It’s been almost five months since I was diagnosed with ALS and more than a year and a half since I began noticing my symptoms. Two years ago, neither I nor anyone observing me noticed the plodding gait that I would soon exhibit. Since then my walking, my strength and balance, have gotten steadily worse so that now I am beginning to doubt that in a month’s time I will still be able to move without a walker and soon after that a wheelchair. The descent has been steady, but recently I became aware that I’m embarking on a new and lower uneven plateau. I fumble more, though I still have a relatively firm grip and a modicum of strength in my arms. I refused to be evaluated by a neurologist. What’s the point of taking tests that you are sure to fail ever more wretchedly with each new administration? Does that offer some a sense of control? It’s better to control what goes on in your mind. I can still swallow and speak and think and remember.
Throughout much of my adolescence and adulthood I’ve found myself making perilous last-minute leaps which fortunately more often than not worked out. This was true when I made my way across Europe long ago and Russia more recently. It was true for a fair portion of my professional life. It has been true of my efforts to find the help I need as my ALS gets predictably worse. I was lucky to have Lyusya. I’m lucky now to have found Terri whom I met through our swimming circle, who lives only a couple of blocks away and has the experience of taking care of her late husband who died not long ago of Parkinson’s and dementia. I’m lucky with my family, which is thawing after its years of hostile coldness toward me. The paroxysms of psychosis, hatred, and terror change the brain’s chemistry and alter the personality. (“This is the new me,” my wife told me four years ago.) No one should expect their loved ones to remain unchanged or to return to their prior condition after such an attack. Frankly, I’m grateful for their non-verbal acts of kindness. I’m ready to make do if things don’t thaw any further. I will not choke on bitterness at the end of my life. I’m unburdened for that last leap into darkness.
“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” This is how Tolstoy’s narrator begins to recount the life of his protagonist and the world that had defined him. In the sphere of his professional life, his death triggers in his colleagues trains of thought of how the disappearance of one player could reshuffle the game of musical chairs of position and status. It’s true that, “Ivan Ilych never abused his power,” but awareness of his power configured all his relationships with the official world, with its magistrates and petitioners. An awareness of his rank informs his inner life as well. As an attractive, well-regarded young professional, he makes an agreeable though modest marriage match. In character he is not inclined to excesses of ambition or lechery. When his attractive young wife becomes pregnant and is jealously controlling, he shifts the center of his existence to his office and colleagues where he confidently rises up in the all-encompassing Russian service hierarchy. When he misses a promotion and tries to recuperate in the countryside, he suffers ennui, the nemesis of the well-ordered 19th-century bourgeois life. He is again lucky with a new promotion. But between boredom and frustration, advancement and absorption in the trivialities of his daily life, something wholly incalculable happens.
Ivan Ilych is arranging his new apartment to suit his conventional taste and to please his family. Tolstoy employs the symbolism of letting the climber fall from a ladder. At first the bruise can be ignored, but it evolves into a painful hidden wound that will torment and finally kill the thoughtless social-climbing protagonist. As his suffering slowly but surely lays claim to his mortal life, he realizes that those around him, his family, colleagues, and friends, only knew him as the bearer of certain roles and positions, and that they now only pretend to care about his suffering person. The doctors he consults give him the medical equivalent of Ivan Ilych’s own impersonal legal-professional handling.
Ivan Ilych suffers not only his worsening pain and terror; he suffers from loneliness, even or especially in the company of his family and colleagues. He suffers from knowing that the others care little and are secretly glad that it isn’t them. Society is an impersonal game in which everyone plays along but cares only for his own advantage. The departure of one means opportunities for the others. Knowing this intensifies Ivan Ilych’s suffering. Only a child or humble servant can bring any comfort to the dying man. What is most unbearable to Ivan Ilych is the pretense of the others that he is not in fact dying.
This is for me now the key to understanding this powerful narrative of human mortality. I think that I have always read it as social criticism, and it certainly is that. But the title is not “The Society of Ivan Ilych.” The crucial point is not injustice but truth, truth as the foundation of justice and humanity. Near death, it occurs to him that he has not lived as he should have. He realizes that his feeble attempts to resist what the powerful and society as a whole considered good—those impulses that he immediately suppressed, “might have been the real thing and all the rest false.” After this “awful” realization, he sees in his family and his hated doctor only himself: they are, like him, engaged in a “huge deception which had hidden both life and death.” Seeing now only himself in others, he is sorry for them and he resolves to end the unease that his suffering causes in them. With this, his unrelenting pain ceases to be inner pain: “In place of death there was light.”
Tolstoy resists any overt religious sermonizing. I think that he wanted to give an intimation of eternal life in accordance with his Christian conversion, but his honesty restrained him and he instead hewed to what the believer, the non-believer, and the author himself could wholeheartedly affirm: Ivan Ilych finds peace in the light of truth.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 