For Better or Worse

Seems life endlessly begins-- and ends, sings Counting Crows. In the art imitating life/life imitating art cycle, the comic strip "For Better or For Worse" ended yesterday.

I am a fan-- which, given the article in the paper announcing that the end was near, may be something of a mixed bag. FBOFW evidently had as many dislikers as likers. Something to do with its emotional content. What I liked about it was that it spoke to "real" life issues. A beloved pet died, and was mourned. Kids grew up, and went to college, or not. Parents and grandparents died, and siblings faced each other in the process. People got sick--and didn't die, but lingered in twilight states. You know: real life.

Well, almost. I mean, if anything, there wasn't enough failure. No one didn't succeed. No one was unemployed. No one used drugs or alcohol, or found themselves addicted in any way. No one compromised themselves for what seemed like good reasons at the time... or otherwise found themselves in ethically ambiguous positions. So FBOFW wasn't really all that real! Just maybe as real as the "comics" can get.

People got divorced, for instance, but then they were married to the "wrong" people in the first place, so the wheel of life turned and even those tragedies were "corrected" comically. Thus it is on the last strip, one of the main characters, Elizabeth (aka, "Lizardbreath!" I like that!), marries her high school sweetheart, Anthony, who is divorced from a caricature of a woman who has left him with their daughter to raise. (The daughter, despite being abandoned by her mother is not very bratty... See? No one really has emotional issues in the comics.) So a "wrong" is righted. And Elizabeth and Anthony immediately after exchanging vows leave the wedding/reception to visit her grandfather in the hospital, where he's been laid low by circulatory compromises (stroke, now heart), but is being dutifully looked after by his second wife, Iris, who has become a hero to his family for her devotion. Whew!

OK, but Iris' testimony closes the strip. She says: "It isn't easy, but we made a commitment... This is part of loving someone-- with all your heart-- and with all you have to give. It's a promise that should last a lifetime. It defines you as a person and describes your soul. It's a promise to be there, one for the other, no matter what happens, no matter who falls... For better or for worse, my dears... for better or for worse."

As someone who has left relationships, and been left as well, I found myself unusually touched by these words. I have known for some time that it is precisely this sort of exchange of commitments that I have been looking for in my life. The lack of this defines my emotional life at the moment. I'd made this sort of commitment earlier in my life--and then decided I couldn't keep it-- but then didn't realize its significance: its uniqueness, its specialness, its difficulty. Frankly, I wonder how many who make this commitment do take it seriously.

Recently, I had occasion to be back in touch with some old friends. Both of them reported that, since we'd last been in contact, their spouses had been diagnosed with cancers and were now "cancer survivors"-- which meant physically compromised and emotionally challenged. I've often thought of cancer as a "family" disease-- by which I mean that, when it rears its ugly head and makes its presence known, it affects more than just the one in whom it is found. Like a lot of adversities in life, one never knows, really, how one will respond until one is "in" it. My friends and their spouses have responded in the "for better or for worse" fashion-- allowing their mutuality to be shaped by these events, but not allowing their mutuality to be destroyed by them.

It is indeed difficult to "hang in there" when someone you love is facing adversity. There is a kind of horror to it, an OMG, I didn't know this was going to happen! And there is a kind of "surrender" that is required, in order willingly to let the adverse events in another's life effect one's own. A lot of the time, instead of surrender, there is only resignation. But resignation carries with it despair, and despair breeds resentment, and pretty soon one who has resigned oneself to the situation actually emotionally abandons-in-place the one who is in need of something more, something other.

This place of surrender is difficult for most people to reach. We are much more accustomed to resignation, I think, and thus fall prey to other forms of resistance. Not too long ago, even in "media" time, John Edwards showed us all another side of himself, when his affair with a campaign aide became all too public. I didn't pay any attention to his media "outing," so I don't know how he and his family handled themselves, but I felt for them all. We had made such heroes of John and Elizabeth, and had so elevated their marriage, that it was almost sadly predictable that John's humanity would disappoint us in equal proportion. They had lost a child tragically; then came Elizabeth's cancer; now John's infidelity. Their life experiences are so far from mine, I cannot imagine what "for better or for worse" means to them. Yet, you know, I hope at the end of the day, they are able to be content with the commitment they have made to each other-- as Iris said, "no matter who falls...". I thought when John persisted in his Presidential ambitions that he was trying to overcome his resignation to his life circumstances, instead of surrendering to his commitment to Elizabeth and her life-threatening cancer. But then, maybe his undoing himself publicly was one way to re-do himself privately. Maybe he has moved now, from resignation to surrender. I hope so. And I hope Elizabeth has, too.

There is another side of "for better or for worse" that we don't often think about, and that is: how "for better" can be just as challenging for relationships as "for worse!" But that may be the stuff of another blog.

This one ends in this way: There is more to Life than one can find in the "funny papers," but it is nice when one finds enough of Life there, framed in a comic way, to allow us to laugh, when we may feel like crying. I will miss the lift that laughing to FBOFW gave me. This is for me not the end of the world that the cessation of Calvin and Hobbes was, but it is a loss nonetheless. Where else am I to turn for Canadian wisdom about what Life is really all about, anyway?

Blessings to you all-- for better or for worse!