If I Can Accept The Simultaneity of Life, I'll Accept Life

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I was walking the other day when I rounded the corner and saw him — or her. A stone-cold raccoon lying on the edge of the road. Flies buzzed everywhere, the stench was building, and right away, I was sad. I love raccoons because I’ve co-opted them without their permission to be characters in my comics. They’ve held a special place in my heart for years due to the amusing — and maddening — dance I have with them when they visit my outdoor trashcan. To see this one dead was a shock.

But just then, as I stepped in a tentative, careful circle around the animal to study what I could of its situation, I heard the chatter and laughter of kids playing somewhere beyond the trees. It was coming from a house across the way. It was the sound of joy, youth, life, and promise. It was juxtaposed with the death in front of me, and I felt a little snag.

That moment had two disparate pieces, existing simultaneously, each fully owning its presence without regard for the other. Yes, life. Yes, death. No questions asked. And such is life — a constant “yes, and” affair. A simultaneity of vastly different truths — both within our own lives and spread throughout the world.

How do we make sense of this? Is it a hardship to imagine and accept? Or is it like a new form of art that breaks through the theoretical movements of the day to show us what’s in front of our eyes in a brand-new way?

Maybe it’s both. Of course.

I don’t want to admit I like things one way or the other. All this or all that. This sounds a lot like black-and-white thinking. I pride myself on being a gray thinker, sometimes to a fault. Well, if you look at this from all other possible perspectives, you can see how those can be true, too. So, what am I? All or nothing, or everything? I think it depends.

It depends on the degree to which I have a stake in the game. Professional games are so much about deciding a side that there’s built-in overtime because the goal is that there be a winner, never a tie.

In life, sometimes mourning a raccoon wins. Other times, enjoying the playfulness of children does. Still, other times, taking in both as coexisting truths is possible, and then you have a tie. It depends on how much each choice is worth to us at the moment.

It’s never faulty to be sad for roadkill. It’s never faulty to enjoy happy children. What’s hard to accept sometimes, is that they co-exist regardless of what we’re feeling. They’re both good and true.

Maybe I skewed a bit toward the sad raccoon on that walk because this is the legacy my savannah-roaming forebears left me. Those guys became aces at sniffing out the negative. They valued the assumption that the lion might be somewhere behind them, trailing the clan, as opposed to Who’s stoked we discovered those berries on our walk today?! Too much berry celebration would have had them unprepared for Leo the Insatiable Lion.

Flash forward to urban, modern living— Leo’s long gone — and still I assume I should promote my sadness for the raccoon over enjoying the happy kids. I also assume that whatever I choose to elevate in my life is the proper choice — the right answer. Because it feels so right to me, it’s easy to assume it’s the universal, correct answer. This isn’t gray thinking.

There are endless simultaneous truths every day, everywhere. That’s our lovely, human, coexisting world for you, and this leads me to an exercise of logical wondering. Can someone be offensive and mean but also worthy of compassion? Could one set of beliefs be simply one of all the sets of belief?

I’ll never forget my friend Fay. She was my first real running buddy, though she was more than that. She lived in the apartment a few doors down from mine in Brooklyn, NY in the mid to late-1990s. We were friends, neighbors, and confidantes. We both got married during our time in NY. Both of our newborn marriages were signs of good things to come. Soon, I got pregnant with my oldest son, and once he was old enough, Fay and I would take turns pushing him in a jogging stroller in Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s rival to Manhattan’s Central Park.

Fay often hung out with my baby son and me on the front stoop and chatted. We’d go for walks together in the neighborhood. She loved him, he loved her, and it showed. She’d look at his sweet face and say in the dreamiest voice, “I’d love to have one of these.”

Through it all, she was going to the hospital to deal with a small, cancerous situation, which was managed and put into remission. Then, one day, she told me she was pregnant. Wow! I was so excited for her and her husband. Such good news — except that it wasn’t. Her doctor told her that her type of cancer was estrogen-dependent and that if she got pregnant, she’d be risking a much more dangerous bout of the disease. She wanted a baby so much that she and her husband decided to go for it. The pregnancy wore on, the cancer came back with a vengeance, the baby miscarried, and soon Fay’s cough which had been in the background, got deep and frequent and nasty.

She died before she reached the age of thirty.

I’ve always wanted to make sense of that story. Regardless of how absurd it sounds, I’ve felt partially responsible for her death because her time spent with my baby spurred a yearning in her to defy medical advice. Simultaneously, I’ve counted the times we spent together with my son as precious moments of my life. I’ve wanted to turn back the clock and make the decision for her: adopt instead of birth a child. I’ve mourned her death and her decision all these years. All of these coexist in my heart. For whatever reason, I haven’t skewed toward any one of these truths. I think they all have special merit. It’s a weird feeling, but it’s a wholistic feeling. Sometimes “yes, and” is a feeling of goodness by way of hard truth.

So, this is where I landed on my walk the other day, leaving the fly-ridden raccoon and listening to the gleeful children in the distance as I made my way home. I looked down at the ground in front of me, contemplating the existence of many things at that moment. There were far more than just a raccoon and children.

There was the Amazon truck driver whizzing by, jamming to some funky music that drifted out the window behind him. There were crows squawking in the tree above. There was the slow floral death happening all around me as time moved toward fall, then winter. There was me, step by step, making my way through the time I have left on this planet trying to make sense of its simultaneous truths.

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Be well, friends. Have a nice rest of your week.