Living & Dying Tidy

Brittany Maynard's brain tumor was the size of two fists, a large chaotic cloud disturbing her otherwise beautifully symmetrical brain.  Her doctors were surprised the twenty-nine year old functioned so well for so long.

I read about Brittany in the October 27th issue of People magazine, intrigued by her decision to end her own life rather than ride out the cancer storm for the next few months which meant more expense, pain, and the inevitable loss of her mind.  "My [cancer] is going to kill me, and it's a terrible, terrible way to die," she told People.

Brittany wanted to die on her own terms, so she, her husband and family moved to Portland, Oregon which has a right-to-die law.   Her plan was to dissolve 100 capsules of the sedative secobarbital in water and, surrounded by loved ones, slip into a permanent sleep.  The proposed date was November 1st.

I watched the calendar after reading the story.  Her life had been magical.  She was smart, accomplished, beautiful, happily married, well-traveled.  Now her days were numbered, and she knew the count.  We all did.

On November 1st, as planned, Brittany passed away.  Although her death was an assisted suicide, the official cause of death was listed as a brain tumor.  She'd written in her final Facebook post:  "Goodbye to all my dear friends and family that I love.  Today is the day I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face of my terminal illness, this terrible brain cancer that has taken so much from me...but would have taken so much more."

Three days later a top Vatican official condemned her decision to die, calling assisted suicide "an absurdity".

Was it?  Was it ridiculous, foolish, incongruous or unreasonable?  Did Brittany's action manifest the view that there is no order or value in human life or in the universe?

A friend just lost his young wife to the same type of brain cancer, a glioblastoma.  The prognosis is most often 99% grim.  The young wife lived one year then died in hospice.  Her children watched her suffer.  I juxtapose the two cases, Brittany and the other young wife, and I can't tell you what I would have chosen, but I can say that I'd like to have a choice either way.

Hopefully I will never have to consider suicide or palliative care, but chances are the subject will come up.  Dying will most definitely come up.  So the question is, what now?  How do I want to live?  What's more frightening to me than dying is dying unprepared, dying with a life in limbo.  There are not only things I haven't accomplished yet, but things in the way.  My life is cluttered.  This must be how purgatory feels, to be neither living nor dying.  I'm stuck.

I've been reading and thinking about purging my house for the past six months.  I've gotten rid of a few bags of clothes and toys so far, but now I'm getting more serious.  I've noticed that when my house is tidy, so is my mind.  Both worlds, which may be mirrors it turns out, are more peaceful, clear, balanced.  Once fully purged of the things that are no longer useful, things that no longer bring us joy, there's a sense of ineffable freedom and lightness of being.  We lose those final ten pounds or complete unfinished projects.  We quit the dead-end job or loveless marriage.  We move again, finally able to see the wide open spaces beyond the choke hold of clutter.

In the end, if we're lucky, all that remains are treasures.  We're surrounded only by the things we need or love.

I've been surrounded by clutter for more than three decades.  There are clothes that don't fit, irrelevant stacks of papers, books I'll never read, broken Christmas ornaments and stray pieces of junk rattling in forgotten drawers.  There are drawers filled with makeup items that seem to have duplicated themselves over the years.  I keep replacing what I already have, stacking taller and taller mountains around my life.  I no longer know what I have, need or want.

My soul can't breathe.

Brittany gave away her possessions just before she died.  When she moved to Portland, I'm sure she purged thoroughly with the help of friends and family.  There were boxes to keep, to donate, to throw away.  There's a picture of her sparsely furnished bedroom in People.  In the photo is a four-poster bed, two matching nightstands and lamps, photographs of Brittany's husband and family.  The flooring is a light honey-colored hardwood.  The white window blinds are drawn up, completely open.  The bedspread is white, walls sand, ceiling fan a buttery cream.  The room is flooded with golden sunlight.

This is where Brittany died.  In this clean room full of light and loved ones.  She did not die in a hospital bed beneath harsh fluorescence.  She did not die with plastic tubes snaking in and around her head and body, with needles in her arms or neck.  She did not die surrounded by strangers, mechanical beeps, ventilators, the smell of plastic and Clorox.

She died at home, surrounded by love. 

Your Number, Not Mine

Tomorrow is my birthday.  I'll be fifty, 5-0.  Freaking fifty.  Tonight I say goodbye to forty-nine, thirty-nine, twenty-nine, nineteen, nine, and nine minutes.

Who was I at nine minutes old?  Who am I now?

Being fifty won't change much about my life, but the age reminds me of words like Ma'am and Loss Of Bladder Control.  The sound of fifty is not a beautiful sound, not the sound of twenty, thirty or even a spunky spike-haired forty.  Fifty is a Fifty & Older online dating site, routine colonoscopies, the pendulous and wrinkled reality of gravity.  Even when a person looks, feels or acts younger than their fifty years, they're still fifty.  The number is what it is, not so young.

How did this happen?  Just yesterday I was twenty-six, I swear.

Fifty years is half a century.  I'm a rotary phone years old, Romper Room years old, smoking as many cigarettes as you want in the doctor's office years old.

In a perfect world, we'd all make it to one hundred in good health.  We wouldn't look visibly older until thirty seconds before death.  Our sex organs would still function optimally, our minds would fire in our nineties as they did in our twenties.  Passing through life wouldn't mean passing beyond our best years.

But let's be honest.  We do pass our best years, our "best" meaning the ability to walk without assistance, remember what day it is, recognize our own faces in the mirror.  Some day I will miss my best days, and I know that turning fifty means getting perilously close to that day.

So I'll enter the The Not-So-Young Zone tomorrow.  Maybe I'll forget to feel old.  I certainly hope so.  Why do we measure years instead of moments?  Why all those dumb candles?

Why not count Kodak moments instead of years?  Kisses, laughs, memories?  What's a year?  It's 365 days, many of them not very special.  A birthday is an obligatory same-as-always day.  What's the point of remembering how "old" we are?

I'd rather remember how many times my mother rocked me to sleep, how many dogs I've had, or boyfriends (Freudian slip).  I'd rather remember best sunsets, best kisses, best cheeseburgers.  Why not count the varied ways others have made us feel special, without the added weight of feeling older?   Why not count what really counts?  

So how many moments am I?  How many smiles?  Giggles?  Hugs?  Loves?

Tomorrow will be a struggle, because I don't want to think of myself in terms of years.  I'm four great kids and some new tires; a bamboo box full of pure essential oils I'm learning to use, and a new iPhone 6 Plus.  I'm the Iced Cookie wax melts I can smell downstairs, a pair of orange sandals made by a company that donates profits to AIDS research.  I am and always will be green eyes, too much sugar, not enough vegetables.  I'm silver, not gold, and a mid-morning person, a fan of dark chocolate, too many books and not enough time to read them all.

I'm now, not tomorrow or yesterday, this morning or an hour from now, but right now.  Now can't be measured, counted, numbered.  You'll never find it on a calendar, in history books or the 6 O'clock News.  Blink and you'll miss it. 

I'm anything but fifty.  What the hell is fifty?  It's two digits, a long tick in time, a random number that belongs to somebody else.

Beware Of Sea Zombies

Fog can be amazing.  If you didn't know any better, nothing else exists beyond the dense white cloud surrounding your immediate environment.  Of course you know your world is out there, the usual streets and stop signs, the corner Shell station and the Starbucks two blocks away.  You generally know where the landmarks are, so you navigate by memory and fairly solid faith.

But if you're in a strange place and trying to navigate in fog, it's not so easy.  It's like crossing the Mexican border after dark and not speaking Spanish.  If you've ever visited Nuevo Laredo at night, and know zero Spanish, you're in trouble.  Life moves with lightening speed, traffic and people.  There are street lights, headlights, everywhere lights and movement, flashes of what you know to be humans and cars but you can't compute the images, or understand the street signs.  You're completely and utterly lost.

It's like a speeding carousel within a cotton thick pyrotechnical fog.

I've read that when a woman has PMS, she literally has "water on the brain".  It's more difficult to think.  She feels dense, foggy.  This can be terrifying and frustrating (hence the handgun).  We can't find the words we're looking for, or leap from one thought to the next, because we can't see through the mental fog.

I'm hearing that menopause feels about the same way.  Goodie.

Back in 1980 there was a horror film, The Fog.  The plot was basically that sea zombies, the vengeful ghosts of mariners who were killed in a shipwreck 100 years earlier, traveled within a supernaturally glowing fog that rolled across a Californian coastal town and killed the living.   They ship's crew had perished because they'd followed a false beacon, a fire lit by conspirators, which caused the ship to crash into rocks.

Residents of the small coastal town knew the zombies were coming when machinery began turning on by itself, or payphones rang simultaneously, and then they would see the glowing fog, moving eerily over hills and streets, until finally closing in on a home or place of work.  But they were in acute trouble once the creepy white fog rolled beneath their doors.  That meant "adios".

It was an okay movie, but a little stupid, like when the driftwood sends messages to the buxom Adrienne Barbeau then bursts into flames.  But looking back, I see that the horror aspect of the movie was fueled by fears similar to fog-camouflaged sea zombies.  These fears are about anything believed to be dangerous that we can't see clearly, can't understand.  We deeply fear the monsters under the bed, in the closet, around the dark street corner.  It's anything we can't control or make sense of, spray dead with a can of Raid.

Fog can be old age, dementia, disability.  It's anything that slows or shuts us down, blinds us, holds us back or cuts us off forever.  Little deaths are still deaths.

Woody Allen's psychiatrist once told his little brother, an agoraphobic radiologist I used to work with, that all fears are related to the fear of death.  Death is the big grandaddy fear, the ultimate ending.  Beyond death is essentially a blind spot.  All we know for sure is that death means inevitable loss, darkness, physical and emotional pain.  And we want none of that.

If your Uncle Niles from Bardstown, Kentucky wrote back from the afterlife to gripe about the food, weather or sleeping arrangements, we'd feel better about dying.  Anything like normal, like life as we know it, even a less than ideal version of it, is comforting.  It's what we know.  But as things are, we can't see what's on the other side of this life.  We know something happens, that energy cannot be created or destroyed.  We become one thing or another, maybe scattered, or we go back to square one and start over again as an amoeba or paramecium.  We just can't know, not with sufficient incontrovertible detail.  And for our own sanity, we have to navigate this not knowing, rein in this fear with some kind of explanation or story to tell ourselves, because we're gonna think about death, and we need to know how to think about it.

So for now, just move slowly through the fog of not knowing, and try to avoid violent collisions with immovable solids.   Go ahead and trust that your familiar world is out there, or some not too disorienting version of it.  And do your best to remember where the curbs are, the ditches, guardrails, cliffs and rocks -- especially the rocks.  Don't be deceived by false beacons (and um, good luck with that one).

The other option is not to risk wondering or wandering through the fog.  Just stay home, binge on '80s movies or shop endlessly on Amazon, and pretend you don't see the glowing supernatural cloud.  Just ignore your television turning on and off by itself.  What's that annoying ringtone?  You'd better answer your phone.

Hands

I remember my mother's hands, the olive skin moisturized with Vaseline Intensive Care, her long piano fingers, the nicotine stains on her right index finger.  The veins were large and spongy, swollen green anatomy snaking along the backs of the hands that caressed me, held me when I was afraid, held me when I was hurt, held me for no reason.

The veins were large, as if trying to escape, or maybe her skin was just very thin.  Way too thin.

Her nails were always painted.  I never saw them otherwise, or any color but a light honey frost to match her full lips.  Maybe she kept her nails painted because they had yellowed.  She smoked all her life, from age sixteen to forty-four.  Her autopsy report would state that her lungs showed signs of early emphysema.  Already, at age forty-four. 

Her hands were shaking the night she came home after a three day absence.  I'd been praying in our yellow bathroom, picking out shapes in the peeling paint.  I promised God that I would never ask for anything else as long as I lived if he would just bring her home.

Moments later our heavy front door swung open, hitting the wall hard.  She lurched forward, her blouse half-buttoned.  She stumbled into the kitchen.  I tiptoed behind her, trying to avoid the areas of the floor that creaked.  I found her swaying at the kitchen counter, holding a lit match to the nozzle of a Dristan bottle to make its opening larger.  Her hands were shaking, causing the yellow light of the match to tremble.

Those three days she'd been sitting in a grassy field, she told us later.  She wasn't sure how long she was there, but remembered trying to decide whether and how to kill herself.

Her hands fed and dressed three children.  Her hands kept a clean house.  Her hands shook a tambourine at an old Baptist church, underlined what mattered to her most in the books she read.  Her hands played an upright piano we kept in the dining room, wrote poetry and songs about God, heaven and hell.  Her hands lit cigarettes, opened beer cans, pill bottles.  Several times these thin-skinned hands were cupped full of pills, pills swallowed all at once.

I remember her hands softly scratching my arm, a comfort we both loved.  We took turns caressing the arm of the other, lightly raking the skin's surface with thin trimmed nails.  I'd snuggle up close wherever she was sitting, our legs drawn up beneath us, then one of us would take the arm of the other and begin the ritual.

Are There Tuesdays In Heaven?

I never had to physically view the bodies, but I've imagined the death scenes many times, my mother slumped forward in a recliner, my brother in pieces on an Arizona highway.

I faced their autopsy reports. The medical examiner got the color of my mother's eyes wrong. They were green, not brown, but by the time her body was found, and because of all the retching, blood had obscured the true color.

My brother's body was no longer recognizable. There were extruded brain fragments on his t-shirt, almost every bone broken, his once handsome face and muscular body distorted. The human I grew up in the same house with, played cowboys and Indians with, listened to the Beatles' Blue Album with, was reduced to lifeless pulp.

Just like that. We fall off the planet.

It was these autopsy reports in particular that brought my agnosticism into sharp relief. Nothing could be further from the "Jesus Saves" and "God Listens" bumper stickers than the very real and grisly images of my loved ones in death. It was how they died, and when they died, and why they died. Not death itself. Death is part of life, but not torture, murder, or the irony of someone chronically suicidal finally succeeding by accidentally choking on a ham sandwich. God can't possibly be that ironic. Paradoxical, maybe, but not ironic. That's just cruel.

Any confusion about life after death can be summed up in this burning question: Are there Tuesdays in Heaven? I'll come back to this later.

For a instant this morning, everything made sense. I had an epiphany after glancing at a book on my kitchen counter, Hyperbole And A Half. It's a creation of part web comic, part blog, by Allie Brosh. The comic is drawn in Paintbrush and is described as "intentionally artistically crude." It's about everything from intellectually disabled dogs to debilitating depression. The colorful pages are inspiring, and the humor, even when it addresses all that isn't funny, makes one take life less seriously. I mean, what else is humor for?

So I decided right then and there in the kitchen that creation is an infinite explosion of colorful confetti.  All this, our lives and what we've put into the world, is an amazing gorgeous blast of paper bits -- every flower, poem, song, star, laugh. We argue over where the confetti originally came from, when it came into being. We war when we can't agree on the answers.

It's everybody's confetti, but that's just not enough for some. And confetti alone doesn't satisfy. We have to paste and glue it, dye it, drown it, own it. We turn it into money, churches, walls and dungeons. That's just how we roll.

We've ruined everything. But that explains a lot.

Jesus saves. Saves us from what? Certainly not ham sandwiches, monstrous murderers and heavy vans that kill best friends (a death I left out). What's that I hear way in the back row? Hell? He saves us from hell? No, I'm afraid not. He might hold your hand, apologize profusely, but there are no surefire hell preventions. The best Christians I know have frequent flyer passes to hell. All they have to do is close their eyes, and there they are.

God listens. Hear that? Hear the warmth of being heard? That's all the warmth you're gonna get, because after God listens you're on your own to deal. He never promised bad things would never happen, that you'd never get cancer, that you'd live a long happy life and end up with a condo next to his.

Here's the hardest thing to face, which I've almost mastered: It's not meant to make sense. Sometimes it seems to, in a wonderful My Little Pony for Christmas kind of way, but other times it's just ugly black confetti everywhere. And it doesn't always clean up well.

Are there Tuesdays in Heaven? No, love. There aren't. There aren't Mondays, Mays, Groundhog Days or s'mores. But here, in a wondrous world that won't last forever, there's confetti, lots and lots of it.  Life is intentionally, artistically crude, which is usually a pretty good thing.

Try and celebrate it.

Rapers & Rape Guards

Whatever his name is, he's still out there, raping 1 in 4 women living in Sweden.  It's 1 in 5 in the US.  And get this, about 35% of women raped as minors will be raped again as adults.  So yeah, you can get struck by lightening and raped twice, more often in Democratic Republic of Congo.

Why are rapers called rapists?  Rapist sounds like specialist, gynecologist, psychologist, psychiatrist.  Raper is nothing special, but you'll need at least one specialist when Raper gets through with you.

I recently read an article in the New York Times about rape kits sitting for years on shelves, untested.  Law enforcement's excuse was that the testing was just too expensive (meanwhile, they're polishing their new shiny semiautomatic weapons).  I bet they wouldn't say that if more men were raped.

Men do get raped (1 in 71), which isn't far from their breast cancer odds (1 in 100).

Women are also more likely to be raped (1 in 6) than get breast cancer (1 in 8).

My own rape kit, which is an assortment of hairs and body fluids collected in the emergency room, sits on a shelf in Houston, Texas.  It's covered with thirty years of dust, never tested.  Raper is 30 years older than he was the morning he broke into my apartment.  If the fact that he raped someone else one week before me is any indication of his usual frequency, I don't want to do the math to determine how many more victims he assaulted these past 30 years.  Even if he were caught, only 3% of Rapers ever see the inside of a jail cell.

Quail Walk Apartments let me out of my lease after the rape.  It was simple.  I walked into the leasing office the next day, sat in a chair across from Lisa-the-apartment-lady and said, "I can't live here anymore.  I was raped."  That last word got tangled in my mouth for a minute, just like it did when I called the police the morning before.

"I'm afraid," I'd told Lisa-the-apartment-lady, but I stopped there.  The rest of it was too weird, that I was afraid Raper could still get into my apartment through the tiny air vents, that no matter how many times I checked the door and window locks, I feared Raper could unlock them somehow, perhaps with telekinesis.  The apartment just wasn't safe anymore, especially since many Rapers return to the scene.  Plus, everywhere was a memory, the kitchen where he searched for a knife, the bedroom where I fought him, the floor where he bound my hands and mouth with electrical tape, the bathroom where the rape occurred, or the end of it anyway.  Worst of all was the living room I crossed to unlock the front door when my boyfriend, a policeman, called to say he was on his way.

The boyfriend was late.  He had another girlfriend, I would later find out.  He gave Raper his opportunity, he and I, the ditz who unlocked the door. 

Raper raped another girl down the street, in a local park beside a recreation center.  There were no Rape Guards on duty.  They should have been stationed as frequently as fire hydrants and flagpoles, churches and Starbucks. 

A Rape Guard should have been alerted had the girl pressed a little button implanted somewhere on her body, a place Raper would never find it, perhaps under her right clavicle or beneath her bellybutton.  Maybe hers was a dental implant, a lever she could flip with her tongue and bite down.  Silently, the nearest Rape Guard would have been notified, could locate this latest victim by the signal of her rape prevention implant (RPI). 

But Rape Guards didn't exist back in 1984.  Oh yeah, they don't exist now either.  One can't even Google "rape guard" and see it appear as one word, like "lifeguard."  There's a RakeGuard.com website which is, ironically, a poker tournament site.

She hugged her Raper, that other girl.  She hugged Raper, maybe to save her life or miraculously, out of compassion and empathy.  I remember being shocked by this.  She mentioned it nonchalantly as she and I sat with a sketch artist working with the police.  We were there to describe the 5'9" white male with frizzy blondish hair.  He had a tan.  He smelled almost sweet, like exertion sweat, not nervous sweat.  He wasn't nervous at all.  Just determined. 

He's still out there, probably forever, but let's at least get his name right.  Raper makes rape sound more common, more everywhere, like a bad rash, like it is.  Raper sounds more like dangers waiting to pounce, like they are.  It sounds like both acting alone or in a group, one big party or a genocidal war game -- Let the rapes begin...  It's bride kidnappings, honor killings, bride burnings, acid attacks, female genital mutilation, human trafficking, ritual servitude (sex slaves).  It's all rape.

Raper is what we call him now, like driver or baker, shooter or taker; loser, hater, killer.  Raper is ancient, patient, and nowhere near retirement.  He can't tell you why he rapes, why women, especially, have it coming.  We won't forget his name, but he'll never know ours, the 1 in 4, the 1 in 5, the too many to count because not all want their names on kits collecting dust, collecting stigma and shame.  Why the shame?  There's a lot in a name.

What was the name of that other girl in the park?  Oh yeah, same as mine.  Nobody. 

Belief-O-Matic

In eighth grade my aptitude test results came with a warning:  Interest patterns too varied.

There was a little bit of this and that, and the only professions even close to my interests were: TV/Film director, teacher, social worker, nurse, writer.

Today I took a test on a website called Belief-O-Matic.  It's a place to test your religious personality and beliefs, to match you up with the perfect religion.  It's like Match.com, only it hooks you up with the right god(s). 

I scored the highest (100%) with the Unitarian Universalism religion.  If you visit their "What We Believe" website, there are a lot of "diverse beliefs" and "it depends" and "many believe it's unimportant or irrelevant."  The beliefs are all over the place, just organized confusion.  Like me. 

My lowest score was 11%, Roman Catholic, which is -- cough -- technically what I am.  Next to Roman Catholicism, also in the bottom 11%, was Orthodox Judaism.  Which means I'd more likely be a Muslim (20%), or a Scientologist (53%), than a Catholic.

I wanted my #1 religion to be Theravada Buddhism, because it sounds cool, or maybe Transcendentalism, because either Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson chose that one.  The latter didn't even make the list.  Atheism wasn't on there either.

Aside from Unitarian Universalism, my top five religions (out of the 27 listed) were:

1. Liberal Quaker (84%)
2. Secular Humanism (79%)
3. Taoism (78%)
4. New Age (66%)
5. Theravada Buddhism (61%)

So I'm essentially screwed.  I'm going to hell, or I'll be reincarnated as a leech or leper, and I'll be thoroughly confused every step away from Nirvana.  I'll never find inner peace, a savior, or ultimate enlightenment.  Screwed.

I guess the simplest way to deal with ambiguity is to break things down to their smallest parts.  What exactly am I looking for? 

1.  I need a belief system (or do I?).

2.  There are many, too many to choose from without definite guidance from a superior expert, those being Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, Ron Hubbard, etc.  But they're all dead, and God won't answer the phone.

3.  All I know for sure is that it's important to do no harm in life, to be kind, treat others as I want to be treated, tell the truth (when it does no harm)...  There's a little bit of good in almost every religion, and I think I'm enough of a grownup to choose the buffet and make the right choices.

4.  I don't really believe in life after death, in the sense that consciousness is involved.  I might be a dust mote or a water bear, stardust or ash.  Whatever it is, it won't be me, so I would only be good for goodness's sake, not to get into anyone's idea of Heaven or Happy Hunting Ground.  I think Heaven and Hell are states of mind, perhaps estates of mind, if there's any truth to cumulative Karma, which there might be in some weird cosmic butterfly effect sense.  It's just best to be good, what good means to me, which is doing no harm.

5.  I need to be an example to my children.  Can I be this good example without a religion?  Or can I call myself a Catholic to keep the peace in my family, to keep my husband from violently erupting in fear for my soul, and just quietly walk my own walk?

6.  Do I believe in a higher power?  Yes.  But this power has no name, and there is no appropriate pronoun, certainly not "he" or "it."  This power doesn't care to have a name, isn't built to care, doesn't have a language that involves "care."  Math doesn't "care."  Math just does what it does, quite well too, and Math doesn't ask for any praise.

A higher power caring would mean the power is human-like, which isn't what humans want, or is it?  We at least want better than us, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.  We want a power that isn't petty, moody, unstable, weak.  I prefer something like "The Force" in Star Wars.  There was no pronoun to grapple with, which was quite nice.  It was an equal opportunity power.  No consciousness involved.  It's like a power source, magic soul fuel, and some kick-ass levitation. 

We're asked in Catholicism to "denounce Satan."  For me, Satan is right up there with ghosts and aliens.  I guess I get stuck on the fact that God was supposed to have created everything, including Satan (formerly Lucifer).  Therefore, if humans were made in the likeness of God, so was Satan.  So Satan is God/God is Satan.  Heads/Tails.  Am I the only one who sees this?

Henry Miller once said something to the effect that the only way to peace is to accept that God and Satan are two sides of the same coin.  Just like The Force and The Dark Side.  There are two ways to go.  Why do they need names?  Be good.  Do Good.  Show good.  Follow Good.  How hard is that?  Why do we need a gazillion religions to follow?  Powers with names.  Powers with egos that need praise, names, arbitrary rules and complicated rituals? 

Keep it simple, and sane.

I apologize if I've offended anyone.  I've spent at least forty years thinking/fretting about all this, trying to sort it out, but every truth I think I've found crashes eventually, splits on impact, like mercury.  There's no solid, no constant like Pi.  Except maybe Love, beautiful crazy Love.  It isn't particularly constant either, but that doesn't seem to matter, does it. 

May The Force be with us all (and no, there's no need to capitalize it)....  In fact, The Force could be represented by a symbol only, something like the-artist-formerly-known-as-Prince uses.  Then again, we'd probably argue over what that symbol would be.

May the <\+/>  be with you.