“Healthy Denial” by William Klein

When I was first living in LA, I worked as a home healthcare aid. I remember sitting in the kitchen of a luxury apartment mid-city when the client called me into the living room to have “a talk.” He asked me, “Why do you do what you do?” 

I gave him my reason at the time. “If you’re going to be doing something it should be meaningful to you. That’s accomplished through helping others and being of service or leaving the world a better place in some way.”

“You’re a Christian, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

He was curious, but his statement in response to my answer was interesting. “Well, I guess denial serves a purpose.” A noted surgeon, he was Jewish but considered himself “an atheist.” He added, “We all use denial in some way to get along in life.”

I took the slam of ignorance and became very quiet. The Greeks said, “A life unexamined isn’t worth living, I guess.” He seemed to think that the act of believing was relinquishing the act of thinking.

“Many intelligent people are believers,” I said. 

He stood by the company line. “Denial.”

“I’m not one to take things lightly in this life. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the psychology of others it’s that there is a need to answer fundamental questions; “Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get here? Where am I going?”

“Why?” He was amused and these questions piqued his interest more. It was as if I was playing right into his game. “I guess we find adequate ways for answering those questions, but they don’t mean much. You miss a lot of life spinning your wheels?”
“Well, I’ve discovered some very real answers that serve me well. They may not serve me in the future, but they’re adequate for now. Even absurdists have to reconcile with some of those answers at some point in their lives?”

“Why? All roads lead to denial.”

“Well, what’s the point of walking the road then?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

In the back of my mind, I was considering in training how we are to keep someone elderly comfortable and not agitate. He seemed to feel better talking about it, though, and I asked him at one point if he was bothered by our conversation. Not at all. It’s good to keep the mind moving. “Is this useful denial?” Was a stark form of realism rearing its face? “I’ve learned that most roads in this line of questioning lead to the question “why do we have to suffer?” Any religion worth its weight has something to offer about that.

He was skeptical, but pressed further. “What have you discovered?”

“That life is suffering. We have to reconcile with it in some way and that quest for meaning may help to alleviate it or offer something that can help us move beyond it.”

“Mental gymnastics,” he replied.

“The fact that we can recover from an episode of distress points to hope. Why are we built with an inherent need for hope?”

“Because that’s what stimuli do. They fight to survive,” he replied.

“But great spiritual figures like Jesus and The Buddha accepted their fate. Jesus on the cross and the Buddha when he ate bad mushrooms, knowing he was going to die. Why didn’t they fight and, instead, accept passivity as the last expression of their lives?”

“Because they were done with this life,” he replied.

“Maybe. Or they knew there was a possibility for something more.”

“I guess we’ll never know,” he said reflectively. “I like you, Bill.”

 “I like you, too. I’m sorry you’re suffering. I wish there was more I could do for you.” I can still remember the good doctor sitting in his chair nodding and sitting in silence. I would’ve loved to have known what was running through his mind at that moment.

I believe the last thing I said summed up the conversation, as he was satisfied with my answer and offered me a piece of chocolate. “I guess there’s comfort in the idea that we are not alone.” Wherever we are and whatever trouble we are reconciling with, there’s someone else in it as well.” As I remember it, the conversation turned to his memories of growing up and his life in LA.

I  could’ve told him more. Sometimes I believe and sometimes I don’t. I’d like to believe that something more was there with the good doctor when he was using his steady hand to operate and the confidence in himself as he helped in the healing process. I’d like to think there’s something more when I’m up against it in the world and something turns it all around and grace sits and rests in my lap.

That conversation stayed with me. When the good doctor passed, I called his wife. I always had a funny feeling that as the help, I had to know my place with her. There was a reason why they requested me to keep going back, though. “You were good for him,” she said. It was the greatest compliment she could’ve paid me. The misses and I never had that same conversation, but my inclination is that the doctor had a conversation with her about it. She told me, “One day we’ll be together again. I need to believe that,” she said quietly.

“I think love is pretty tough to conquer. It’s the one thing that I believe can endure beyond this world. Historical literature has pointed to that.”

“I’m with you on that,” she said.

I wonder if “love is a form of healthy denial?” If it is, “I guess, there’s healthy denial.”