Pomegranate Seeds

I almost died on Friday. This is not hyperbole. During relatively minor surgery, my blood pressured spiked to 199/106. The anesthesiologist, who certainly did not have a bedside manner, may have been incompetent. In Recovery, once the pain of the procedure was manageable, not with narcotics but with innocuous Naprosyn, my typically normal blood pressure returned to less alarming figures. Seems I was supposed to be given Naprosyn pre-op and that had been somehow missed. I left it at this, with a promise to contact my GP and have the event investigated and monitored.

Falling asleep later that night, I was awakened on two separate occasions by what I know to be flashbacks. I have worked long enough as a Jungian analyst and long enough with trauma patients to distinguish a flashback from a dream. The two flashbacks were identical in detail. I see the white lights of the operating room and the alarmed eyes of the masked nurses. I suspect that the anaesthetic cocktail offered was not enough to keep me unconscious and the BP spike was likely due to waking up during the surgery. Psyche was telling me a truer tale than the missed medication by way of the flashbacks.

As I said earlier, I will be following up with my GP, but here, with the words that prime the depths of my unconscious psyche, I muse into the deeper meaning of the experience. No sooner was I on the operating table then The anesthesiologist barked at me because he could not easily find a vein. How is this the patient’s fault? After two tries, and an irritated command “not to move my arm and undo his work while he applied the surgical tape” I was at his mercy. I lost consciousness with a passing thought that he was a man who was burnt out and did not like his job. Unlike the volunteers, the students, and the nurses I had encountered from he first moment I entered the hospital, this man’s empathy and Eros was shut down. He was no longer orientated to a purpose that met the mandates of his position or his responsibilities. I may never know if he is incompetent, negligent, or burnt out, though his reviews on Rate My Doctor indicate my impressions and assessment are accurate. Regardless of his story, I take to this medium to muse over what this ‘near death’ experience has taught me.

While I may be processing this event for months, or even years, right now I can’t help but feel I have a ‘second chance’. A second chance to ensure I never let myself be placed in a position of duty or responsibility to others that I cannot fulfill. A second chance to clarify my life’s purpose. A second chance to stay courageous and brave in the face of, not great adventure, but the greater soul destroying malady called malaise. The disgruntled anesthesiologist of my story is an animus who has checked out.

As I convalesce, I am reading Elon Musk’s biography this weekend. On the couch in front of the fire, a blizzard persists outside the windows. Half way into the biography, I do not know whether or not I like Elon Musk. I do know I am intrigued by him. His vision and his single-minded focus on achieving his vision, and rallying others around him, may well be what it takes to make human beings multi-planetary beings. Mars is more reachable with each rocket launched. Is Elon Musk a modern day Ulysses? Is he a pirate. Does X mark the spot?

I used the image of the lush pomegranate to announce to close friends and family that I was having surgery. I asked for prayers and best wishes. Little did I know that the descent into the underworld would be so literal and so profound. Maybe their prayers and well wishes were what kept me tethered to life. In the ancient myth of descent, Kore is an innocent maid picking flowers in the meadow. Unexpectedly, the ground opens up and she is ravaged by and into Hades. Her mother Demeter, and the Earth itself, withers in barren grief at the loss of the maid. In a deal made with the currency of the seeds of the pomegranate, she is given passage back to life. There are more stories in our myths and fairytales about the one way passage into Hades than there are about return. In the apocryphal story of Holy Saturday, the crucified Christ goes to Hell and redeems the World Parents - Adam and Eve. It is said in this story that Christ defeats death. Conquers sin. Lays the Way for a New Eden. In a much older Greek story, the maid Kore returns to life as Persephone. She is no longer the innocent and naive virgin. She is crowned Queen of Hades. For six months of the year, when she is in life, the earth flourishes. The other six months she rules in Hades. Hers was a profound deal with the devil, nothing short of a life and death bargain. Perhaps from this tale we are to learn that emergent life needs the dark, the cave, the womb. Seeds need incubation. Ideas need mystery and faith. Perhaps we need the imminent knowledge of death to thrive.

I have beloved family, precious friends, and dear analysands who are currently sitting at the bargaining table with Hades. They have taught me in their own way that Death is a powerful and unrelenting negotiator. He is not always fair. Not everyone wins passage back to life. Unlike the Christ, we do not defeat death. Not all of us are offered 6 pomegranate seeds. Until you are staring into the jaws of this dragon, no one can really understand what is being asked by the descent. I am not comparing my experience of this last Friday to that of anyone else. I am lounging comfortably on my couch tapping thoughts into a keyboard. I am not fighting to get some anal pharmacist to release the jewels of life saving chemo drugs from the lair of bureaucracy. I am not seeking a clinical trial because conventional routes have been exhausted. I am not battling with an insurance company to grant adequate time to heal. I am not losing my hair. I am not vomiting into the toilet. I am not weighing the options between protracted suffering and palliative relief. There are many stronger and braver and more authentic warriors than I facing life and death choices with each breath. To these I bow with respect. To these I bow my head and I pray.

I wonder when and how Death became the adversary of Life rather than her twin. Maybe when we lost our connection to the beyond, the transcendent, the greater mystery? I do not know whether or not we will ever populate Mars. I do not know whether electric vehicles will be affordable en mass. I do not know whether X, formally Twitter will save democracy. I do not know whether we will cannibalize ourselves and our planet with our misdeeds or missteps. I do not know whether my blood pressure spike was a wake up call or a siren’s song. In the face of death and destiny, there is so much we do not know.

I looked up the meaning of the word cannibalize. I have always believed that the etymology dictionary is where words tell their deeper story. I was surprised to discover that only the last entry in the citation referred to the act of cannibalism. As a transitive verb, the entries for cannibalize referred to economic, mechanical, and astrologic systems that utilize, incorporate, and integrate previous iterations to evolve in complexity, ie. to take salvageable parts from (something, such as a disabled machine) for use in building or repairing another machine; to make use of (a part taken from one thing) in building, repairing, or creating something else.

Death perhaps is the ultimate cannibal and one of his emissaries is surely serious illness. There are others: war, accident, violence, despair. From dust we come and to dust we shall return. What happens between the dust of our beginning and our ending that we show ourselves. I spoke elsewhere of the ‘sweet spot’ between symptom and diagnosis. The place of ultimate tension. I do not fear death. I fear dying before I am dead. I fear being so stuck in a marginalized existence that I waste this one precious life, or someone elses. I fear taking for granted the breath that is denied so many. I fear an animus that is incompetent, overwhelmed, or cowardly in his willingness to dream, vision, or reach. I do not have an Elon Musk animus, at my age, my animus is more like the old Ulysses of Tennyson’s poem. I pray he never becomes a disgruntled anesthesiologist who puts me to sleep before my time. My seafaring or spacefaring animus’ hands are stained with juice of the pomegranate. I do not know how many seeds he has eaten. Today, all the know is this:

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

~

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.