02/22/05 10:26:00 - February 22, 2005

Maybe I need medication. Maybe I need to find my purpose in life. Maybe I need to re-discover my faith. Maybe I just need a hobby. Ever since Lily died, life seems really futile. I get the sense sometimes that the entire human race has all the significance of an anthill. Billions of people, running everywhere, doing their part for the survival of the species, but it doesn’t really matter whether we do or not, because eventually even the best of us dies and is buried. It used to be that we became worm food, but we can’t even say that so much anymore, what with embalming and all.
Do we really live again? Is this life all there is? What’s the point of it all? It’s ironic that I spent two years of my life trying to help people find the answers to these same questions, but now I’m asking them myself. I know what I told people, what I used to believe with all my heart, but now, I just don’t know. I know that I’ve been heading down that path for quite a while. I just don’t know anymore. I do believe, I think, and I hope that there’s something to be said for that kind of faith, but that’s all it is: Faith. Jesus told Thomas (I think), “Blessed art thou because thou hast seen and believe. But more blessed are they who have not seen and believe”. Something to that effect, anyway.

Well, I think I’m pretty solidly in the second category, now. I’ve come to doubt my own feelings, my own experiences – the very things that made up the base of my previous “knowledge”. But even still, I was still able to hold on to my belief. Now, though, I just don’t know. I doubt a lot more than I used to, and it’s a not a sort of healthy-feeling doubt, where I could just say it’s more of an intellectual exercise. Now it seems much deeper, much more pessimistic. Much more… existential, maybe. Albert Camus said, “There is only one philosophical question, namely, suicide.” I need to find what makes life worth living. Not that I’m actually suicidal, mind you, but I just often feel like the few joys in life don’t necessarily justify the pains, and that at the end of it all, it doesn’t really matter.

Take my job, for instance. I train soldiers to interrogate people. This is done in order to defend my country from people who would kill all of us, if we had a chance. But sometimes, I can’t help but think, “Why does it matter? We all end up dead, anyway. At best, we’re looking at tacking on an extra 70 years, but in a lot of cases, it’s not making a difference. It didn’t make a difference for the 200,000 estimated to have died in the Indian Ocean tsunami two months ago. It didn’t make a difference to the 25 year old who died in a car accident on his way to work. It sure didn’t make a difference for Lily. I work my tail off, get all my hopes up that Lily will grow into a beautiful woman and lead a long, happy, productive and fulfilling life, and look where it got her.

And on the other hand, I look at Aren. He is such a smart kid. Cute. Polite. Motivated in some ways like I never was. Now he’s looking at a bone marrow transplant. I am left hoping that he does well and that there are no complications, otherwise I end up being the former father of two. I don’t know if I could even survive that. On the other hand, he could survive it and die in a car accident on the way home from the hospital. Or I could. Or MaryBeth could, leaving me as a single father of a five-year old. There is just so much uncertainty in life.

I find myself feeling more paranoid lately, too. I don’t know if it’s some sort of sublimated feeling that I didn’t do enough to protect Lily or if it’s just that I now officially live in the “Wild, Wild West”. I can’t say how many times over the past few months I’ve seriously considered buying a handgun specifically for the defense of my home. I also want to take hand-to-hand combat classes, whether they be jiujitsu, karate or krav naga. Maybe I’m just boiling over with testosterone. I don’t know. I do know that I don’t really remember feeling this way.

Interesting, isn’t it, that I can go from “life is pointless” to “I have to defend my family at all costs” in one paragraph? Maybe I do need medication.


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