One peculiarity of ALS: you feel your body slowly dying even while your mind is unaffected, free to contemplate your whole existence even as you are soon to depart it. Since throughout life you’ve been haunted by the feeling of things needing to be done (Good heavens! how onerous that was for me as a school kid!), now that there are no future obligations to fulfill, the sense of obligation turns from the future to the entire past and asks what you should have done in life but didn’t. It’s a self-administered Judgment Day for the secular. Did I neglect the Good, the True, or the Beautiful? As a scholar, I wish I could declare that I properly elevated the True, even if I neglected the Good and the Beautiful. But that’s hardly the case: I screwed up on all counts, the one on account of the others. If I had been more devoted to the good of my fellow human beings, I would have focused more clearly on research objectives that meant something to them. If I had cultivated beauty, I would have trained myself that truth like beauty is an end in itself, not a means to any sort of promotion or recognition. I passed up a million opportunities to serve my fellow human beings or show them some small kindness.
Just now I read an old New Yorker article by Louis Menand about the two greatest baseball heroes of all time: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig (who gave his name to ALS). I didn’t know that both were heritage German speakers. Of the two, Gehrig was the more modest and selfless. Menand quotes from his goodbye speech to a stadium of his fans:
‘For the past two weeks, you’ve been reading about a bad break,’ he says. ‘Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.’ And at the end: ‘I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.’ There is nothing self-pitying in the speech, no self-denial, no defiance. He is helping other people get through his pain. This was not colorless or boring. This was a man looking at death. In an age of showmen, in the very House That Ruth Built, it was a transcendent moment of selflessness.
I never liked the idea of preferring celebrity to science in such matters, and who would want to be memorialized in such a way; but he was in any case exemplary in knowing how to take his leave with dignity. I won’t forget his example.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 