Ode to Life
&
#WeAreAllUkrainians
(a birthday manifesto)
Miami 2.27.22
I’m in Miami and the war in Ukraine is already moving into day 4. The colleagues (all of Ukraine, much of the Russian citizenry, the rest of the world) are fighting Vlad the Very Bad Putin with all the humanity in every cell of their being. They refuse to be newly or formerly oppressed; they refuse the days of Stalin and totalitarism and bread lines and no vegetables for soup and all the deprivation of the time before and during the Cold War. I was in Russia in the early 90s: it was so cold in January the water in the pipes of the fancy hotel where I stayed had frozen like an icicle of Coca-Cola, making me think about the rust in the architecture of the empire’s plumbing. Here I am, in sunny Miami, where my brother lives and my oldest daughter is considering a return to college (I have 3 daughters in their 20s—how did that happen? What conspiracy of life brought me such joy? Blessings, in any case, beyond what I deserve). I woke to another turn of my personal page. 64 and so much more, I thought. To my surprise, I wasn’t unhappy, didn’t want to ignore the number, wish so many people I knew didn’t realize I was older. That’s not my view, not from the pool here either, even with Ukrainians fighting with handmade Molotov cocktails in the cold of Eastern Europe where I wonder, if I was there, would I take up the civilian training and fight, or would I be among those unable to confront the prospect of a premature death and head for the highway and temporary exile in a friendly ally country? I’d like to think I’d be in the fifth fighting column, though I know myself at least well enough by, now, being this age and being this lucky to have reached it, still healthy enough to learn to fire a gun, but hating guns, too, and more compelled to pick up the virtual pen, though it’s a digital keyboard, to fire off my words.
I’m lucky to have them, that’s a big truth of this day. I wish I could do more in this moment for Ukraine and for the Russians who hate Putin and dream of their country gathering its courage like Ukrainians to fight dictatorship. The world is inspired by the willingness of Ukrainians to fight with their untrained souls for their right to live in greater freedom, to simply be able to decide for themselves the rules of living and how to govern themselves. They are fighting for the simple right to have their words, to have their freedom to go where they will, as I have enjoyed without having earned it particularly, but by the luck of birth and the courage of my parent’s generation to fight Hitler in Europe. I’ve thought about Hitler more than once in thinking about Vladimir Putin, a man who can’t accept to be less than a Napoleon Bonaparte in his time. He cannot accept his modern age; he wants to turn the clock back. He won’t win, in the end, even if he succeeds in subjugating Ukraine for a time, and other former Soviet territories. It’s a very lost cause Vladimir, I want to tell him, personally. You can’t possibly win against the self-interest of every individual to live out their soul’s happiness. You should have learned this lesson, and tried to make yourself happier, not with stolen fortunes and the power of the military but with the joy and satisfaction that comes from making the world a better place, not a living hell for others. You need therapy.
Back to me, my day. I woke, as I said, feeling surprisingly happy and grateful. There was little of the frequent chatter that rises in the brain and one’s marrow as one reaches milestones of life and, one more frequent occasions, we are not completely happy by the person in the mirror: they look shockingly older, and various features of physical beauty have given way to something else. We do recognize ourselves, of course, and we do celebrate our daily survival and our ability to love ourselves as well as we have, and care for the amazing instrument of our bodies as we do, but there’s a small sorrow that can rise up: we are older, they clock is running faster in the direction away from the days of sun of our youth. I don’t feel that sadness today, and maybe that’s why I woke with a deep joy in my being that I let myself feel, even as I felt sorrow and solidarity with the Ukrainians fighting to be able to live, and the Russians who have their young sons and daughters being killed in a war of hubris they completely oppose, if anyone asked them, and it they dared to say it publicly. They can’t’; they’d be imprisoned, too, and hopefully, one positive effect of this war of a vainglorious leader will be for the world to help Russians who are trying so hard to liberate themselves from this poisoned leader, Mr. Putin. He will now be remembered for reuniting the world against tyranny and reminding it of the dream we often forget is ours to cherish and defend: democracy, however flawed it is practiced, and however rogue, corrupt and imperial our own governments. It is our shared human dream to live in greater freedom. The Ukrainians and the sympathizers of the world who are forming a small fifth column of fighting help are doing this not only for themselves, but for us, and we all know it. We all carry a debt of moral gratitude for their courage and the reminder that we must fight, we must be willing to lose our own precious lives, if it comes down to that.
Here, today, I have the sun and pool in Miami to greet me, and an early swim to remind me how exceptionally lucky I am. There are no bombs falling; there’s only my own life with its time ahead to challenge me to make the most of it. My fights are like theirs, internal: how to live, how to defend what one cares about, how to extend that solidarity with others.
I thought about this when I was swimming. My body is not in the shape it was even a few years ago. I don’t tell many people, but I’ll come out here now, that I turned some page of health overnight three years ago, and was diagnosed with a rare illness that even I, as a longtime health reporter, knew (and still know) little about. I have not wanted to tell the world of my friends even, because I don’t want my limitation to define me or the possibilities of my life. It’s not my lifestyle nor my political identity. But I also know that I should tell others because maybe other people in my circle are similarly afflicted, and find it not especially sexy and, like me, we don’t want attention for that but for all the positive things we may aspire to be, do or offer the world. Still, I’ll say it. Overnight, it seems, I was diagnosed with what has evolved to be a form of scleroderma as well as (at least by lab reports) lupus. I don’t give lupus any attention, because I have many friends who’ve lived with it without too many problems for years. The other one makes me feel like I’m in a small club of people who are confronting a daily or weekly or occasional new reality of a body that doesn’t not move as it did, does not let us run or dance as we do in our minds. No more about it; if you are reading this, you can look up. I’m been extremely lucky so far: my version is called morphea and while it does invite a degree of physical pain every day, it’s not going to kill me tomorrow or soon, as the more serious forms of scleroderma can and do. My own future with my new state of dis-ease is not a simple forecast. I can tell you I’m getting better, and I’ve learned to have even greater joy every day that I walk more easily or, like today, I slip into a big pool (itself a rare luxury) and swim and feel my aching knee joints loosen a bit, and by the end of a few laps I feel the grace of easier movement and the lifelong thought that has accompanied my days: I am so lucky, I am so lucky to be here with my hurt knees and the sun already shining on this life I’ve been given.
--
I came to Miami often when I was small. My father’s parents and family lived in Haiti, not far. An easy plane ride to drop of the kids with the grandparents and cousins in June so my parents could take a proper holiday in Cuba or Peru or Paris and enjoy the glamourous life that they left behind to settle in southern, then NE coastal Florida, to build a practice (my father, a pediatrician) and raise a family (my mother, the artist, shouldered the heavy lifting there). When I was swimming earlier, I watched two grey clouds slip over to steal the early blue morning for a while. They reminded me that I survived hurricane Cleo, one of the big moments of my early life. I was 5, maybe 6, and we lived in Ft. Lauderdale briefly. One day I remember getting pulled out of our classes in makeshift classrooms on stilts and pedaling my small bike (Yes, I had mastered bike riding—another milestone by then) to follow my older sister and brother home in order to huddle somewhere in the house behind taped windows and sandbagged doors to await the storm. One of the first miracles occurred: we lived on a subdivision canal, with boats tied up high to escape the storm. We were allowed out during the eye of the storm and I remembered, embedded in my mind’s eye like yesterday, watching two young boys in yellow slickers walking along of the canal. All the boats were gone, some floating like ghosts in the water that had risen above its banks. Our yard was flooded and—miracle of miracles—a whale was in our backyard. Later, I knew it was a manatee, but in my young mind, it was a white whale and I was a pirate, and I was going to rescue those ships and my siblings and I would sail somewhere great with the white whale as our new friend once the rains and lighting had stopped.
Such is the power and joy of the imagination and fantasy. I’ve been blessed to have an abundance of what my father called magical thinking (he saw this a negative, at times, a failure to focus on the serious aspects of reality) and I explored as my personal kingdom. I can recall great adventures that I had in Ft. Lauderdale with my cousin Tizwing, who is dead now, one of the premature losses. He was a wild one, never took life seriously enough, if you asked others, who judged his sweetness and desire for joy and penchant for bon vivant living and excesses of pleasure and refusal to live small. He’s gone and so is his mother, who, says the family, killed herself after many years of sorrow at her divorce and perhaps the failure of her dreams to fulfill her soul, I don’t know. I loved her. And her husband, that uncle, he’s dead too, and so are my parents and that older generation that gave me a great childhood and made me feel life was my oyster, if I dreamed big, and worked hard and got lucky.
I’m writing all this because is a day of extreme gratitude as every day should be of course, but we mark it annually, and we sometimes mourn the lives and selves we have been as we evolve. My siblings have had grey hair for two decades and I’m slowly discovering I may have more than I think, if I ever stopped dyeing it darker like I have since my 20s. (I’m a New Yorker; I still dress a lot in black, sue me). Lucky here, too, silver is the color of a new generation of youth as well as us who have entered later age.
All this to say: I am so extremely lucky and I don’t take any of it for granted. I’m so lucky my hands can type more easily than two years ago, and, if I’m in charge (which I am, mostly) I’ll be able to watch my fingers dance across the keyboard and let my thought fly out as they are here until I take my last breath. When that may be doesn’t consume my thoughts compared to what I am doing every day to wrest every drop of good life from my day. I’ve always known what many of us learn early on: the only arbiter of our lives is ourselves. We set the measure of our possibility, what we aspire to be and do. When we are younger, we give that measuring stick to others—our parents, teachers, coaches (I was going to be a professional tennis player; got to qualifying Virginia Slims… see that dates me), heterosexual society (yah, I managed to come out, with difficulty, then later, greatest joy… thank god I am gay. So many of the most interesting people are gay… luck of the draw, one could say. Merci!), and the people we admire who have the success we aspire to achieve—until we realize the only one holding that stick is ourselves, our best and worse selves, I suppose. Our worst selves hold the stick to berate our shortcomings (the lapses, the fuck ups, the outright blowing up our lives, the shitty lovers with their red flags we ignored, the hangovers when we knew better, our lazy couch potato selves that never used gym membership enough) and our best selves admire the Ukrainians: we would rush to the defense our best ideals if given the opportunity, if the stakes of our own survival were that high. My own best self knows that I’ve reached the age of my own sagacity: I have everything I need to be very, very happy and if I’m not, I don’t have to look at anyone but myself for help in confronting lesser-self or worst-self thoughts and moments.
I’m not one for blaming others, in other words. All my mistakes, all my missteps are my own and I chose them and everything that adds up or doesn’t is all mine, thank the stars I’ve had that freedom—the freedom demanded by Ukrainian great-grandmothers and teenagers taking up arms that would normally hold at arm’s length to keep away the faint stench of old blood from forgotten wars by other would-be Stalins who fear liberty.
I still have my goals, thank the Haitian or some other small gods of soul. I still have my internal voices of censure. I recognize my old demon friends vanity and pride. I still want the admiration of my peers and many of them are dead: the writers I admired, the people whose words gave shape and meaning to mine. I still want to challenge myself to write what I know I might, if I let my mind speak more freely, if I could put the censors and arbiters of my worth as a writer in a small room to rest and then shut up forever haha. I have a few private goals that are too centered on other people liking what I have to say. So sue me, is what I think. Without vanity and self-aggrandizement, we likely wouldn’t get ourselves off the proverbial couch to run marathons or, like Volodymyr Zelenski, to discover the heart of great, brave leader who believes in his countrymen and their shared demand to live freely. We are all writing our own great chapters, even when we look back at the less great ones. That’s fine.
This past week, between doom scrolling the advance of Russian troops on Kyiv, and admiring the ordinary citizen heroes of Ukraine, I felt my days shadowed by the sorrow of passage of an old friend, Paul Farmer, whose death disoriented me more than many other people, some of whom I had spent more time with. Paul wasn’t a best friend or even one I saw so frequently. But he was one who lived as I would like to, with his own bar raised very high. That’s why he was so magnetic as a person to others: he set that bar far higher than was possible, but even his own failure to meet it represented an incredible degree of success in his goal of helping others, of offering concrete hope in his goal of more equitable access to health care for the poorest, and of sharing his field lessons as a physician and activist. He happened to be a terrific writer too. When I heard he’d died of a heart attack at 62, I felt a bit unmoored. It wasn’t just the loss of an amazing person to the world, but the loss of the time we’d shared that no one but he and I or others at the time had known. He had a big impact on me. We shared being two white people who’d found our way to Haiti and knew historic redress was the task, and our own position was one that required constant assessment. We were far from neutral in our role. Mine came from family ties, his from a physician’s sense of duty. One thing I think about is how Paul always felt he was disappointing others: his wife and later, his children, his colleagues, his students, and the many people who wanted to spend time with him. The more well know he became, the more people wanted of him, and he was never meeting his own incredibly unrealistic goals for a day. But he achieved so much on a daily basis in refusing to live smaller. It wasn’t an easy way to live, and he always felt he could do more, even as he succeeded and failed daily. The way he would talk to me about how he was likely disappointing others stays with me, because he did so much. He was driven, yes. But it was his own yardstick, and he let himself set it very high.
I have my own yardsticks. They are about loving my children as hard as humanely possible and giving them greater freedom: a challenging mix for any parents of children who have become their own adults. I have my mind, calling me to chase away my censors and the imaginary gatekeepers who might not value my words in whatever form I express them. I know they are paper tigers. I’m my own yardstick, ultimately. I have to meet my own measure, like every Ukrainian and every Russian now, and all of us witnessing who seek to take actions that make a difference in the most positive way, in the way most likely to support the glory of being alive and in supportive community with others.
This year I have small goals, including doing what I’ve done this morning: sitting down to let myself talk to myself, or some imaginary audience, maybe. I want to do this every day, knowing I’ll fail but the days I do will be the greatest happiness I can offer myself. I’m moving back to NY and look forward to time with old friends and making new ones. I want to dedicate quality time to the words of others: to read and really take in all that wonderful literature that I want to read and can’t often find focus to do. I want to look at art and share the work of artists whose work moves me. And I want to report on the tyrannies that move me, where, as a global citizen, I have to consider my role and responsibility to act and at the very least, speak out. And, always, to support and share any resource I have with those who would like to have more of the freedoms that I have been so blessed to enjoy.
Let Ukraine prevail and let Vladimir Putin get therapy and a hearing at some future international court of justice. Let the world care as much about the situation in Palestine and the war being waged by Israel to occupy historic lands as we do Russia and Ukraine and Crimea. Let us consider by way of comparison the fact that we care much more about Europe (can I say white Europe?) than Iraq and Syria and the plight of people who are brown and black and serve other religions than Christianity. Let us be aware, at the very least, of our own historic failure to care equally and bear witness equally.
#IStandWithUkraine and I stand for Russians for are freedom-loving, and I am my parent’s daughter, who lived through Hitler’s occupation of France, and I am feeling it all today, on my own small birthday. I have the greatest gift of another day. I won’t be wasting any of it but sharing it with friends and my family. I hope my words may give some ballast to those of you who are feeling less optimism and joy about the bigger world and your own private worlds. We are alive and as long as we are, we have a freedom that others are dying to have. Thank you Paul Farmer and the writers I miss and #alleyesonUkraine and #IStandWithPalestine and thank you to all the journalists who are where I might be, and let the word come and let the truth be known.
And did I tell you? My favorite number is 22, followed by 27. My mother’s birthday was Jan 22, and mine today. So today has that extra special sauce, as I think of it. Thank you to everyone and everything that has conspired to let me have another one.
--Anne-christine d’Adesky