TWO: In loco parentis

Both my parents in their later years gave me the same advice: “Don’t grow old.” I was never inclined to follow parental advice, but in this case, I tried, and, I am sad to say, I have failed.

When my father was in his eighties, I brought home my Osborne computer upon which I had installed a somewhat primitive “artificial intelligence” program called ELIIZA, which functioned as a Rogerian nondirective psychotherapist. (I used ELIZA and its marvelously fractured syntax as a character in another prepublished novel, “Tales of Monkeyman,” but that’s another story).

I loaded the program and sat my father down at the keyboard. The miniscule screen prompted: “HOW DO YOU DO. PLEASE TELL ME YOUR PROBLEM.” I left my father alone. He called me back about 5 minutes later to show me what he had written.

“I fear death.”

“DO YOU SAY YOU FEAR DEATH FOR SOME SPECIAL REASON?”

“I don’t believe in an afterlife.”

“THAT’S QUITE INTERESTING.”

That was it, as far as he could go, and probably the longest psychological examination my father ever had (as well as his longest experience with a computer).

In many ways, ever since adolescence, I have defined myself in opposition to my father. He was a successful pillar of the community, a well-regarded opthomologist with owning class aspirations. I became a downwardly mobile quasibeatnik. He was an alcoholic, I became a pothead. As he became a Dupont Republican (to the right of Reagan), I became a communist. But here we were, staring each other in the face: I fear death. I don’t believe in an afterlife.
I have spent most of my life identifying as an atheist. I remember the exuberant sense of liberation I got when I took on this identity at age 13, the flush of pride when I told my very Catholic friend Kathy that I didn’t believe in God. A year or so previously, I had been confirmed in the Episcopal church, and I do remember enjoying the tranquility of my own thoughts as I prayed in church. Prayed for what? To be good at some sport. For my peers to like me. To grow pubic hair. Stuff like that. What convinced me that there wasn’t a God after all was quite simply the lack of evidence.

In college, I discovered Eastern religion and attempted to embrace it. Casting the I Ching every Sunday morning off and on for 40 years became my church even during my most atheistic years. Jung’s concept of Synchronicity – an acausal linking of events by ‘meaningful coincidence’ – a quasi-scientific justification for my beliefs. I continue this ritual to this day, the Book of Changes being full of at least as much good advice as the Bible, even if its predictive capacity is suspect. In my communist years, I broke with Jung when I heard that he got himself protected by the Nazis by announcing that “Semitic psychology is qualitatively different than Aryan psychology.” I began to see Synchronicity as a reactionary concept, which attempted to horizontally cut across and cripple the vertical cause-and-effect march of history toward socialism. Yet I continued to shake those coins, justified now by a sense of the very dialectical nature of ancient Taoist thought, yin and yang as Marxist thesis-antithesis.