On November 1, 2016, I underwent surprise open-heart surgery: a quintuple bypass. I did not know I needed it until an angiogram a few days earlier confirmed my suspicion that something was going on with my old ticker. I just wasn’t feeling right, and thought I’d better get myself checked out. That decision saved my life. It turns out that five arteries to my heart were blocked—one of them at 98 percent.
This life we are living, this life through which you are I are walking hand-in-hand, will not go on forever. Not in its present form. Our existence is eternal, but our lives in any particular form are not.
This has been brought home to me in a powerful, powerful way. There’s nothing like getting your chest sawed open, heart stopped, body put on a machine to do its blood circulating and breathing for three hours, and chest then wired shut and zipped up again, to make this message clear to you: You are not your body. Your body is something you have, not something you are. Who you are is eternal. What you have is not.
The American poet Em Claire (who I am joyously happy to say happens to be my beloved wife) captured this reality perfectly in her poem, Precious Occurrence . . .