The following is
Essay #5, Goodbye To All That, of Dr. Ring's new book,
Waiting to Die: A Near-Death Researcher's
(Mostly Humorous) Reflections on His Own
Endgame.
What is the bane
of an old man's life? That's obvious.
Naturally, it is the body. But what is the
bane of an old professor's life? (No fair
peeking ahead!)
Give up? I will
tell you.
It's his
archive. Oy, what troubles it has caused me
during this time of waiting for the end to
come. Rumor has it that I will perish, but
meanwhile I have been consumed with the
effort to make sure that my archive survives
my death. It's paper immortality I am going
for.
Let's start at
the beginning. What is an archive? In my
case, it's all the professional crap I had
accumulated during my forty or so years as a
professor and author that I had felt worth
preserving in hopes that one day an
enterprising biographer would find his or
her delight in trawling through it. (If
there are any takers out there, get in
touch. I'm taking applications.) The
contents of my particular archive consist
mainly of records of my research, interview
tapes with near-death experiencers, reprints
of articles I've written, original copies of
some of
my books on NDEs, lecture and
workshop notes, files of all the
professional presentations I've given,
professional correspondence, and tons of
letters I've received from people of all
sorts, mostly describing various kinds of
unusual experiences they have had. In short,
the paper trail of my life as a professor,
researcher and author in 55 boxes, give or
take a few.
But the story of
how I came to accumulate those 55 boxes is
the sorry saga I must now relate.
When I was ready
to retire from the
University of Connecticut
toward the end of 1996, prior to my return
to California, I had to jettison a lot of my
professional holdings. At the university, I
had three offices at my disposal and lived
in a house that could also accommodate many
of my books. But I was now going to be
moving into a small house. So I had a fire
sale, so to speak. I gave away most of my
professional books and I trashed a lot of
materials I was glad to dispose of. But I
still had a considerable amount of
professional items I wanted to save.
What to do? I
simply didn't have room for all of it, but
my problem was saved by an angel.
His name was
Terry (not his real name) and he was a
medical doctor interested in NDEs, a
colleague of mine, but hardly a friend, who
happened to be there at the time I was
stewing about what to do with all my stuff.
"Ken," he said,
"I'd be happy to help." Terry told me simply
to box up all the materials I didn't have
room for but wanted to preserve. He offered
to have them all shipped at his expense to
his home in Tacoma where he'd be happy to
store them in a temporary archive for
however long was necessary. What a mensch! I
couldn't believe my good fortune and Terry's
willing to spend one of his own in order to
become the custodian of these professional
effects. We'll come back to Terry later.
Over the course
of the next ten years or so, I added to my
archive in California, and by then I had
accumulated enough material to fill 30
Bankers Boxes, which I kept secure in my
storage room. And there they sat -- until I
began to fret about what to do with them and
all the boxes Terry (now in Louisiana) still
had. Realizing that it was probable I would
not live forever (at least not here), I knew
I had to find an ultimate resting place for
the entirely of my archive. But who would
handle all this for me and where would it
go?
You know how
sometimes "the universe" works in mysterious
ways to answer your unspoken prayers? Well,
sure enough, another angel was soon to
appear in my life who would solve
everything.
Last year, I was
contacted by a very distinguished
psychiatrist I'll call Heinz with whom I had
had cordial relations for many years. He
told me that he was planning to create an
archive for some of the pioneers in our
field, and was inviting me to become a part
of it. Of course, I was both honored and
thrilled. This would certainly solve my
problem. Heinz told me that a fellow named
David was handling all the details and would
be in touch soon to take charge of my
archive.
When David
showed up a few days later, he turned out to
be a tall well-built fellow, seemingly in
his late 30s (but actually much older than
he appeared). He was extremely affable and I
immediately took a shine to him, especially
when he told me that Heinz had a large
dedicated storage facility where my entire
archive -- along with the archives of others
in my field -- could be stored in
perpetuity. And at no expense to me. Wow! I
couldn't believe my luck. And more -- David
turned out to be some kind of computer
genius and told me he had invented a
digitizing procedure which would enable him
to easily digitize large portions of my
archive. Double wow.
He told me he
would be happy to handle everything. He
would first take all of my boxes and bring
them to Heinz's house for an initial
inventory after which they would be moved to
Heinz's facility. Several days later, David
showed up with a truck, and loaded all my
boxes onto it, and off they went to Heinz's
basement.
Meanwhile, I
made contact with Terry, who had wound up
taking care of that portion of my archive
for twenty-two years, and told him to repack
everything and have it all shipped out to
David at Heinz's house. About a month later,
it had all arrived. Set me back 2000 bucks,
but it was worth it to have my entire
archive reassembled in one place. David
assured me that all was well.
But it wasn't.
It couldn't have been worse.
What had
happened? It turned out that for some time
David had felt that Heinz had not followed
through on various promises he had made
regarding payment for his many services. And
there were other contentious issues that
flared up when Heinz returned from his
travels abroad. These quickly escalated and
all of a sudden -- an explosion. In a fury,
David was booted out of the Heinz's house
and threatened with arrest if he returned.
David, without resources or friends, was
forced for a time to sleep in his car, and
finally left the area altogether.
And left me
holding the bag. I now had a big mess on my
hands. La maladizione -- the curse of the
archive! It was all too good to be true.
Alas, and well-a-day. Is it any surprise
that not long after this fiasco, I came down
with the flu and was sidelined for nearly
two months?
Anyway, when I
finally recovered, I had to get up to
Heinz's house to inspect the damage, so to
speak, and figure out what to do with my
archive now. Trouble was, Heinz's house is
located in a largely inaccessible redoubt
and it requires a veritable Sherpa to get up
there. Fortunately, I knew one who knew the
way, and not long ago, she drove me up
there.
There's another
strange thing about Heinz's house. It was
apparently designed by
Escher because in
order to get into the basement where all my
stuff had been stored, you had to take a
perilous death-defying journey down steep
stairways that seemed to end abruptly, and
then somehow there were a series of rickety
stairs that eventually led to the outside
where I was forced to surmount more
obstacles before arriving at an outside
padlocked door that led into the basement.
Now, you may
think I'm making this up, but I'm not. I was
then actually given a miners hat with a lamp
attached and told to turn it on. The door
creaked open and we entered into what seemed
to be a coal mine. It was dark, dank, damp
and eerily Dantean. I'm an old guy with bad
balance and very poor eyesight. I could
scarcely see anything, but imagined all
manner of rodents must be loitering about,
to say nothing of spiders and probably the
odd snake. (All right, I'm engaging in a bit
of hyperbole here, but it was indeed a
spooky place.) I could finally see that my
Bankers Boxes had been neatly stacked by
David, but all of Terry's were sealed and
only dimly visible. Obviously, there was no
way that I could open them there to inspect
their contents, which I hadn't seen in
twenty-two years.
But I was told
by Heinz's secretary (Heinz himself was out
of the country again) that I had to get all
it all out of there. Heinz could no longer
be responsible for it, and it turned out
(gasp!) that he didn't have the storage
facility I had been promised in good faith,
I'm sure, by David. Screwed!
Well, there's no
point in dragging this out. Eventually, my
Bankers Boxes were brought back to my
storage room where my girlfriend Lauren and
I had to inspect them, label them, and then
stack them again, just as they had been
before David had carted them away. Lauren,
providentially, has an abandoned art studio
on her property in Piedmont -- across the
Bay from where I live -- and she said I
could have Terry's portion of my archive
deposited there for the time being where we
could again inventory, label and stack. We
did that just last week. Actually, I did the
inventorying, but Lauren labeled everything
in her exquisite hand, and then stacked them
all since I have a bad back and am weak of
limb whereas she is strong like bull, though
fortunately she doesn't resemble one.
Oy, what a
megillah! Perhaps now you can understand why
I say that an old professor's archive can be
his bane, besides being a pain in the
tuchis, and a drain on his wallet.
In any case,
rummaging through those boxes whose contents
I hadn't seen in so long, I felt, once
again, that I was saying goodbye to all
that. A good part of my professional life
was in those files and papers, and I felt
nostalgic while sorting through them. But
just as I got to the second to last box, I
found a surprise, which thrilled me -- a
cache of about a hundred personal letters I
had saved of which I had no recollection
whatever. I quickly perused them, but
decided to wait until I returned home in
order to examine them more thoroughly to see
just whose letters I had saved.
What I found was
that the letters came from two periods --
1975/76 and 1981/82. They included a batch
of letters from my mother, one of which
described a dreadful quarrel between her and
my stepfather, and another set of letters
from my daughter, Kathryn, then 18, just
after she had left home in Connecticut to
move to Denver where she was to attend a
technical school that eventually led to her
becoming a master mechanic for Volkswagen.
There were several antic and whimsical
letters from a former student of mine turned
porn star -- the Stormy Daniels of her day
-- and some from a TV journalist named Aviva
with whom I had had some riotous adventures
in LA back in the day. I remember once
proposing to marry her because, if she
accepted, her name would have become Aviva
Diamond Ring. Alas, she declined. I was,
however, amused to find in one her letters
several good quips from
Woody Allen, one of
which I could have used as a epigraph to one
of these waiting to die essays. It went like
this: "It's impossible to experience your
own death objectively and still carry a
tune."
I especially
treasured a set of three letters from a
professor with whom I had been very close
friends when we were both teaching at the
University of Connecticut. After three
years, however, he took a position at the
University of North Carolina. However, we
saw each other again in California when I
was on sabbatical leave in
Berkeley in 1969
on which occasion something very traumatic
had happened to him. Fortunately, he's still
alive and I was able to make contact with
him. He was thrilled to learn about his
letters, and told me about the aftermath of
that incident that had freaked him out from
which he was a long time recovering. Through
e-mail we renewed our friendship and since
he has family near where I live, it's likely
that we will be able to see each other again
after all these years.
Another
important discovery involved a batch of
letters from a woman who had been a good
friend of mine when we both lived back east.
However, we had long since lost touch with
each other, even though I knew she lived in
California. We, too, have enjoyed
reconnecting through e-mail, but what was
particularly rewarding about that contact
was learning that my friend, whose name is
Ronna Kabatznick, had written an
extraordinarily compelling book about her
personal experiences while in Thailand when
the
Indian Ocean tsunami struck the day
after Christmas in 2004. Her memoir, a
beautifully crafted account of an
unimaginably horrific catastrophe, moved me
greatly and filled me with admiration for
the courage and grit my old friend
manifested in coping with that disaster. Her
book, which I highly recommend, is entitled
Who By Water: Reflections of a Tsunami
Psychologist.
There were also
some very loving and indeed passionate
letters from women who were in love with me
and in a couple of cases had even moved to
Storrs, where I lived, against my express
wishes. But the set of letters that really
affected me, as I re-read them, was from a
woman I had loved deeply against my will and
who had almost ruined my life because of the
intensity of her love for me. I had
completely forgotten about these letters of
which there were sixteen, almost all
handwritten (these were the days before
computers, of course, when people still
wrote by hand). Re-reading them the other
night I was struck by their ardor, their
longing, their anguish, their unassailable
conviction that we "were meant to be
together," and their insistence that I yield
to her and to the fate that she foresaw for
us.
Letters, too,
can function like
Proust's madeleine, and in
the case of these letters from this woman
whom I will call Suzanne (though she
actually had a name given to her by her Yoga
guru), I could not help remembering how it
was that we first met and fell in love.
Those letters of hers brought it all back to
me, especially the pain we had each suffered
because of it. I found myself drifting back
to those fraught days and spent a good hour
or more dwelling on the fever of love which
almost destroyed me.
No need to
dredge all that up here; those memories will
remain private. In any case, my involvement
with her went on for years. I eventually
left the woman I had been living with, but I
could never fully commit myself to Suzanne
either. I think now, as an old man, how my
life would have turned out had I chosen to
yield to her. I have both regret and relief
that I didn't. My love for her, however,
never ebbed. I can still feel it, especially
after re-reading her letters.
There was one
odd thing about her, however, that shows, I
think, how much she felt connected to me. I
don't remember now what her original last
name was -- it was probably a leftover from
her marriage -- but one day she told me that
she had decided to adopt a new surname. From
now on she would be called Suzanne Ken.
I laughed; I
thought she was joking. But she was serious.
And she insisted that her adopting the name
Ken had nothing to do with me. But then, why
Ken? She wouldn't say other than to aver
that it "felt right."
The other night,
after re-reading her letters, I couldn't
help wondering what had happened to her. I
decided to try Googling her, and mirabile
dictu, I found her. She's 76 now, and living
in New England. She is still known as
Suzanne Ken.
I have her
address. But I will not write to her. What
would be the point now? I have to say
goodbye to all that, too.
Archives can not
only be a bane, and although mine did lead
to some rekindling of former friendships, it
also made me acutely aware that they can be
emotionally dangerous as well. Maybe there
are good reasons to leave its contents
alone. Maybe that's still another reason for
me to get rid of the dang thing.
Anyway, my next
step to try to arrange to do just that. I'm
now beginning to look into the possibility
that some university or institute would like
to take if off my hands and house it.
Preparing to let
it go isn't really that difficult. It's just
another step in my journey of waiting to
die. It will be a big load off my mind to
offload all these boxes. Why should they
weigh me down when all I want these days is
to be able to fly?
Kenneth Ring's New Book:
Waiting to Die:
A Near-Death Researcher's (Mostly Humorous)
Reflections on His Own Endgame
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