One of my few negative thoughts in pandemic isolation is mild resentment that this had to happen at this point in life. Missing a few weeks or months of “normal” life is not fun for anyone, but in one’s 70s there are fewer weeks or months to spare. It’s like someone taking a handful of your french fries. It doesn’t matter much when they’re heaped high, but a bit irritating when there are only a few left and you’re still hungry.
I’m not expecting either coronavirus or death and I’m certainly not ready to go, but the pandemic has unsurprisingly evoked thoughts of dying. No fear, just awareness of the possibility.
We all die and thank goodness! Life is like a musical phrase. It has shape and purpose. A sequence of notes is meaningless without the end of the phrase. Putting aside Philip Glass and a few Schubert and Liszt piano pieces that lurch through cadence after cadence, most musical lines taper and end in satisfying inevitability.
Death gives life meaning just as a last chord completes a symphony or the final whistle of a soccer game lends meaning to all that came before. Bear with me.
In the 1970s, when our children were young, my wife and I lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Cleveland Heights was and continues to be a progressive community. The Coventry Village neighborhood was among the most progressive, hip places in the country. Radical icons of the era, like Detroit’s John Sinclair, made Cleveland Heights a second home. Dr. Benjamin Spock lived for a time in Cleveland Heights during his tenure at Case Western Reserve University. He is credited with spoiling a generation of children with his book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. In fact, he should be credited for his humanity and prescience. One of the first exhibitions of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party was in Cleveland Heights. We still have the poster, designed by our bearded, principled friend Jesse Epstein.
Having established the community’s hip bona fides, it will come as no surprise that there was a shifted sense of child development, a particular aversion to unhealthy stress and competition. It was a gentle and thoughtful time, too often caricatured when it should be instructive.
One manifestation of this subculture was found in the youth soccer league. The policy was unambiguous: We don’t keep score! The idea was to foster a deep love for the game without the toxicity of competition. Although the team jerseys were not tie-died, the parents were. Birkenstocks were ubiquitous. It seemed as though even women without children were breastfeeding in public. From the back, the genders of parents and children were indistinguishable.
I argued, unsuccessfully, with league officials and my wife. “The game is meaningless if you don’t keep score,” I implored. I was otherwise aligned with most of the values implicit in the ’70s revolution, but not this. Unlike school, where I believe grades are damaging, scores are the point of sport.
The point of soccer — the point of most games — is to score. The point is to score more often than the other team scores. It is the structure of the game. All of the important experiences of team sports are animated by this structure. The excitement, the beauty of a perfect set piece, the drama as the clock runs down, the disappointment of a botched save, the elegance of a series of one-touch passes — all of these things are what makes the beautiful game beautiful. When the score is tied with only a few minutes remaining, all parts of the game become more vivid, more memorable, more thrilling and more disappointing. When there is no score, these experiences are muted or absent.
Of course adults must contextualize the competition. All kids should get playing time. “Win at all costs” can be saved for the Premier League. Yes, everyone can get a trophy for giving a good effort. But winning and losing are the whole idea. Otherwise, kids can just kick a ball around a field of daisies for a while and then have some baba ghanoush and a cup of kombucha.
The best athletes, at every level, find inspiration in both victory and defeat. I’ve never met a serious athlete who didn’t vicariously enjoy someone else’s win, another person’s last-minute goal and the heightened senses aroused in these moments.
The kids, as you might imagine, kept score themselves; not to lord it over the other team, but to impose the structure that made the game interesting to them. They thought we adults were stupid.
The analogy may not convince you, but it is also the structure of life, including the final whistle, that animates the things that make it worthwhile.
Without death, the phases and phrases of life have little meaning. There would be no urgency, no fire, no resignation, no culmination, no anticipation, no reconciliation — no music. It would be like endless cake without eating your spinach or endless spinach without getting cake. It would be like Christmas every day — never looking forward to it and never feeling the letdown the day after. It would be like winter without dreamy thoughts of spring. It would be like eternal fall with nothing following the piercing November winds. It would be like summer all year, as dreadful a living condition as I can imagine.
There is nothing to live for without death.
This disease is a global tragedy, but it must remind us to experience life all the more richly while we have it.
Steve Nelson lives in Boulder, Colo., and Sharon. He can be reached at stevehutnelson@gmail.com.