confession

In my ideal life, right now, I would have time in the morning to scribble down what comes to my mind on waking. It's the time when my mind is least inhibited by reality, is beyond it; when what I think is most likely to be creative and weird and free. I always think I'll remember to write it down, but I never do. By the time I get to work it's gone, the colors all have run together, the shine is off the shiny parts, and I am once again the automaton that earns my keep. I have to make myself be less alert, I guess.

Was chatting with a friend about risk taking when the risk is small. Another chimed in comparing drinking tap water to the higher chance of getting hit by lightning.

Lightning is nothing compared to regret.

The second summer of my first marriage, my husband and I started an interior renovation company. One of our clients had a lovely brownstone in Brooklyn that we were restoring. The kitchen had maple cabinets, which I spent the spring stripping and refinishing. I knew the label on the Zipstrip had warnings about benzene, carcinogens, open ventilation, and masks (I wore one but not a gas barrier). I mostly stripped outside, but I saw those warnings as overblown as the warnings on Sweet n Low packages. I figured, I'm never having kids, I'm not pregnant, I'm only doing this for a few days, I'm not a rat being injected in lab with 10000 x the possible lifetime dose...

Two months later, I got unexpectedly pregnant.

Twenty-three years later, I paid the price for my assumptions.

People tell me it's impossible, or at least highly unlikely, that this is the cause of Jesse's APL. I do searches on this topic every few months. I tend to look for blame ("something I did" + "APL" + "young adult" = not objective research).

The debate changes direction a lot. It's gone from an assumption that this only happens to children or the elderly, to the present evidence that it occurs most often in young adults; from arsenic as an old wives' tale to arsenic being the answer -- the doctor who treated Jesse in Chicago has his name on much of the US research on this particular form of leukemia, and the research is confined to populations as small as ten. They have to group it with other classes of leukemia to raise a population into three digits. Too much they don't know.


No one knows how long it takes for one misfolded gene to go crazy. Six cases for every ten million people.

I know the jury's going to be out re: causes of leukemia, especially one as rare (and curable) as APL. That's how science is. But my larger point is that ignoring a risk because it's relatively small can be painful, not just because of what could happen to you; but because when something does happen, at least you'll know it wasn't because you were drinking poisoned water.

Someone at work once said he had a mother-shaped hole in his life; for me, it's a Jesse-shaped Something. Not a hole, the opposite. Love is an easy term for it, I guess, but it really doesn't express this. This consuming wave of longing, guilt, regret, joy, love, relief, respect, pride, nostalgia, this unfinished song hanging in the air. This never ending grief.

How I've come to look at it.

Because all religious belief, including christianity in every flavor I've encountered is, from a psychological standpoint indistinguishable from any other irrational belief (superstition, or magical thinking, for example), I've come to see it as protective, or perhaps a defense mechanism. First though, defense mechanisms get bad press. They aren't always harmful or unhealthy. We all use them to get by in life. After all, you can't spend your whole life completely focused on the full reality of human existence: it's too much. You need to be able to buffer yourself.

That said, I think one thing most religions have in common is the comforting notion that there is someone bigger than you who makes your life possible, who looks out for you to some degree, expects great things out of you. Many have the component of transcendent joy in serving this greater being. Most include an awesome fear of trespassing against it. All of these elements are far too much like a young child's relationship to a parent for me to see it as anything but an adultified version. A comforting construct: God as the Parent who will kick your enemy's ass, and give you paradise, if you're very, very good.

Next, it seems people are neurologically predisposed to find a God construct. There are areas of the brain triggered by prayer and/or meditation in fMRIs of religious folks of all walks. There's the God helmet, too, which triggers a sensation of God's presence when worn, simply by triggering the right hemisphere temporal and parietal lobes. There are other similar studies of similar phenomena. Now, I'm not saying that I think that just because your brain is wired for something, that that means the original thing is real or not-real. The brain is wired for dreams and hallucinations, which I think we can all agree have limited reality (that is, they exist, but only within our own brains). This doesn't mean that I think all these phenomena exist solely in the brain either: there's evidence that some out of body experiences are objectively real, even though you can have a fake one fairly easily, according to Michael Schermer.

When I was in the throes of unbearable grief over Jesse, my psychiatrist kept pushing me to at least try to believe in God and follow a religion, on the theory that it would make me happier, and cushion the loss. I tried to point out to her that there aren't many religions that would accept a dead atheist like my son into heaven, so what exactly would I be forcing myself to hope and pray for?

I've been a serious, deep believer. I know how seductive and convincing it all is. I guess what I want to say is that I don't think believers are stupid, or delusional, necessarily. I think we all have things we believe in with less than sparkling pure evidence. For many, the intuitive sense of Godness is all the proof they need. It's not meant to be logical. For others, that which is good about, say, the Bible, adds to their proof. Again, doesn't stand up to logical tests, but it's an understandable framework, and not stupid, just limiting.

The test is whether the belief is useful, helpful and positive, versus unhelpful, destructive or limiting in some unnecessary way. Maybe God is the ultimate woobie. But woobies and pacifiers when used properly won't kill anyone and they aren't contributory to or indicative of idiocy of themselves.