Denial

MY FATHER started smoking when he was fourteen, and by the time he was sixty eight, the damage had been done. He lay in the intensive care unit of the V.A. hospital, his lung cancer had spread to his brain, and he had only hours to live.

I walked into the small ICU room, and had to walk right back out. I feel fairly certain he would not have known I was even there. Out in the waiting area, I was unable to sit down, and was hyper ventilating. My mind was racing, and I felt a sense of panic, knowing that soon my father would be gone forever.

A nurws asked me if was was alright, and I indicated that I was. She offered me a chair, and I declined. Then, the room started spinning around in circles, my legs buckled, and the next thing I knew, I awakened, laying on my back on a marble floor and staring into the face of a doctor.

The docotre gazed into my eyes, and asked me how I felt. "I'm fine" I lied. Never admit weakness.
The doctor responded, "your present physiucal position would seem to belie that statement, young man".

My first thought was "are you calling me a liar?"  then, the thought slowely came to me, "shit, I've been busted. He can see through my act, he can tell I fainted." Damn, busted.

That was twenty seven years ago, and ever since, I have been amazed at my own behavior back then, amazed that I was so determined to not only be strong, but to not show any trace of weakness. But really, in a sense, we are all like that, as a group, as a species.

Everywhere are clear signs that we humans are rapdily destroying our own world by living the way we do, by indiscriminately pouring our filth, mostly carbon, into the atmosphere, trapping heat, changing the ecosystem catstrophically.

Plant and animal species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, a rate which has happened only two or three times in billions of years. And yet, we keep telling ourselves, pretending to ourselves, that we are doing just fine.

We talk about the truth, we pay lip service to it, but we really don't seem to consider the situation critical. We refuse to believe the truth enough to act on it. Maybe our attitude of denial is based on the psychology that a problem ignored is a problem that goes away, or maybe we all understand that by the time the earth becomes really sick, we'll all be dead.

My mother is ninety two years old. When she dies, I hope I don't faint.