Rising from the Ash

"Watt" was the nickname she adopted for herself at age seventeen, citing the novel by Samuel Becket as her inspiration. Watt is a forlorn empty-vessel character in the novel which she felt she personified. I met her at age twenty when she was admitted to Palo Alto Hospital pregnant and with a cancerous growth in her jaw. I was a third-year medical student, not much older than she, and she was assigned to me during my surgical rotation. Watt lived with her boyfriend Donny in Mountain View, a 1960s era, Northern California hamlet with an upscale strip mall and a swath of lush green hills.I befriended Donny, also twenty, who was snatched out of a finding-themselves state into the jaws of coming paternity and the unknowable terrors of his girlfriend's mutilating facial surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. They stayed united and faced it all, even as Watt's lovely pink-cheeked face was viciously altered by the need to excise a rapidly growing sarcoma. Eventually, with radiation and chemotherapy necessarily delayed, a healthy baby boy was born. The two were briefly but truly rapturous.Theirs was a beautiful and heart-rending love story. I cried seeing them together. Before the boy's first birthday Watt died. At that moment I graduated, my wife was pregnant, and we left California to pursue my residency training in New York. My son was born four months later.Ten years passed and I was walking on First Avenue in Manhattan. In the careless serendipity of time and place, I ran into Donny. We recognized each other. The greetings were awkward. Donny was in New York following his desire to be an actor. He had the looks and the voice. I asked about his son, who was being raised by Watt's parents. The conversation closed on that small revelation. Donny was obviously eager to move on, to live in his new present. We parted. A long shadow passed over. It was a cloud momentarily blotting out the sun. Where, I wondered, was that twenty-year-old girl who I had met near the brink of her womanhood, her name washed in a passing cloud?Where was the joy?Each of us has a Watt story, more such stories as we get on in our lives. How, then, do we go on?.

"Injustice hangs from every limb of every kind of lynching tree."

.Watt does not live through me. Maybe not even through Donny. I mean live in the sense of an active, ever-present memorialization. But I believe that a small, incognizant part of me, perhaps in my work as an MD, is ineffably, subliminally rededicated to her.Donny’s acting will, through hidden, unconscious protrusions, speak for and even about Watt.That is built into human evolution,  the socio-cultural evolution, that inexorable drive toward progress.But Watt does not only represent untimely loss. She also stands, as if waiting, for injustice. And her impalpable presence remains a germinal seed, a future seedling that will burst forth and rise as justice.The state of Israel (with all its political incrustations) was born out of the Holocaust. The United States was born out of British colonial tyranny. Black Lives Matter, a tree still yearning for its deserved height, is still growings out of slavery.Freud declared that every civilization provides rules, options and opportunities to delimit human's innate aggression and that it ultimately yearns toward its own destruction. His is another apocalyptic vision, a  rapture slamming death and rebirth together. Yet every civilization, even the most hierarchical or genocidal, strivess for justice.Do we?Injustice hangs from every limb of every kind of lynching tree. Even Watt's cruelly untimely, pain-ridden, disfiguring, mother-depriving loss is a singular injustice. She informs my life forever. Her lone seed exemplifies the precept cited both in the Quran and the Talmud: whoever saves one life saves the whole world. I take that to also mean that whoever remembers a life, in whatever dormant deeply planted form, rekindles that life. We are all rekindlers.We see it now in America. The drive to justice is mounting daily. Grievous loss, costly fraud, fiendish deceptions, flaunted inequities are seeding and germinating the calls and actions to restore justice. The world is watching us.Are we on a course toward Freud's recipe for our self-destruction? Or do we have soil rich and fertile and healthy enough to rise out of our despoiled earth?I believe we do.