A Master of the Wired World?

I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.

What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.

Anne C. Leer, editor

To order, click here. Discounted price is $18.87 from Amazon.

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The Guilty Victim

Curiously, the first emotional effect of getting sick is often guilt, especially in people like myself, who have become accustomed to taking care of others -- parents, breadwinners, caregivers. How dare we throw the lives of those we love into tumult just because out bodies are failing us? The bulging eyeball comes from the story of a Little League umpire who, struck in the face with an fastball that nearly blinds him, feels he has to go tell the young pitcher he is all right. The chapter suggests that "goodness" and good health go together -- that one of the early effects of illness is that it skews our motives. Every deed is now seen as connected to "the problem." Guilt extends to my writing this book -- what if I play it too hard for sympathy, then survive? What if I milk the reader so much that the reader revolts? Problems, problems! Guilt is a tar pit, and it is everywhere; did you do something to cause it? Even brain surgeons are stuck in it -- a horrifying look at the emotions of the early brain surgeons, who lost 100% of their patients in any but the simplest intracranial procedures.

At first I found it curious that the first complaint I registered, after my initial financial stress, was guilt.

But it makes sense. If my first discovery was that I might no longer be able to hold up my end of the family contract and be the primary wage earner, then it was logical my next response would be dealing with this very personal failure.

My tumor had decided to dwell right next to my temporal lobe, the part responsible for language. As it grew, it stood an excellent chance of causing major disruptions to my abilities to speak, to write, and even to understand English. (And Spanish and French, my other languages.) Already, I counted among my symptoms an inability to come up with the right word for things, and sometimes, a fuzziness over the meaning of a statement I heard on TV or the radio. The words vanished as soon as I heard them. I could not recall them to parse their intent. They were gone.

As a writer, my only symptom was a decreased ability to do detailed assignments. I only have a handful of clients, and the most important to me of these is a speaker series that brings in management philosophers and futurists like Alvin Toffler and Lester Thurow to talk about organizations, leadership, and change management. My job is to create a 10 page report on each speaker. The report has to be useful, but it must also be readable, something attendees can pass on to their teams back where they work.

I used to be able to hear a business talk and quickly create a textured, detailed report on the points raised. Since my diagnosis, however, I found it harder to focus on the minutiae of a talk. When I reviewed my notes, I couldn't recognize them.

On the other hand, I still felt strong about conveying the overall meaning of the speech, so I wrote my reports a bit differently - more about general themes and less about specifics. No one complained - yet I felt I was cutting corners, and yielding ground I would never again occupy. What will happen as the tumor grows, and I yield even more ground? Will I abandon themes in favor of flavors? Will I abandon long sentences for very short ones?

Indeed, as I wrote the preceding paragraphs just now, it took me three full minutes to come up with the name of Lester Thurow, perhaps the world's best-known economist, with whom I was fortunate to have lunch just a year ago. I knew his name began with a T, and that he was at MIT, and that he had a head of curly hair, and had once climbed K2 in the Himalayas. I had to sit with those associations until my brain rerouted the question and furnished the answer.

This is so different from the way I used to remember things. How will I remember his name once I have forgotten all the clues? At what point, en route to total language loss, do you set the pen down for good?

But when I put it down, I will be letting everyone down with it. It's my job to keep things going, keep money coming in, keep grinding grain, keep laying track. It's a brute task, a manly task, even if all I am is a writer. But its brutality protects me from a lot of fine details. Grind the grain, lay the track, and no one will ever think less of you - you're a good provider. All I have to do is keep providing. Which I don't think I'll be able to do.

How dare I throw the lives of those I love into tumult just because some pointless protein has decided to spread its bedroll inside my ear?

I am reminded of a story from my childhood. My brother Patrick and I, 9 and 11, liked playing baseball. I think we loved the game as perfectly as two boys could. It began with playing catch with our dad, then with each other, then on to a sandlot series we played in the neighborhood, and extended to organized play for the town's youth league.

My dad was a coach, assisting Harry Robinson, a giant, gentle man who wore horizontally striped doubleknit shirts over his great soft belly. I remember how the horizontal stripes bowed and dipped where Harry bowed and dipped. Harry distinguished himself from the other coaches, including our dad, by never coming drunk to a game, or getting into a fistfight with other parents.

We played on a field by the Western Automotive factory, down by the Baltimore & Ohio tracks. The field was a stone's throw from Harry's house on Jackson Street, the second-poorest street in our town. It was only spared from the being the town's poorest street by the street just behind it, Tenney Avenue. Tenney Avenue was a place of gnashing teeth and torn shutters. We were sure no house on it had running water, and those who knew said that people just slid a window up when it was time to go to the bathroom. Beyond Tenney Avenue, there were no other streets, just fields full of cattails and cicadas. And the worst house on Tenney Avenue was the Barnes house. One of our team lived there, Skeeter Barnes, a small, earnest boy with a throwback mitt that had no discernible pocket for a ball to nestle in. I imagine it was older than Ty Cobb. Jim Barnes, Skeeter's father, was the town drunk.

Jim Barnes was not a bad man, but he was always drunk. He had one of those saggy bloodhound faces that telegraphed his alcoholism a half mile away. It may be that he drank because he was a fool, and was unable to do any better. I do not know that he ever had a regular job.

Or it may just be that drinking made him foolish. I remember on my brother's eleventh birthday, Jim Barnes came up to him before a game and presented him with a shiny new penny. Pat stared at it. I nearly burst out laughing at the sight. But Pat thanked him profusely, perhaps understanding its symbolic nature better than I did, and put it carefully in my uniform hip pocket. But honestly - a penny was about as valuable in 1959 as it is today. It was hard to know what Jim Barnes was thinking.

Anyway, it is important in this story that, for a dollar a game, he was our home plate umpire. And my brother Patrick, a very serious and very intelligent boy who was also a very good boy, was pitcher.

Sometime around the fourth inning, Barnes staggered back to the plate. He had obviously been sipping from the jar he kept in the bushes down by the tracks. After a few pitches, Pat got ahead in the count and wound up for his executioner's pitch. When it left his hand it accelerated to the speed of about 48 miles per hour. It may even have had a half inch of curve on it. In any event, it was a dazzling thing, and rose up over the strike zone, up over the catcher's outstretched mitt, and conked Jim Barnes, who had forgot to put his umpire's mask back on, full in the right eye.

Jim Barnes went down like a sack of oats. Mr. Robinson, the opposing coach, and the bench and infield of both teams clustered around him as he kicked in the dust, covering his eyes with both hands.

No one else knew how to umpire, so the game had to be postponed. My dad drove Patrick and me home in silence, but I noticed an enormous tear welling in Patrick's eye. He went straight to his room when we got back, foregoing TV and a snack. When I got in bed beside him a couple hours later, I could tell his pillow was wet from crying.

The next day was a lolling about day, but Pat did not come down from his room. I was reading a Hardy Boys book (The Missing Chums?) just after noon when there was a light rapping on the back screen door. I opened the main door and there he was, Jim Barnes, with an enormous yellow, orange, green, gray, red all over eyeball hanging halfway down his cheek.

It was like a monster movie, only scarier, because it was real. You could tell it was his actual eye that was swollen, not something rubber they painted and cupped over his face.

"Tell your brother," Jim Barnes slurred, "that I'm gonna to be all right."

I must have gasped.

"Doctor," Jim Barnes pointed vaguely at his cheek with a half-crooked finger, mumbling, "… all right."

And he turned and shuffled away.

I bolted upstairs to tell Pat the good news - but also to lay on him how horrible the sight was. "He had this giant drippy eye, and, and …"

But Patrick would not be comforted. He just stared levelly out the window into the treetops of the apple orchard outside. When I asked him what the matter was, he solemnly told me:

"I threw that ball as hard as I could. I didn't hold back."

I thought that was hilarious, but I didn't tell him so. More important, to me, was the lesson unfolding. Pat felt guilty for uncorking his killer 48 mph fastball. And Jim Barnes felt guilty for making Pat feel guilty.

Years later, poor hapless Skeeter, playing outfield with the mushy infielder's glove, was the first of my high school class to die, from a stray bullet, in Viet Nam.

By the time I found out about Skeeter ten additional years had passed. I was living in New Haven, and writing a novel. My best friend in New Haven, Andy Ward, was the scion of a rich East Coast family. His father headede up the Ford Foundation. His brother Geoff co-authored the Ken Burns documentaries about baseball and the Civil War. Andy was the epitome of the well-placed gentleman. He told me about his 15^th reunion, at Greenwich (Connecticut) High School, and how the number one cause of death of alumni was boating accidents.

And I told Andy about Skeeter. And he felt guilty.

Here is a memory of perplexing action.

My sister Kathy, who was born with a leaky heart valve, passed away at age 15, when I was 11. Her life was tough in many ways. She could never exercise, her baby teeth never fell out, and her skin was grayish from poor circulation -- she was called a "bluebaby," and kids made fun of her for that.

It's a condition that medicine found a simple cure for, to be administered at birth -- a few months after she was born.

Kathy was a girl of great gentleness and sweetness. She was a painter and drawer, and a lover of horses. All my childhood, my job, and my brother Pat's, was to run and fetch things for her, because she did not have the strength.

She was a sophomore in high school when she went to the dentist to have her baby teeth pulled. They never came out normally, and infection had begun to build in them. The dentist warned us the procedure was dangerous. Sure enough, Kathy slipped into a coma in the dental chair, and after several days, she died.

Her death made for a stormy adolescence for me. First I ran away to a seminary, with an eye to becoming a monk. There I got into trouble because I formed a too-close relationship with a friend who was very gay - although our relationship was not gay, to the best of my knowledge.

After I left the seminary, at 14, I stopped going to church, and the slide into disrepute was rapid. I got into trouble with the law -- shoplifting. I was blackballed from the National Honor Society in high school. People saw me as a hard case.

Now fast-forward into the future, to my 15^th high school reunion, in 1982. I drove back to my small town with a bad attitude, determined to show people how far I had come -- not financially (I was broke) but in daring and worldliness. I danced with old girlfriends, and I kissed my junior prom date - my first date ever - on the lips, right in front of her husband.

I had too much to drink, and I saw, at the bar, a big kid I remembered from grade school, Jim Stawicki. He was the class psycho, built like an adult even as a kid, with a brutal jawline and a dead look in his eyes.

In sixth, seventh, and eight grades, Stawicki made my life miserable, chasing me on the playground, throwing me up against walls, and slapping and pummeling me. He hated me for some reason I didn't understand, and saw me as an appropriate victim. That's what bothered me the most -- I did not want to be a victim of anything.

Taking courage from the liquor, I challenged him. "Stawicki, what made you hate me so much in grade school? I wasn't a bad kid. What did I ever do to you?"

Stawicki winced. "Hey, man, I'm sorry. I was so crazy in those days. I had all kinds of problems."

But I wouldn't let him off so easy. "OK, but why me? Why did you choose me to pick on?"

He looked at me levelly, and I could tell something still bothered him. "Because you laughed at your sister's funeral."

I flashed backward. I was excruciatingly self-conscious the day of the funeral. I was upset about Kathy, and I didn't want people peering in on our problems. But the funeral was a big event in the town. My whole school, St. Joseph's, was taking time off to attend.

I remember glancing about during the service, looking for reassurance from my classmates that they wouldn't always know me by this moment. That this wouldn't mark me forever. I'm sure I tried to smile.

It was a terrible day.

Back to 1982. "Jim," I told him. "I wasn't laughing. I loved my sister, but it was no one's business but mine. I must have smirked, but you have to know I was dying inside."

"I know, Mike. I loved her, too."

So that's what it was. When all the other kids called Kathy bluebaby, or warned her about the purple people eater, Jim was her avenger. He beat up a dozen kids, and some of them must have said something. He showed his devotion the only way he could -- with his fists. When she died, he transferred his enmity to me. Out of love.

Jim went to Vietnam and was a behavior problem there, spending time in the brig. Now he was better, and counseled other vets with emotional disorders.

And me, after what seemed like a lifetime of being alone, I met and married my best friend Rachel. Rachel, too, went through the mill, losing her father at 16.

It's been an interesting marriage, because we are so gentle with one another, so aware of the old pain. Sometimes we seems like we are brother and sister.

Now fast-forward to the present. My daughter Daniele, whose face so resembles my sister, is now her age, when she died. When I think of my sister's terror at that age, I can't help crying. I have a good one about once a month.

And as I try to prepare Daniele for the long future ahead of her, I am so grateful for her health.

You can not believe how rosy her complexion is, on a crisp December day like today. Or how embarrassed her brilliant color sometimes makes her.

Or how beautiful it looks to me.

One of the things I felt guilty about, as I started writing about my brain, was the fact that my suffering, while not minor, was not major either. I feel I am in a good position to take any healthy person by the lapels, and impress upon them the particulars of my situation. Compared to healthy people, I have looked into the dark maw of death and not blinked.

Compared to really sick people, however, particularly people with bad brain tumors, my story is a sunny day at Coney Island. If I say something plucky, those who can still frame arguments will see right through it: "I'd be plucky, too, if my prognosis was as favorable as yours."

Those no longer able to frame arguments, and those who survived them, will simply stare, with pursed lips.

I feel like the Grimm tale about the father and son leading their donkey into the town of Bremen. One by one, the townspeople made them feel bad about the way they entered the city. The father should ride, because he's the father. The son should ride, because he's a child. Eventually the father and son try to carry the donkey, and it falls off their shoulders into the river and drowns.

You can't please everyone. So I will just try to do justice to my story, and the hell with the politics.

Remember my list of twelve complaints? When I showed the list around on the Internet brain tumor listserver, most people resonated with the feelings I was getting at. I had several people write me that I was saying what they had wanted to say, and that it helped them.

But one tumor survivor, named Karen, would have none of it. "I feel like a cow after finishing your little list," she said, "-- milked."

This hurt and confused me. In my mind I was being honest, though probably a bit melodramatic. But Karen, who also struck me as honest -- brutally so -- saw my effort as sick and manipulative. The criticism stuck in me for a few days, like the barbed tip of a porcupine quill. Then writing kicked in, and I figured out that if I just tucked in the descriptions here and there, made them a bit more emotionally rigorous, they worked better.

Also, I reminded myself of the writer's dictum -- you can't please everyone. Like the father and son leading a donkey into Bremen in the folk tale, you will eventually drown the donkey.

Complaining can be unseemly but it also has purposes, and a stubborn part of me wants to become an advocate for complaining, and plead the plaintiff's redeeming benefits.

First, it's so human. What an act of friendship it is to listen to someone else's complaining. Indeed it is what separates friends from associates -- only friends will put up with our whining. If you think about it, a good conversation between friends is often like a shower in unclean water. You tell your gruesome stories, in a gruesome way, and the friend patiently waits to tell his or hers.

Second, I think it is developmentally necessary. Complaining is a transitory stage in the development of understanding. It is a creative way of coping with negativity. There are only three things you can do with negativity. You can express it and move on, you can express it imperfectly and sustain it, or you can stifle it, and never move on, or have to come back at some future time and work it through. I'll choose the first option any time.

The problem is, complaining is just enough fun that many of us hang up there, and never move beyond it. Some of us stay there because it is in our personalities to hang up there. Some of us are falsely encouraged by our friends to hang up there, so that they too can hang up there. It's a classic codependent strategy: "If you don't move on, I don't have to move on."

To kvetch, to fuss, to piss, to moan is critical to healing, so much so that I hereby nominate it to be added to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's list of stages of suffering.

Complaining is a moment on the road to growth. It is a condition of imperfect perspective -- seeing only negatives, seeing oneself at the center of the world's pain -- that with most people improves naturally with time, and expression. Complaining outwardly is the best way to quell complaining inwardly. Having expressed the negativity, a dialectical process kicks in, and the complainer moves on to the next stage -- humor, self-reflection, "on the other hand" thinking. You put the grouse behind you.

Finally, all writers complain. Complaining is the source of so much art. Chaucer used it. He wrote several "complaynts" among his short poems, including "Complaynte to His Mistresse" and "Complaynte on the Size of His Purse." And they are jewels of their genre, comical yet persuasive. After padding through the heavy classics, what a relief it is to read that Chaucer had little things he needed to bitch about, just like we do.

I always think of Mel Brooks' great comedy The Twelve Chairs, in which Dom Deluise plays a corrupt priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, scheming to recover a fabled chair from the czarist era containing a fortune in jewels. Time after time he snatches a chair matching the description, rips it to shreds, to find nothing but excelsior and springs. Finally he can take no more, and from a mountaintop he shakes his fist at heaven, complaining: "You're so strict!"

Twelve chairs, twelve complaints - coincidence? Or just one of those things?

Kathleen, a woman I met in e-mail, discovered by accident that I have a brain tumor. After I had known her for a month or so, I decided I ought to let her know, So I sent her a copy of my twelve complaints. This was her response, and it made me feel better after what Karen wrote:

When I was 17, in January 1968, three friends and I dropped out of the college we were attending in the Amish country of Ohio and drove to California to join the hippies.

We rented an upper floor of a house in the Beverly Boulevard part of Los Angeles, about two miles from Hollywood. Our plan was to convert that second floor apartment into an experiment in enlightened living - with lots of mysticism, incense, free love and good weed.

We called it our freak farm, and in our mind it would be a place for extreme mellow behavior, great music, and positivity abounding. We sincerely believed an age of Aquarius was just getting underway, and that the old world would melt away in the face of its beauty. Our ethic was maximum experience, total love, and zero guilt. We figured we would learn how to be beautiful from the California hippies, whom we took to be authorities on the topic.

But there were unanticipated tensions. Two of the friends, Robin and Michael, were a couple, and slept together in an oversized closet. This left the other two of us, Worth and I, alone in a strange land. No one knew how to clean, or cook, or make a living in the world. None of us was especially discerning, so when we opened our commune to all comers - people we met on the street or hitch-hiking -- we got exactly what we asked for.

Every day, seedier, less-connected people would find their way to us -- dealers, dreamers, sociopaths, acidheads, addicts. They all did the necessary beautiful things to get in - make the peace sign, say "oh, wow" and "far out" a lot, and smoke pot. There was invariably something wrong with them, but we were at a loss how to screen them out.

One night Robin invited in a big-bellied biker named Rowdy Yates. He had a young girl with him named Gloria Gonzalez who was in need of medical attention. She was hemorrhaging vaginally, so that blood was running down both of her bellbottomed pantlegs. There was also something wrong with her face. Her right eye was inverted, so that you could only barely see part of her iris, up along the top of the lid. The rest was the red of her eyelid, and the half-moon of the eye-white. And she was so sleepy, like the Doormouse in Through the Looking Glass.

Robin walked her to a bus stop and bused her to the Free Clinic on Melrose. By the time they got back, Gloria had told her her story. She had not known Rowdy long. It was he who made her bleed. We offered her sanctuary in our commune, and let Rowdy know his presence was no longer needed. Gloria slept on a throw rug with a yellow tabby cat.

In the morning we got to know Gloria. She was 13 years old, though she swore she was 18. She spoke Spanish and pretty good English. She was blind in one eye -- the obviously injured one, from beatings her father had given her at their home in Rosemont -- and had only 20% vision in the other. She ran away from home, and had been on her own for over six months, going from man to man, taking downers, or reds. She offered to live with us and be our criada, our live-in maid.

We didn't know what to say. Our idea was to have a free groovy society, not take in indentured servants. She seemed all right, but she was so young and unhip and Hispanic. We didn't relate. But we worried about her now, and we said sure.

Gloria was a terrible maid. Some days she would do nothing. Other days she would have a work-and-worthiness attack, and she would take a broom and begin blindly sweeping everything within broom's reach into a cloud of dust and debris -- including the dope. This caused considerable consternation when everyone was laying around spaced out, and suddenly had to spring into action.

Sometimes we yelled at her. She could be rude and low-class, and she didn't much like hippies. One night we tried to introduce nudity into our routine. A couple of the fellows, myself included, lounged around the flat in our altogether. But we were very stiff in our lounging, and no one except the neediest of us took part. It was sadder than it was free.

"You guys are weird," Gloria said.

After a couple of weeks Robin took Gloria her to a social worker and arranged several things for her -- a job doing assembly work, an apartment at a building run by the local Society for the Blind, and best of all, eye surgery to restore the good one to full vision and to replace the ugly dead one with a glass eye.

Gloria seemed ambivalent about this news. She started going out in the mornings and coming home very late or not at all. We would learn that she was going out to get picked up, then raped or mauled or beaten up, and dumped when they were done with her.

She had fantasies that each night the rapist was the same man, a beau ideal, and he was courting her. She called him Jesse. One day she didn't come back at all -- three guys had dropped her off in Twenty Nine Palms, 125 miles away in the Mohave. We had no car so there was no way for us to collect her even if we'd been in the mood.

As the day for the operation drew near, she told us she was engaged to be married. No one believed her. By this time we decided she was crazy and uncontrollable. I felt sorry for her, but blown away by the scope of her problems and by her extreme responses.

It was at this juncture that Gloria came home one day, and crawled into my crawlspace.

"Take this," she said, and handed me a couple of reds. I had never done downers before, but I was grateful for the attention. We smoked a joint, then we began to kiss. As we undressed, she called me Jesse.

This was not my proudest moment. I had tried to meet other girls, but all the good ones seemed to be taken by cool hip guys, or they put me off till someone better came along. This was the knock on the hippie generation - it was possible to be very lonely and very rejected, even with the best intentions.

I was moved by Gloria, but I also sensed opportunities for myself. She was a child so she engaged my protective instincts. I would be her big Anglo brother at 17, clearing the obstacles from her path, helping her get her life on track. I would escort her through her surgery and rehab, and on the other side she would be beautiful, and poised, and serene. It was the hippie dream, slightly altered. And I would get credit.

After we'd had sex, however, my head cleared. I became very ashamed of myself -- Gloria was a blind, abused, underage addict, and I had taken advantage of her. I was the worst person in the world.

"I'm sorry," I sobbed, as I dressed quickly and ran out of the house.

I spent the night at my dad's house, a few blocks away drinking Brown Derby beer and watching the Tonight Show -- Joe Garagiola was the host that night. In the morning I drifted back to Vendome Street. But Gloria was gone. She didn't come back that day, or the next day, or the day after that - the day she was scheduled for eye surgery.

A girlfriend of Gloria's came by on the fifth day to say she was in a nearby hospital. I went to a pay phone on the corner of Beverly and Vermont to call the hospital. But the switchboard refused to divulge any information, since I wasn't a family member.

"But we are her family," I explained. "Her real family was mean to her. We took her in and tried to help her."

But it was no good. The girlfriend came by a week later and told us the details. Gloria was dead. She was run down over by a moving van about a block from where we lived. She walked right in front of it. She fought for two days in the hospital, but her wounds, to her head, and spine, and internal organs, were too severe. Her parents had come from Rosemont and identified her.

At the time she was killed she was wearing a raggedy secondhand wedding gown she had bought at Volunteers of America. Was she coming home to us and got blindsided by a bad driver? Had she committed suicide? Was she just too high, or low, and too blind to see what was coming at her? Was the promise of a new life just too much to bear?

I don't know, but I have felt the guilt of this child's death for thirty years. The other day, out of the blue, Rachel told me that Catholic guilty feelings are what define me.

"They sure did a job on you," she said.

I did not defend myself. I don't think there is anything necessarily wrong with being defined by guilt. In fact, I guess I'm proud of at least having standards of right living to live up to you. It's a sign of ambition, at the very least.

But I defended Catholicism. Where did Rachel get off, as a Jew, telling me that the tradition I was raised in, and which I have largely sloughed off, was neurotic? And I knew thousands of Catholics, raised in the same general milieu I was raised in - but they did not apply the same gravitas to living that my brothers and I did.

Sure, the Catholic religion contributed, because it was there for my kind of personality to seize on, and mould to my purposes. But I feel I could have been a longsufferer if I'd been raised Unitarian.

Or maybe it's ethnicity and not religion. Only an Irish family like mine, against all that we know about biological opportunism, reproduction, and proliferation, could still be flourishing at the end of a long line of virgins, martyrs, and saints.

"Offer it up to the poor souls," was how the nuns urged us to transform pain into grace.

But it was so hard, and so treacherous. Dante wrote about the circle in hell reserved for the good who were proud. C. S. Lewis had great fun characterizing the self-consciously virtuous whose sin was second-guessing God.

Promising God you would wear beans in your shoes as a sign of your covenant with his will sounded great. But the jailhouse lawyer that resides in every soul quickly learns the beans hurt less if you soak them overnight - or better, use canned.

The problem, it seemed to me, wasn't that I felt guilty, or desired martyrdom, or even that I thought I was better than others - although that comes closer. The problem was that I was so self-conscious. Most admirable people are, first and foremost, unselfconscious - which is less a trait of their own making, than the luck of the personality lottery. I and my family, by contrast, were unlucky in that lottery, and selfconscious to the bone.

I grew up seeing myself seeing myself seeing myself seeing myself - and in that excruciating awareness naturalness died and I did perplexing things.

Early in the spring My stepfather Dick in Ohio called a weekend family powwow at a location central to the whole family, at a Holiday Inn in Beloit, Wisconsin. The idea was to get together to discuss the future and the breakup of his estate.

My brothers and I protested that his estate didn't need to be broken up, that he was and always would be the king, and that concerns about his health, especially without a definitive diagnosis from his doctors, were premature.

It seemed like good manners to say that. We didn't know yet, and neither did he, that he had a very malignant brain cancer called an astrocytoma encroaching on his frontal lobe, where the emotions are centered.

There were hints. The previous August my family came down for a visit. Dick seemed sluggish. We took a color snapshot of Dick on his tractor with my son Jonathan, 1, on his lap. It is a treasured family item now, blown up to 8x10 size, but it is clear Dick is not himself in the picture. He is looking at his grandson sadly, as if it is the last time he will see him.

He said he didn't feel just right. He had always had a hair-trigger temper, bursting into a tirade when something went wrong. But no one would have described him as an angry man. And now he truly seemed angry -- permanently. He woke up in the morning with a chip on his shoulder, and he kept it there throughout the day.

We drove in separate cars to Sea World, a huge aquarium show on the other side of Akron featuring, among other creatures, Shamu the killer whale. Somehow my family got separated from Dick and my mom, and we spent two hours looking for them. Finally we gave up, and drove the seventy miles home alone.

They pulled in several hours after we did. I could tell from the scratch of the tires on the gravel that Dick was angry. He stormed into the house, looked at me with hate in his eyes, pointed at me, but was unable to say anything. He had never behaved like that before. So I knew something was wrong with him.

But now winter was ending, and we were all converging on Beloit. My brothers in California flew in to Chicago O'Hare. Dick and my mom and my stepsibs Rich and Kathy drove up from Cleveland, about 400 miles. My family drove down to meet them, in an Ohio Edison fleet car Dick had bought at auction and given us a year earlier, from the Twin Cities.

My hope for the weekend was to avert a repeat of the Shamu Incident. It did not look promising. The car Dick gave us broke down on the trip down. The transmission wouldn't go into fourth gear. So the last ninety miles of our trip was automotive agony, roaring up and down the hills of central Wisconsin.

Not only would the car need repairs in Beloit, but it might need to be junked altogether. And it was a weekend. And I had no money in the bank, and no credit card. And I knew Dick wanted to focus on his will.

I was 40 years old and the patriarch of my own family, but hopelessly impractical in the eyes of the greater family's patriarch. All us Finleys were this way, so I didn't take it personally.

But Dick had changed over the winter. The anger, the chip on the shoulder, was gone. He nodded when I explained about the car problems, and had my stepbrother Rich locate a transmission guy to do the work - at a weekend price which Dick paid. He then apologized to me for giving me a car for free whose transmission failed.

At the meeting he explained how the estate would be divided - my mom would get it, and when she died, it would be divided among us. The family excavating business would be run by two employees, with my mom kicking in as the owner.

It was a terrible plan. Within three years of Dick's death, the business would be a shambles, its assets auctioned off for a few cents on the dollar. Without Dick, no one wanted to do business with us. His brash but loyal personality was what made it a success all those years. The tumor not only cut short his earning years - he died at 62 - but it reduced his estate by about 80 percent. And the agreement we all signed on to in Beloit was so offensive to his son Rich, who wanted to inherit the business directly, that he never spoke to anyone else in the family again.

I saw Dick two more times before he died later that year. Each time, the tumor obstructed the emotional controls in his frontal lobe still more. So I found myself having improbably fluid conversations with a man I had known for many years to be very bottled up emotionally.

Dick wasn't unemotional by any means. He was a prototypical grand fellow, a gregarious backslapper, a whooper and a yeller, like a riverboat captain or a rodeo rider. But he could only express the big, obvious, public, male emotions. He was no good at opening up, or confessing to weakness, or saying I love you. I know he loved me, but he invariably handled this task with me by slipping me a handful of twenties whenever we met. For my part, I never complained.

But now, the bottle that had held these powerful emotions in was cracked, and the emotions fizzed out.

His tumor was inoperable, so his doctors put him through extreme radiation treatments instead. They burned his head dry. He could no longer salivate, or cry. But they didn't stop the astrocytoma. In the last year of his life, this powerful man could only walk with shuffling little steps. My mother had to point his penis into a urinal to relieve him. He went from being the strongest man anyone ever knew to a babe.

But he had dreams, and he told me what they were. He dreamed of meeting Jesus and Mary, and them welcoming him into heaven. He dreamed of seeing his army buddies from Korea again. And he had a recurring dream that a long black limousine would pick him up out front, on the Lake Road, and he would climb in. And there would be, depending on the dream, a different assortment of real and Hollywood gangsters - George Raft, Dutch Schultz, Al Capone, Edward G. Robinson.

Together with the gangsters in pinstripes, they would drive down the back roads of the small towns of that part of the Western Reserve - Birmingham, Brownhelm Junction, South Amherst, the areas he used to motorcycle through on his 900 cc Yamaha.

And they would talk. "And would you believe it, Michael - they were not bad like you think. They were kind, good men."

Al Capone especially appealed to Dick. "Al's not a killer. Sure, he's made mistakes. We all make mistakes. But I got to know him. And his heart -" Dick tapped is own heart in the telling - "his heart is in the right place."

It was Dick's way of forgiving himself, another tough guy who wasn't so tough inside. And I realized that from the time he became really sick, I never once caught him apologizing for being sick, or for taking so much attention, or even for putting my mother through the ordeal. Because he knew it was not his fault.

I think he used up his guilt and anger earlier in his sickness. When he was angry at me for leaving him with Shamu the killer whale - that was when he was feeling guilty. That look of dark reproach he gave me when he pointed at me, and was unable to speak, and stormed by - it was intended for himself.

But guilt of this sort passes. It needs to. There are more important tasks a body must get to.

So many things fasten us, like roots, to this life. Guilty feelings, though we associate them in our minds to the greater life beyond this one, often root us tighter to the routine we cannot bear to move away from.

What is "martyrdom," the way we have come to use the word, but a way of getting what we want? How often do we let guilt slide us closer to God, compared to how often we use it to anchor ourselves to dead habits?

After my diagnosis, and the emerging likelihood that doctors, in order to save my language center from being squeezed till it ruptured, would have to dig the expanding meningioma out of my head, I read up about the history of brain surgery. It is a stunning story of people slashing the long, hairy roots of conscience and hubris, for a greater good beyond.

There has always been craniotomy -- the opening of the skull to relieve pressure, to release spirits. There are wall drawings of skullpenetration going back 7,000 years.

But craniotomy is bone surgery, not brain surgery. It doesn't breach the sacred veil of the brain. Richard von Volkmann, the greatest German surgeon of the 19^th century, a doctor who would go anywhere and do anything to save a patient, drew a line at the brain. In 1904, Harvard Medical School doctors, reviewing experiments that crossed this line, concluded sadly that the only benefit of brain surgery for persons with tumors was to relieve pressure -- removing tumors was impossible.

A search of medical journals in 1906 showed that of 828 brain tumor operations undertaken, 315 patients died almost immediately. But that number didn't tell the whole story. Of the survivors, a sickening majority lingered for a time -- "paralytic, epileptic, blind" -- and then died. True surgical cures occurred about a tenth of the time.

But 10 percent represented progress. Enough good things were happening in the field to embolden surgeons to go where no one had dared go before.

Indeed, it was the pathetic condition of brain tumor sufferers that impelled pioneer neurosurgeons to go on a cutting, sawing, and drilling campaign that killed virtually the first one thousand patients on the table. They were in such misery that taking their lives away, or their ability to think, or speak, or smile, or move, did not seem so unbearable a risk.

Much has been written about the hubristic attitude required to make an initial incision in another human being. Take that hubris and then quadruple it and know that you're going in where no one has gone before, and that your first hundred patients died the instant you opened them up, and you have an idea what these surgeons were made of.

Like Civil War generals, they shed the blood of many, and besplotched their own immediate reputations, to create leverage for the future. Their patients died on the table so that my neurosurgeon's patients could get operated on and survive.

And do I imagine that, at the end of each day, these doctors felt guilty? And how. In that sense, their psychological complex leaves God's in the dust. God can revel in his omnipotence and omniscience because he is, after all, omnipotent and omniscient. Like Superman, he never pays the price for his powers.

"Victor, if you operate on that man, he will die," a neurologist said to the turn-of-the-century brain surgeon Victor Horsley, who used to perform brain surgery in his patients' parlors. "Of course he will die," Horsely replied, "but if I do not persist, those who come after me will do no better."

Another surgeon, Harvey Cushing, performed an operation on Maj. General Leonard Wood, a military pal of Teddy Roosevelt's. Wood was about to be named chief of staff of the U.S. Army in 1909, when he began to experience paralysis in his left leg and seizures. Cushing was terrified of going inside the head of a national hero, and was relived when the surgery was postponed: "Glad the operation has been postponed; for everyone dies that I touch."

Eventually, Cushing removed a huge meningioma from Wood's brain. Eleven days after surgery, the general, who had lost all feeling on one side, was up and walking again. It was a red letter day for practical brain surgery. But it was a terrible struggle for Cushing. Was he God, to take upon himself such a task?

Neurosurgeons take so much upon themselves, all the doubts and self-accusations, and then they summon the strength to go in again anyway.

There must be a lesson in there for people like me and the kind of guilty feelings I have. Maybe guilt is just the price of admission for being alive and cutting the flawed deals we have to cut. Maybe it is just the table stakes for sitting down to play.

(c) 1999 by Michael Finley

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