"So Much Unfairness of Things"

In considering Frank’s battle with cancer and losing him far too soon, I’ve thought often about the classic short story So Much Unfairness of Things, in which a young man is expelled from private boarding school for cheating on a Latin test to avoid his father’s disapproval.

The title just stuck in my mind I guess – I’d read it in Mr. Teale’s 7^th grade English class. At that time love was an impractical mystery, boys were incomprehensible bundles of noise, and I was an awkward nervous girl whose bookish shyness could be mistaken for being stuck-up or so I was told. Plus I couldn’t play softball to save my life, which was the social test of acceptability in the rural town where I’d been abruptly transplanted.

Around the same age, Frank had gone through his own awkward phase. After one too many run-ins with bullies, among them a neighborhood punk and a Nazi phys. ed. teacher, one summer he built his own Nautilus-style gym equipment and put it to good use. Come September he established his primacy by climbing the school rope hands-only to the ceiling, then settled the score with the punk. How he relished repeating that bit of triumph and self-mastery!

By the time we met, we were grown-up people with our own lives, careers and interests. He was 30 and single, I was 38 and divorced. I vividly remember the first time we met – it might sound corny but there was this little bell going ding-ding-ding somewhere in my head and heart saying “This guy! This one! That’s what you were looking for!” (What he remembered about that meeting is that I was wearing a short black dress with red tights and black boots – thank you, Donna Karan!) It didn’t take us long to figure out that the feelings were very mutual, and for 15 years we never parted without a kiss and a “Love you – see you later.” 

I don’t know if he ever read So Much Unfairness of Things; Frank’s tastes ran more to engineering, physics, and experimental science. But he had a sharp sense of justice and personal responsibility. Would he have felt sympathy for P.S. Wilkinson, who sought to escape judgment through a dishonorable act and ended up with a life sentence of shame?  Not sympathy perhaps, but he would have understood.

Life is inherently unfair at least from the short view, or we’d all be tall blond rich astrophysicist organic gardeners with Ferraris or something like that. It happens that good people die young, even very young, or are broke, or ignored; bad people live to healthy old age, or are misleadingly attractive, or win the Lotto. Thankfully the reverse is also true, there’s just no such thing as a level playing field and there’d be no game if all the players were exactly the same size with the same attributes and outcomes. Plus very boring.

But the trick seems to be finding ways to make life good anyway, as much as that brings up images of inspirational platitudes with no more depth than a $2 greeting card. Frank and I spent a lot of time discovering ways that worked for him and for us; sometimes fumblingly, sometimes in a stroke of intuition, sometimes from sheer perfect serendipity. 

And the only advice I could give to someone else living in the face of loss is to be willing to fumble, follow your intuition, and enjoy the gifts of serendipity that will come, because life is good after all.

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Postscript: In writing this, I had to look up C.D.B. Bryan, who wrote the short story I mentioned above. His son has a wonderful website at http://saintbryantv.blogspot.com/ with many photos, reviews and articles from the 67 boxes found in his father’s attic, including a fantastic piece about Kurt Vonnegut.

On it I found this quotation from the author:

“My praise for cancer lies in the gift it gave me: the gift of knowing I was loved.”

I find this both moving and very sad. Talk about unfair.