Dean Barnett, aka Soxblog, usually posts once a day with his "Spanning the Web," feature, and regularly sprinkles his page with extended lively essays, usually on politics. The best compliment I can pay him is that I'm always anxious for his next installment; when I do see something new, I feel free to drop everything in anticipation of really enjoying the next five to ten minutes of my life.
However, when Barnett goes a few days without posting--as he did this past week, Tuesday through Sunday--my concern is deeper than mere boredom or anticipation. He may hate to know it, but a modicum of concern steps in. Though the farthest thing imaginable from narcissistic (he has been wonderfully merciless in mocking Andrew Sullivan's preoccupation with his sleep apnea, his beagles, his house in Provincetown), Barnett revealed months ago that, for some time, he has been dealing with cystic fibrosis, a case so severe he was placed on the lung donor list. (Not a good list to be on, I now know, as lungs are not easily transplantable. My first realization of what wonderful things lungs are was a third-grade screening of Hemo the Magnificent, when I saw their amazing composition, the process by which oxygen is transferred from the world around us to our blood. Such delicate organs are these that gas, but not liquid, can pass through, and we live. Simply astonishing, lungs. And never more evidently so than when imperiled.)
Reading bloggers long enough is like following a favorite television show over a number of years: you get familiar with the characters, their likes and dislikes, their grammatical quirks, their rhetorical hobbyhorses. You get to know them (or think you get to know them) better than all but your closest friends and family. With this comes genuine caring. And so, when Barnett did not post Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday, my reaction was: Oh, crap. Something happened.
Understand: my connection to Barnett is a thin, thin reed. I e-mailed him to wish him well when he first made reference to his illness. (I hoped Barnett, a Red Sox fanatic, would accept the good wishes of a Yankee freak.) Some weeks later, when he wrote about sports head cases (Boston ones in particular), I wrote him again about the Paul Westphal-for-Charlie Scott trade between the Boston Celtics and Phoenix Suns in 1975, a trade worth remembering because it put both teams in the NBA finals the following year, and led ultimately to the greatest NBA game ever played, the 128-126 triple-overtime Celtics win. (If you're scoring at home, Scott was the head case in the deal, but he was a head case held in check by a solid Celtic veteran core of Dave Cowens, Hondo Havlicek, Paul Silas, Don Nelson, and--especially--his backcourt mate, the ex-Marine JoJo White. In the Game 6 of the finals, as if to cement his one-year marriage with accountability, Scott scored a ton to secure the championship for Boston.) Barnett responded with a kind e-mail of his own in which he mentioned how his family had known Westphal when Westphal was the ex-USC golden boy rotting on the bench behind White, Don Chaney, and swingman Hondo. I didn't write him back--I assumed he wasn't looking for a pen pal--but I followed his every word, right up until the past week, when I began to seriously worry.
Well, now I know better. Barnett has been too busy to post. Good to know. In what feels like a revelry in some re-discovered good health, he has a few thoughts for us (second item). An example:
WANTING TO LIVE may be the biggest “x factor” in determining how long you’ll live. For those of you with a serious illness, this is the single most important observation I could share with you. Focus on the reasons that you want to live. Focus on the things that satisfy you – minimize the things that drive you nuts. If you feel your life is endless misery, it will end soon. Fill your days with the activities that make you happy to get out of bed. Eliminate from your days the things you dread. You’ll want to live longer, and you will.
And for those of you with loved ones who you would like to see live for a longer time rather than a shorter time, help them in this. From what I’ve seen in being around other sick people, loved ones can most readily accomplish this by focusing on not being burdensome. I can’t tell you how many seriously ill people I’ve heard say how their family is driving them crazy. Go to a support group meeting, and there’s a 30% chance that part of it will devolve into all the patients pissing and moaning how the people closest to them are driving them nuts. How sad is that?
If you’ve got a gravely ill loved one and you’re driving them nuts, you’ve simply got to find a way to stop doing what’s bugging them. What follows is harsh, but you’ve got to hear it – you’re literally killing them faster.
Barnett--a fan of Charles Krauthammer and Dan Henninger, if you doubted his judgment--sometimes bestows a "read the whole thing" award on the best essay of a given day. Yesterday, he was too modest to point out that he'd won it himself.
Oh yeah, today he was back at his usual beat, pounding away at the New York Times (first item, number three) for tying itself in knots to avoid reporting on the Canadien arrest of 17--say it out loud, Gray Lady--suspected Islamofascist terrorists.
There. That felt better. Go get 'em, Sox.
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