Smiling Through

I like to think of myself as a jolly fellow, possessed of great good humor, who brings light and joy to those among whom I move.  In the last six months I have had that sense of me more than once acknowledged, nay, insisted upon by others, not least by two doctors who attended me, once in a delicate surgical procedure to remove a nearly melanoma-like growth and the other in my annual physical examination.  In neither instance were the circumstances what immediately calls to mind gladsome moods, and yet I have to say that both doctors in the midst of the proceedings had to exclaim what joy I always brought into any encounter, the surgeon declaring that I quite made her day, if not her week, of otherwise totally somber and serious undertakings in the surgery, and the primary care physician insisting that he waited with joy for my annual visit and examination.  I bring this up principally because my husband, after twenty five years in my company, and as one can well imagine finding things growing dry and stale, is frequently insisting what a sour view I take of life, how negative I imagine everything to be.  It is true in a way, I have to agree, that I am quick to note what might go wrong but I find it a liberating perspective.  I look back upon my life and see myself at six being kissed by a father leaving the house in the morning, brought back at the end of the day in a coffin after a fatal auto accident.   I think of myself as a twenty five year old husband who has spent a dreamy Sunday over the newspapers, helped his wife lay out a spread with which entertain two friends at midday meal, spent an afternoon locked in amorous embrace, only a few hours later to summon a physician hurriedly at the wife's insistence, and an hour later watch in speechless horror as her corpse was loaded into the undertaker's car after a doctor pronounced her dead.  And then at thirty six to learn that my dearest friend, seven years my senior the father, brother, uncle I never had, a kind of family priest to my second wife and me in our growing marital tension, whose last words to us as he left for Europe were  "Be nice to each other," who six months later on the day he was to return to the States, as it was reported to me, rose from his hotel bed, and fell to the floor instantly dead of a heart attack.  And finally to find at fifty eight a wonderful new friend at the university I had begun to teach in, who spent enough of his weekdays in New York to allow us to enjoy theater together, whose wife often invited me to join them near Hartford where she worked, a man of only forty something years of age, suddenly stricken with a virulent cancer whose treatment the oncologists threatened would be arduous, long, and very uncertain, who an hour after that pronouncement suffered a fatal heart attack in his hospital bed, something that both his wife and I instinctively knew was his psychic and physical rejection of their words.  Well, in sum, I don't expect good things to happen necessarily and prefer to fortify my soul for the misadventures of life that make it all too tragic, to expect the betrayals offered by circumstances and my fellow creatures.  But what my husband does not seem to understand is that this view of things allows me the freedom to feel pleasure, laughter, and joy almost all of the time, because there's nothing left to lose.