Col Chamberlin

Josuah Chamberlin

It's 2:30 AM and I contemplate lieutenant Josuah Chamberlin, a personal hero.  He was ordered  to defend little round top during the battle of Gettysburgh.  He struggled to halt General Robert Lee's attempt to  cut the Union forces in two.
" Defend your position at all costs"

  His superiors never knew he  was  out of ammunition.  He would defend against the  confederates armed only with fixed  bayonets.

 Chamblerlin stopped the Grayback   advance. He   halted the enemy attack and kept the Union whole.

  This part of the  story is  remarkable, but doesn't explain my admioration for this union  officer.  He was repeatedly wounded during the War, and  lived with a pelvis filled with  Confederate lead until the day he died at the dawn of world war I

 I have done nothing so bold, so grand, so life affrimning. After the Civil War, Chamberlin became the Governor of Maine and then the  president of Bowdoin college.  He  lived a daily existance of  constant  pain.

  Daylight is three hours off. I gulp   the same morphine derivatives Chamberlin used 150 years ago.  We share one similarity    Neother of us is terminally ill, our dangerous pasts  replaced by the  merely nettlesome present.  The pain won't kill us and the question becomes: How to remain useful,  productive, happy  in a world of discomfort?
I am thankful,   grateful.  My  situation is not unique.  Many of us struggle with pain.  Cyn's back throbs, I have friends with trigeminal neuralgia  that feels like an electronic probe  surging pain into a jaw.

 How to remain  productive in pain -cloged days? Meditation? Medication?   I stuggled to  extricate myself from the prednisone and pain medictaion,   my  once and future constant companions To be useful. Beit Shamai argues in the  old testiment  that it would have been better never to have been born. He may be right.

My dear parents, I suspect , would have been much much happier  had they been childless.   I don't doubt their love for us, but still, makes you wonder.    Mom is an intellectual, she would have been happy  teaching,  reading, thriving in a  childless life with my dad. My dad is an engineer. His slice of heaven included his slide rule,  his  engineering journals and  his graph paper.  Children are messy, random and demanding. Had we never been born, my brother and I would have been spared much grief.
So why be born, how to explain existence without becoming facile, glib or  fatalistic? In my 2 AM persopetive, I will always be in pain,   I will go through my  remaining days with a fixed expression stretched to my face,  my patients will ask why  I am crying at work.  What to tell them?
 I am here for two reasons. I feel a real obligation to  Mark Heller, my  late father in law. He would have  said we are all soldiers " Come home on your  shield or with it," he'd say.


I'm finsihing Donna tart's The Secret history

She writes

πληθὺν ταρβήσας: τὸ δὲ ῥίγιον αἴ κεν ἁλώω
μοῦνος: τοὺς δ᾽ ἄλλους Δαναοὺς ἐφόβησε Κρονίων.
ἀλλὰ τί ἤ μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός;
οἶδα γὰρ ὅττι κακοὶ μὲν ἀποίχονται πολέμοιο,
ὃς δέ κ᾽ ἀριστεύῃσι μάχῃ ἔνι τὸν δὲ μάλα χρεὼ
ἑστάμεναι κρατερῶς, ἤ τ᾽ ἔβλητ᾽ ἤ τ᾽ ἔβαλ᾽ ἄλλον.

or, in the Samuel Butler translation:

"Alas," said he to himself in his dismay, "what will become of me? It is ill if I turn and fly before these odds, but it will be worse if I am left alone and taken prisoner, for the son of Saturn has struck the rest of the Danaans with panic. But why talk to myself in this way? Well do I know that though cowards quit the field, a hero, whether he wound or be wounded, must stand firm and hold his own.”

Hard to resolve  this.  Self  destruction or , more accurately, non  existance, would be cowarly, selfish.  We are here for others. If  Chamberlin had stayed at Bowden, the South might have won the war and Michelle Obama would be a slave.

   I have an obligation to raise the family, to set an example for my kids, his grandchildren. I have patients who need me.  Despite the pain, the battle rages on.  

We are not here  to  to enjoy  great meals, see great sights,  read great books, We are here because in the endless wash of eternity, we have  sentience  for a  precious scond of time,  before the draft ends  and we return to stable state,  our eternity as a wisp of silica dust spinning in some faceless corner of the sky.   Carl Sagan  wrote  we are Star Stuff.  In this perspective, all martter waits its turn to turn sentient, every atom gets its chance  to gaze through   conscience's   telescope, observe the   universe and contemplate our role in an indifferent  heaven.  

Whats a little splash of pain in an eternity of unconsciousness?  Don't worry the dentist warns,  this will only for a moment.