Call Me Lazarus

"He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’"

 — The Gospel of Luke, The Rich Man and Lazarus

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"When all the prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone, an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects. When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. But when everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed… 

That is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them even in calm and easy circumstances. In France, we are worried about increasing rate of suicides. In America, suicide is rare, but I am told that madness is commoner than anywhere else."

— Alexis de Tocqueville

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Dear Kate,

Call me Lazarus.

Yesterday I told you I shall refrain from writing but this morning from death I rose and here I am, being sent to you by a rich man, away from "Abraham's Bosom", supposedly a special place set apart from the rest of hell.  

To give you a warning.  A warning that, alas, you will ignore.  ("If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.")

I am writing now as a survivor of a natural disaster, from my afterlife, the disaster democracy, natural as we feel it should be: endless human progress, ever bettering ourselves, everyone more equaled by the day and everything more equitable, until the earth is made flat again like how we once saw it, a dead vision of our heartbeat, flatlining into a level playing field where no one comes out to play anymore.

I was petrified when I first saw water dripping from my ceiling.

Paralyzed, numbed instantly.  Like I've walked to the scene of a fatal car accident and seen my own kid behind the wheel.  It's all over I said, my kneecaps now hitting each other to the rhythm of my quickening and quickly dying heart.  I couldn't look away, didn't know who to look for.  I've made a mistake, I thought, to be a homeowner.  I can't handle this.  Who do I think I am?  I should have stayed in my townhouse and let someone take good care of me.  Are roofs supposed to have holes?  Don't they build them to make sure they work?  One thing only I want from my roof and it fails me.  It's not fair.  I've done my share to build a home, a good life for my family, and shall continue to pay a dear price for it, the mortgage not even the biggest of my burdens—and what for?  A leaky roof?  I didn't buy myself no fuckin' leaky roof.  Someone owes me an answer.

Tocqueville described above a human specimen that was me.  What followed the fear was greed, and greed would throw fuel to burn in me a bigger fear, variegated but monotonous.  When my kids were young for a time I would worry about not having enough insurance, not enough quantity, a lack of quality and variety, inadequate coverage for my decay and death, never for the best price—an ever bettered price that I could and should fight for, for the love of my family, the mission of a man, the call to not merely survive but thrive, making headway endlessly as fear and greed make their way in my head and from there poison everything that was me.

My fear of dying was stronger then my will to live.  It was death that beckoned me to live another day.   "In America, suicide is rare, but I am told that madness is commoner than anywhere else."

Mental health issue is a serious matter.  But apparently not serious enough for us to be a bit more honest with ourselves.  To call it a dying of the spirit does poetic justice to our being human.  But that's religious language, isn't it?  Like "Abraham's Bosom," something that can't be real and surely isn't happening, not to us at least.  Roofs do leak, but not mine.  Disappointments are aberrations no one should suffer, and by tomorrow we will come up with a way to triumph over it.

We are in this together: you've been warned.

Yours, Lazarus