Life is precious

Writing about life and death recently in an essay, I asserted that life is precious to all of us. My friend Jeff House commented that life isn't precious to murderous kids in ghetto gangs, or people who commit suicide. I added child soldiers to that list, and doubtless there are other groups too. I don't think many suicides belong there though: a large proportion are suffering from the accursed affliction of depression or some other mental illness which so warps their perception that sometimes their life no longer seems precious to them - and occasionally when in this diseased state they take not only their own life but the lives of their spouse and children. Leaving aside these diseased states and forms of social pathology, I maintain that life is precious to all (the rest) of us. I said to Jeff House that I could make a list of reasons why my life has been precious to me, reduce that list to a short list, and even narrow it down to a single reason, the mutual love that Wendy and I had for each other. In this post, I'll try to list some of the other reasons life is precious to me. The most obvious is the one Peter Medawar gave: considering the alternative to life, i.e. death, he expressed a very decided preference for life. I agree one hundred percent. What are some of the other reasons that life is precious? There is the love I have for my children and grandchildren, and most definitely the love I still feel for my beloved Wendy, even though she isn't here to reciprocate. Then there is the affection I have, reciprocated I am confident in most if not in all cases, for friends, even a diminishing small handful of friends whose bond with me dates from childhood or university, more than sixty years ago. What else? Many particular experiences have made my life precious to me. Very high, indeed top of the list, I must put the experience of being present at the birth of all three of my children. I actually delivered Jonathan, the youngest of the three, because the nurse-midwife, the only other person present in the labour room, was on the phone trying to call our doctor, and Jonathan's birth was very quick, almost precipitate. By then I had delivered many babies and that birth was easy for Wendy too, and so quick there was no time to worry about any of many things that could have gone wrong. Next on my list of reasons life is precious is curiosity that can only be satisfied by the pleasure of finding things out, Richard Feynman's phrase for scientific curiosity which I will broaden to a wider, richer curiosity about what's become of people I know, how has their life unfolded since last I had word of them, what's become of whole nations. Now, in my mid-80s, my main reason for wanting to remain alive is curiosity about what my grandchildren and a few others I know of the same age, will do with their lives. The many pleasures of travel are another thing that makes life precious. Sad to say, these pleasures have diminished perceptibly in the past 20-30 years, not because of increased age and reduced vigour but because of the increasing annoyances of air travel and the decline of sea travel (cruise ships don't provide sea travel, merely a way to commute between allegedly interesting ports at which they stay too briefly for the cruising passengers to gain any insights). Only train travel remains relatively pleasurable, and only in Europe, not in Canada or the USA, and I can't really include it among things that make life precious. Next come an array of aesthetic pleasures: listening to several kinds of music, contemplating art in galleries, especially galleries in Europe that I will never see again - and watching the other people contemplating art, often as richly satisfying as the art itself. Admiring buildings designed by great architects fits in this class too, and above all other forms of creative endeavour, reading great works of literature - and lesser works too - is so rewarding it is high on my list of reasons why life is precious. Throughout my life I've had immense pleasure from reading, sometimes I feel from reading just about anything, even the back of cereal packets. Reading is most pleasurable of course when I'm reading something worth while. Worth while reading includes the literary canon from Homer through Dante and Shakespeare to Proust and Joyce, some living and recently dead writers who seem very likely to join that company; it includes literate works about physical, biological, social and medical sciences; it includes classical and some contemporary works on history, literary and a few political biographies; and for me it also includes enough less eminent writers for this subject to receive further attention in another post on this blog some time.

Wendy at work

Here is Wendy's diary for 2 weeks in August 1976,illustrating how hard she worked.

Monday August 16: Three loads wash. A wet, dark day. Put basement carpet out to air; washed kitchen floor. Wrote 4 letters.
Aug 17: A lovely day. Played tennis. Started scratching off paint on window ledges downstairs. Took Jonathan to NAC Theatre to hear & see the Huggetts. A most enjoyable evening.
Aug 18: A perfect day. Scraped rest of downstairs windows and got undercoat on. Cleaned both bathrooms. Up early to have car serviced. Spaghetti for tea. Worked after tea to finish undercoat.
Aug 19: Another perfect day to play tennis with Jonathan 8.30-9.15 then gardened till 11.15. Did one load washing. Biked to bank. Bought chicken for tea. Second coat enamel on all downstairs window sills. Played piano.
Aug 20: Played tennis. Finished painting kitchen window sills but paint very gucky. Painted tops of heater covers. To Davies for buffet dinner. Awfully boring. Home late & broke toe and toenail when heater cover dropped on it.
Aug 21: To Emergency to have toe X-rayed (broken) & dressed. Home to rest up. Lamb chops for tea. Rebecca to work. DP [her friend] here but no bother, went out with Suzy & Carol.
Aug 22: David home 3 am & slept all day. DP & Rebecca to Lac Phillippe. Rebecca to work, DP off. Early bed.
Aug 23: A perfect day. Did 5 loads washing very quietly & put foot up as much as I could. Billy [Watt; next-door neighbour]brought in a cup of tea for me in afternoon.
Aug 24: A gorgeous day. Out to Richmond by car with Billy to pick tomatoes. Very pretty out there. Made up 2 lots chutney. Rode bicycle to Dr Patten for toe dressing. Waited some time. Wrote 2 letters.
Aug 25: Another bonza [NZ slang for very good] day. Cut up tomatoes & onions in sun all day. Did a load washing. Made up 22 lb tomatoes into relish. Dropped place mats on to nail bed: agony!!! Roast pork for dinner.
Aug 26: Cool & a little cloudy, just my sort of weather! Finished making chutney & cutting up tomatoes & onions in sun.
Aug 27: Hot & muggy. Shopped all a.m., Bank, Carlingwood, Lincoln Fields. Put food away, made pate & cleaned kitchen. Up to Dr Patten for foot dressing. Home to roast chicken. Out to film Bad News Bears.
Aug 28: Rebecca off to Hull disco till 4 am. Could not sleep for worrying about her. Up at 10 am washing & house cleaning. Toe sore.
Aug 29: Cold but sunny. Away at 10 am w. D & J to Lanark, Carleton Place, Balderson Cheese Factory.
Aug 30: Under 10 C, v cold, started washing early, soaked toe & wrote letters. A bad night with burning toe.
Aug 31: Started painting middle wall in stair well & plastering cracks. Bought wall paper. Had watch fixed.
Sep 1: Washed & carried on w. sanding & scraping doors.
Sep 2: Busy with painting wall, washing, sanding & plastering cracks in stair well. Hired ladder from Rentalex & worked on high walls till 11 pm. Very tired.
Sep 3: Returned ladder. All a.m. shopping for food & putting it away. In afternoon undercoated doors. Bought $1 navy striped dress at Fairweather's.
Sep 4: Painted doors & west wall & architrave of upstairs hall. Put on wall paper. Watched TV.
Sep 5: To church. Fine but cold. Second coated 4 doors upstairs & now finished!

All above is vertbatim from her diary for the last two weeks of August 1976, except for an occasional word I couldn't read. I was away much of those two weeks, doing a series of site visits for the NIH Epidemiology Study Section. As Richard says, she was like the Energizer Bunny. It took more than a broken toe to slow her down!

A post-script on diaries

Reading Wendy's diaries is vicariously exhausting: just reading her catalogue of a day's activities tires me out. Then I came to Friday 16 April, 1976 (Good Friday). She wrote: "A beautiful day. Up at 8 am, ate breakfast, read paper till 9 am. Washed (i.e., did the washing). Just seemed to mess about all day. What a lot of time I waste!" Earlier that year she flew from Ottawa to Los Angeles, then on to Auckland, Christchurch, Timaru, then Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Colombo, where I met her flight - I was working for WHO. We had several fascinating weeks in Sri Lanka, flew on to Madras, Agra where we stayed, saw the Taj Mahal by full moon from our hotel room and at length with a guide all to ourselves next day, Delhi with more sightseeing, then flew to London, rented a car, toured the Cotswolds, visited my classmate Lou Opit, then a consultant surgeon living in Warwick about to become professor of surgery at Monash University in Melbourne; then flew home to shovel snow, ferry kids to and fro, paint window screens, prepare and deliver meals to a sick friend, take part in PTA meetings, consult school teachers about problems with our two sons. All these travels, all the people we met and the sights we saw are catalogued in her diary (1975 and early 1976 are particularly interesting and fun to read). I'll take that entry for Good Friday 1976 with a very large grain of salt. I promise myself and readers of this blog that I'll post more excerpts from her diaries soon.

Diaries again

I've spent many of my waking hours lately reading Wendy's diaries. I began at the beginning (1954) and today I started on 1975, 20 years after I came into Wendy's life. As I've mentioned, there's a gap, no diaries for 1957 or 1958, unless they are squirrelled away in some unlikely place I haven't yet explored. What an eventful period it was for us! We started our married lives in early 1957 in suburban general practice in Adelaide, moved to Sydney in 1960 for me to begin training in public health, had a year in London in 1961-62 where I was a research fellow in the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit; then back to Sydney for 18 months until I accepted an invitation to work at the University of Vermont; in early 1965 we moved on to the University of Edinburgh where I had five wonderfully productive years, and then at the end of 1969 we came to Ottawa. I have relished reliving our experiences from Wendy's viewpoint. In 1961 we traveled from Adelaide to Liverpool via the Suez Canal on a freighter carrying 12 passengers, plus our two toddlers; I had a lightning tour of British medical school departments of Social Medicine then rejoined Wendy, Rebecca and David in a lovely old ramshackle house, Cromwell Lodge, 30 Newington Green, inner north London, where we lived for a year in dire but happy poverty. She describes our struggle for existence cheerfully, skimming over the worries and dwelling on the joy we got from life that year. A cryptic word that crops up once or twice reminded me of our very satisfying sex lives, a form of entertainment that cost almost nothing. (She didn't describe an occasion I vividly remember, a summer Sunday morning when our version of a Kama Sutra position was interrupted by 3 1/2 year-old Rebecca's question in a horrifed, querulous tone, "What's Mummy doing to Daddy?!" We hastily withdrew under the bedclothes, turned and saw Rebecca and David who had woken unusually early, holding hands as they often did, wide-eyed with wonder at the foot of our bed. We didn't explain and they were too young to remember so we don't think their psyches were forever warped). She does record many energetic, sometimes exhausting trips to the Ridley Road street market about a mile and a half away, where a week's provisions could be stacked on the stroller, one or both kids perched atop of it all, and safely brought back to our front door. In our Burlington, Vermont and Edinburgh, Scotland years, she recorded our very active social lives, and the names of many among the large numbers we entertained, or who entertained us. She describes our trips to old ruined castles in Scotland, Boomer, our undisciplined golden Labrador farting in our VW camper van with all the windows closed against the drenching Scottish rain; our wonderful European camping holidays; and our sorrowful but ultimately triumphant relocation from Edinburgh to Ottawa. I was preoccupied building a large new academic department and traveled widely and often in our early years in Ottawa, and until I read her diaries I had not appreciated how rapidly or how well she adjusted to her new life in Canada, formed a large new friendship network, and immersed herself in community activities including PTA, head-start kindergarten, and local activist politics. She sometimes kept separate and more detailed diaries of our important travels, for example to Australia in 1968 (conferences in Canberra and Sydney for me; Wendy helped my mother wind up her little row house and move into assisted care living); and to New Zealand in 1970. We left Rebecca and David in Katamavik summer camp while Wendy accompanied Jonathan to Auckland for open-heart surgery to repair his life-endangering congenital heart defect, I attended a conference in Dunedin and gave talks in various major centres in the USA on my way home. I had not appreciated until I read her diary how stressful this time was for her. It may be a challenge but I will do my best to incorporate excerpts from Wendy's diaries in my memoirs. And I still have over 30 more years of her life with me to read about. The four photos above were taken in Sydney in 1960 (Left); Trafalgar Square, London in 1961 (Middle Right); and Adelaide, December 1963, just before we sailed away across the Pacific to the Panama Canal, and on to the USA (Bottom Right), and about to fly out of Adelaide to Sydney (Top Right).

Certainty and doubt

Not long ago I spent an evening looking at and listening to the man I believe to be the greatest scientist of my lifetime, Richard Feynman. I lent one of his books, the collection called "The pleasure of finding things out" to R&R's nephew Martin, who is a physics student at Ottawa U, and will pass it on to Raman Kumar when Martin returns it. Meantime Raman and his Mum, Karen Trollope Kumar found many U-tube clips and the BBC Panorama interview with Feynman on line, and sent me the URL coordinates (some are familiar, others I'd not seen). It's hard to think of a better way to pass the time than learning from or in my case refreshing my memory of Feynman's thoughts - profound thoughts, always expressed in plain language. I've seen that BBC Panorama program several times before, and enjoy it more each time I look at it. I can very highly recommend it to everyone who reads this blog. The last clip I looked at on that evening spent with Feynman was a montage of Feynman's sayings and writings spoken by someone else, on the dichotomy between science and religion, between doubt and certainty, skepticism and unquestioning faith. The fundamental point is that a true scientist questions everything, accepts no absolute certainties. There are obvious exceptions: it is absolutely certain that I could not swim across the Atlantic Ocean, it is absolutely certain that I will die. Feynman's point was that scientific certainties are certain only until or unless refuted by valid scientific observations, often investigations designed to refute previously accepted truths. Thus, for instance, prayer has been demonstrated in numerous trials to be without efficacy. Miracles, required for canonization of saints, vanish under objective, impartial scrutiny. It is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of god, or a supernatural power responsive (or not) to human entreaty. There are scientists who believe in god; those I have heard discussing their belief seem to do so on the basis of a sense of wonder at the working of nature: no human could make a flower, or a flea, or a radish, so there must be a higher power than humans. This commonly used but hackneyed argument misses the point (and ignores the facts of evolutionary biology). The point is simply this: there are believers and there are skeptics. I am a skeptic; my brother, to whom I sent the URL of Feynman on religion, is a believer. He needs no evidence, no proof: god exists, prayer works. My brother and I have a great deal in common. But we differ on this matter. I don't seek to convert him to my viewpoint, but I do enjoy a discussion, a debate, an argument. I suspect that what I've said in this post may provoke some, and I look forward to it.

Sturm und drang

One calm sunny morning last week as I walked to the shops two blocks away, the summer time leitmotiv of songbirds was drowned by the ugly snarl of chainsaws, cutting up fallen trees and hundreds of stout tree limbs, victims of a violent thunderstorm late on the previous afternoon. At its peak, the clouds were so low and so dense it was as though night had come a few hours early; I could feel our solid tower block sway in the force of the wind; rain and hailstones hit the west-facing windows with a sound like machine gun bullets: I was relieved to find no breakages when the storm passed; all but one were water-tight too, thanks to renewed grouting last year. A graceful old willow tree beside Paterson's Inlet immediately below our north windows was split asunder and most of it blown into the water. All that remains now is the sawed off trunk, almost 2 meters in diameter. Violent storms with lightning, torrential rains, high winds that occasionally twist into tornadoes, are common in the heartland of this continent; this was the most violent I remember in over 40 years in Ottawa. My impression that storms have increased in frequency and ferocity over the past 20 years is supported by the statistics. This is one of the defining features of climate change. I'm perplexed when I reflect on it that this and other obvious signs like disappearing polar and alpine ice fields, retreating glaciers, and prolonged droughts, aren't recognized by those who deny the existence of climate change, as proof that it really is happening.

Ottawa University's memorial service for donors of bodies

Today the U of O held its annual memorial service for families of people who have donated their bodies to the medical school. David and Jonathan came with me (Rebecca could not get away from overwhelming pressures at work). We arrived about 10 minutes before the service was due to begin and I was surprised to see that the large room set aside for the ceremony was already packed to the rafters. We were lucky to find three seats together at the back of the long, rather narrow room. I'm glad we went. It was a brief, simple non-denominational service, not recognizable as Christian (rather than Jewish or Islamic). The head of the department of anatomy expressed his gratitude for the donated bodies, and was followed by the mother of a young man who died of a highly malignant brain tumour. She spoke most movingly. She was followed by one of the prosectors and then by two medical students, one speaking in English the other in French. The ceremony was moving and I thought, looking around the room, that many family members probably were feeling as I did, that we were taking part in a very worth-while enterprise. After the ceremony and a look at the book in which all the body donors' names are recorded, we went outside to look at the monument - a stone about a meter tall, half a meter broad, that is situated at the centre of a small grove of pine trees. It is a rather lovely setting, as the photo shows; the close-up photo of the memorial stone doesn't capture very clearly the inscription but zooming in and enlarging the image clears up that problem. This is now a memorial to Janet Wendy Last, as well as to all the others whose names are inscribed in the memorial books.

Getting up to date again in physics

About 20 years ago when the chattering classes were chattering about black holes, string theory, antimatter and other totally mysterious ideas, I thought I ought to bring myself up to date, purely as a self-defensive survival strategy. I read books by Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and scientific popularizers like John Gribben. Lately I've had a few conversations with Richard's very bright nephew Martin who is a first year student at Ottawa U, studying physics. I didn't feel as strongly motivated to get up to date all over again, but browsing in one of the neighbourhood book shops, I saw several remaindered book in a series called "The Big Questions" and on impulse, bought two of them, one on physics, the other on mathematics. It was an inspired impulse. A lot has been happening in physics in the last 20 years, and after a rapid run through The Big Questions in physics, I feel more confident that I can hold my own in conversations with young Martin. I've learned a great many new details and some new principles of physics - there has been a great deal of progress in the past 20-30 years. Some of the new ideas and information are disturbing, alarming even, and some are reassuring. One fact I didn't know before is the vital life-protecting role of the earth's magnetic field. I knew the earth's rotating/revolving molten metal core had something to do with creating the magnetic field and I did know that interaction of the magnetic field and cosmic radiation is responsible for the spectacular displays of the aurora borealis and aurora australis. But I didn't know that the magnetic field has a vitally important role in protecting all living organisms from exposure to lethal solar radiation. I knew that the magnetic field shifts, responding to turbulent movement in the earth's molten core. If it were to happen that even very briefly at such a time of shift, the earth's magnetic field failed to shield living body cells from lethal solar or cosmic radiation, all life on earth could be fried to crisp in a matter of moments. Now there's a thought to help you sleep more easily in your bed tonight.

Handyman and woman jobs

When a strategically located button fell off, all I had to do was hand the garment to Wendy, she would get out her needle and thread and subito, the button was back in place. Long ago, before Wendy came into my life, I sewed my own buttons back on. I remember doing this on a ship 60 years ago. One of the deck officers saw me doing it and before I knew what I'd let myself in for, I was sewing his fly buttons back on too. In those days, trowser flies had buttons, not zips. I had to rehabilitate that rusty skill yesterday when the button holding the waist of my pants in place came off. Threading the needle was the hardest part; I need to have my eyes tested... As I worked on replacing that button I reflected on how our skill sets evolved over the years, Wendy's especially so. Her early efforts at ad hoc home repairs often had end results evocative of Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson, but 10 or 15 years into our marriage she was more proficient than I at many and widely varying household repairs. She mentions some of her achievements in her diaries, not in a boastful way but casually, just in passing, so to say. As I look around our apartment I see some examples of her handywoman skills. These skills didn't include plumbing, however. Plugged toilets and toilet cisterns that had ceased to work always remained part of my domain, maybe because I learned all about water-carried sewerage systems during my public health training. She watched me fixing our toilets a few times, however, and soon became as proficient as I with the toilet plunger. But not with cisterns, so they remained my specialty. I know when I'm out of my depth too, and not long ago I had to call in a professional plumber. An hour with a dentist or a psychoanalyst would probably cost less than the plumber's bill, so next time I see one of my grandchildren I think I'll suggest switching from university degree courses to an apprenticeship with a good plumber.

A Proustian moment - not

Mary and Ian Carter dropped in yesterday morning. Mary is the younger daughter of one of my father's classmates in the Adelaide medical school, and Ian graduated from the Adelaide medical school a year or two after me, spent his career working for WHO. Our conversation yesterday was about grandchildren. Perforce they lead a peripatetic life because their children's families are scattered about the world: Queensland, Western Australia, England, and Quebec, in Chelsea, just across the river from Ottawa; so each year they roam the world keeping up to date on the progress of them all. I'm glad my offspring are near and I'm spared these long haul flights, which get exponentially more exhausting as one ages. Yesterday's visit was too brief to talk about anything else other than grandchildren. I'd have enjoyed going in search of lost time with Proustian reminiscences about Adelaide, getting a different perspective from my brother's. Perhaps it's as well we didn't go there. We would probably have found, as Proust remarks towards the end of A la recherche du temps perdu, the sad answer to the question, "Where are they now?" The answer of course is "Dead. All dead." Even so, I would have welcomed a longer visit and a bit more opportunity for conversation about other matters of mutual interest besides grandchildren.