukemia comes on like a bad that will not go away. From Greek and meaning literally “white blood” leukemia is cancer of the bone marrow, where blood cells are formed. In leukemia the system runs amok and spews out more and more dysfunctional blood cells leaving the body with no immune system, defenseless. Left untreated no one survives acute leukemia; most die in 3 to 6 months. No sure-fire cure existed, so our patients were hospitalized knowing they were in for the fight of their lives and that the possibility of survival, even with the most powerful treatment available, was slim. Acute leukemia strikes healthy adults in mid-life and I realized that ,somehow, I had landed as a new nurse working with dying patients who were my own age; another painful thump on the forehead by The Cosmic Joke.
In order for the Bone Marrow Transplant to work, first the patient’s own faulty immune system had to be killed by intravenously infusing poisons called chemotherapy. Once the patient’s bone marrow was dead, healthy marrow from another person was infused in the hope that a new bone marrow would be kick-started to produce healthy blood cells and result in a restored immune system. But the cure took it’s terrible toll. Our patients became very sick very quickly from the chemotherapy. Patients suffered horrific and painful chemical burns and tended to bleed alarmingly from everywhere. Minor infections routinely ignited to life-threatening emergencies. I spent my twelve work-hours running, often in sheer terror at events unfolding in the course of a normal shift. I had achieved my desire to hit the floor running. I heard a whisper in the back of my mind: Be mind-full of what you ask the cosmos to provide.
All if us knew that the drugs we so meticulously mixed and administered were deadly. About two thirds of our patients finally died in our care. The cruel joke was that at death most were cancer free, having succumbed to the side-effects of the cure.
Working twelve-hour shifts allowed us to immerse ourselves in the care of our patients for three shifts and then, in theory, detach for several days before returning to work. It never really worked that way for me.
Tom was forty-two, two years older than me, when I was his Primary Nurse. I had cared for him off and on for the better part of two years and now Tom was close to death. We had not spoken of it, but we both knew it. The prospect of imminent death tears away superficial barriers to intimacy. When I finished my last shift before taking several days off, he was frail, but lucid and not in pain. I went home knowing I might not see him again and feeling I had done the best I could for him.
On my second night off I awoke from a euphoric dream: Tom and I were dressed to the nines; he in a black tux with tails and me in a flowing gown. He was healthy and robust like in photos I had seen of him before leukemia struck. We were dancing in golden light; swaying and twirling and floating like Fred and Ginger. And laughing! In the dream Tom kissed me on the cheek, twirled me away from his embrace, and danced away, alone, into darkness. Standing alone in the light, I called out his name and woke up. Then I called work and was told he had lapsed into a coma.
Compelled by the dream, I rushed to his bed, laid my head on his thigh and quietly wept. He looked like he was sleeping peacefully. He never opened his eyes, but he lifted his arm and placed his hand lightly on my cheek. I looked up to see a smile flirt with his lips, and I smiled and said good-bye. I believe he was still inside our shared dream, dancing.
Transcendence, when it comes, is fleeting,
experienced within a
Single
Pure
Moment
both within
and beyond
the small confines of this life.
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