My trouble with writing is not knowing where to begin.  How do I name one event as the genesis of everything I am, my biases, likes, dislikes, prejudices, fears, loves?  Even writing that sentence suggests that now, at this moment, I have the perspective (the authority?) to name my reality.  Does one ever gain such perfect perspective on one’s life?

            After my mother-in-law died on November 8, 2019, I stayed in Atlanta to clean out her small apartment.  My wife returned to Seattle.  She is still employed; I am not.  I’ve been retired for several years, thanks to luck, perseverance, intellect, and white privilege, all those things.  It has taken several years, but I have become better at holding the tension in that last sentence, adept at maintaining a precarious equilibrium between guilt and anger.  Guilt over unearned advantages and anger at how those advantages tend to minimize the hard work and sacrifices I made to take advantage of them.  

            For such a small apartment, there was quite a bit to sort through.  The hardest part was not the few pieces of furniture and art worth anything, or the jewelry and china, or even the ten-year-old Honda Civic with only 38,000 miles on it.  The hardest part was dealing with the boxes of photographs, her original social security card, the scraps of paper on which Carol scribbled poems.  I felt good about giving the furniture to the employees who cared for Carol over the last few years of her life.  Carol’s brother-in-law took charge of selling the car just as he had taken care of her finances for many years.  The china and jewelry went to my wife.  We turned everything else into cash or gave it away, everything except those two banker’s boxes of photographs, poetry, thank you notes, love letters, her original birth certificate.  I shipped those boxes to Seattle, unable to sort through them or throw out bits and pieces of her life.  I rationalized my decision by convincing myself I would sort through the memorabilia when I returned to Seattle, create, I imagined, a lasting pictorial biography of a woman I had come to love more than I realized when she was alive. 

            Five months after shipping the boxes to Seattle, they remain on the floor of our T.V. room next to the antique secretary we inherited from Nana, Carol’s mother.  It, too, is filled with photographs spanning our lives, from our marriage through three kids.  Will these photos still be in that secretary when Melissa and I die?  Will our three kids box them up and store them in their closets or attics?  More than Carol’s death, more than the dozen times I have caught myself since she died, halfway to dialing her number to tell her something funny or to check in, more even than the spam email I received just this morning from Carol Watson with a smiley face, those photographs stored in boxes, filling that secretary, haunt me.  How do we throw out a life?  Or, do we catalogue it?  Sort and organize it?  

            I’ve been working my way through a book by Jim Holt called Why Does The World Exist?  An Existential Detective Story.  Even better than that title is the blurb about the author.  It reads, “Jim Holt . . . has written on string theory, time, infinity, numbers, truth, and bullshit, among other subjects…”  Among other subjects?  What’s left?  Reading his book, I come away with two thoughts: Holt is way above my intellectual pay grade; and, how much fun would it be to have a beer with this guy.  Although I admit to grasping only about a tenth of his material – a survey of the great philosophers and scientists who have attempted to answer that ultimate metaphysical question, none of whom, for Holt, have the definitive answer – I am clear on one point.  Holt is dead set against turning to religion for help in his quest.  God is not the answer.  For Holt, God is a cop-out, a crutch, intellectual laziness.  I don’t blame or judge him for that.  Sadly, for many people, religion and God have become synonymous with corruption, hypocrisy and hatred, and for quite understandable reasons.  Today, the words “evangelical Christian” more often evoke images of brain-dead, Trump sycophants, or money-grubbing snake-oil salesmen than devout, joyful believers in the Gospel of love.  So too, Catholicism, my original faith tradition, has become more aligned with misogyny, patriarchy and pedophilia than social justice. 

            I did learn one thing from reading Holt’s book, if learn is the right word.  It feels more like discover or connect with rather than learn.  Every great mind he interviewed about this “impossible-to-ignore” question, regardless of their starting point, regardless of their expertise – string theory, quantum physics, multi-universes, philosophy or mathematics – admitted that there is no sufficient answer to how something came from nothing.  We are no closer to the answer to that ultimate question than were our Neanderthal ancestors.  It remains, at the end of rational thinking, a mystery.  Yet all of these brilliant minds have their own word or combination of words to describe this mystery, words like cosmic void, Big Bang, ideal forms, and Infinite Mind.  When you really stop to consider it, aren’t the words “God” or “Allah” or “Yahweh” in that same category?

When faced with something we know must have a reality, but unable to explain what that reality is, we turn to metaphor, art, music, poetry, prose.  In these times of irrational reliance on – metaphorically speaking – the left side of my brain, I feel good about giving a shout out to the liberal arts, the underappreciated right side of my brain.  Of course, as I sit here writing, I fully appreciate how self-serving that last thought is.  Nonetheless, to stare in the face of a question like “why does anything exist?” elicits, after mind-numbing mental gymnastics, a surrender to humility, quickly followed by gratitude, and ending in laughter.  Yes, truly, where was I when God or the Big Bang created the cosmos?

For the time being, I’m not going to do anything with those boxes of photos and memorabilia.  I’ll let them sit there in the corner, and sometimes I will stare at them and laugh or cry and not feel the need to do a thing.  To surrender to a mystery, whatever name we place on it, is not a cop-out.  It’s an act of courage.