For the first time in my life, as of this week I have a real life insurance policy. This isn't a knee-jerk response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This is something I should've done five years ago. Late isn't good, but it's better than never. It's part of a broader project to get my affairs in order given the general fragility of life.
Like Randy Pausch, I've also spent some time thinking about what I'd want to say to my kids in the event that I won't be there to see them grow up. Unlike Pausch, I have the luxury of not actually having any sword of Damocles hanging over my head. I might not wake up tomorrow, but I might also live another 70 years. Recognizing that the former might be the case, I went ahead and got writing. Since the odds are good that my kids might never read these words until they're in middle age, I thought perhaps they might do more good here:
My Dear Children,
Life is a strange and complex and often contradictory thing.
So often it drags on and on. In the end it’s over all too soon. Like everyone,
I wanted my life to be longer. I at least wanted to live long enough to see you
grow up, and to help you through the joys and hardships of your youth and
maidenhood. In the end none of us is master of their fate, and I’m sorry that
my help to you had to end where it did.
Of all the things in my life, nothing brought me more meaning
than being your father. I hope your memories of me are such that you know this
is true and don’t suspect me of being ironic. If your memory is faithful and
honest enough you will remember times that I was frustrated with you and didn’t
seem to take complete joy in your presence. Life is contradictory indeed. But as
thin as I stretched myself caring for you and your mother and my career
simultaneously, I always knew that you were worth every sacrifice I made. You
were my greatest love and greatest joy, in the final ultimate truth.
It’s difficult for me to describe how I felt changed after
you were born. It is as though, up to that point, I was the master and
protagonist of the narrative of my life. After September 13, 2015, you were.
First with Isaac, then with Lucy, then with Mira. Becoming a parent, if you’re
a well-adjusted, decent human being, makes you a bit of a fanatic. I became fanatical
for giving you the best life I could, even though the resources Sarah and I had
at our disposal when you were born seemed rather meager. I ran myself ragged
trying to make sure you were fed and loved and cared for in the best way I
could manage.
It would give me great pride for you to find this same joy
and meaning in your own lives, through your own children. Of course, like all
creatures, I want my DNA to pass on in the great river of life, and you are now
the vessels that carry those genes. But you are the masters of your own lives
and you must make this and all the other supremely important decisions of life
for yourselves. I would never want to make these decisions for you anyway, even
if I were still alive.
So you need to decide for yourselves whether you’ll have
children, and if you do, if you’ll do it while you’re young or if you’ll wait
until your 30s or even your 40s. Why did Sarah and I make the decision we made,
to begin with Isaac immediately after we wed? We were young and beautiful and
the idea seemed so lovely to join each other and blossom like the springtime
flowers. Your uncle (my brother) Matt died six months before our wedding. That
drove home the knowledge that nothing in our lives was certain and that
everything could be taken away in a stupid little moment. You would do well to
remember this, too. So, if we wanted to have children eventually, why not start
right away?
It was unimaginably difficult, doing what we did, raising
two children out of a one-bedroom apartment while Sarah worked through
residency and I drove back and forth between Los Feliz and Long Beach or El
Segundo every day. If we had seen how difficult and how painful it would be at
the beginning, I’m not sure that we would’ve had the mental and spiritual
strength to begin. Maybe we would’ve waited to get married or Sarah would’ve taken
an IUD. Had we done one of those things, though, Isaac and Lucy wouldn’t be
here. I have no regrets for what we did. I just don’t wish that pain and stress
on anyone else. Does that seem contradictory? Perhaps the macro-scale universe
has a sort of superposition of joy and pain the same way the micro-scale
universe has a superposition of quanta.
Diving into parenthood in our youth, consequences be damned,
yielded the most significant meaning of our lives. It also was very difficult.
You should decide for yourselves what path forward you think is best.
You know what the church teaches about contraception. Does
that seem like some kind of mind retrovirus left over from the Bronze Age?
Sarah and I followed this teaching anyway. Whatever our faults (and there are
many), neither of us is stupid or anti-feminist. If you remove the church
teaching, we probably would’ve used contraception, but add that influence and
we were happy to be fruitful and multiply. You should pay attention to the
influences you cultivate in your lives. They may trigger things you never
expected in yourself. We all learn by imitating each other until we understand,
so choose who you imitate carefully.
In any event, should you marry, and should you decide to
have children at some point, you may decide like a majority of couples even
within Catholicism to take more direct control over your own fertility. I can’t
fault you for doing so, but I encourage you to listen to what the church has to
say. Perhaps you might find something kindled in you that wants to do for your
spouse what spring does for the cherry trees (aside: When you have a moment you
should read the poetry of Pablo Neruda). I think in a way that’s what happened
for your mother and me.
I don’t recommend having children without marrying. Having
children enters you into an indissoluble bond with your kids and will rewrite
your priorities in life up and down. Fully committing yourself to, and
receiving commitment from, another responsible, lovely adult, who will share
your life in a similar way first is a good idea, to say the least.
I’m assuming in this whole discussion that you’re interested
in what the Catholic Church has to say. Sarah and I made a commitment to the
church and to raise you in it. I spent a significant portion of my life
considering myself an atheist, and even after becoming a committed Catholic my faith
was tenuous. If you need to wander in the desert of atheism or agnosticism, or
if you convert to another creed, I certainly can’t fault you from my own life
experience. As long as you have come to your present thoughtfully, humbly, and
lovingly, I encourage you to follow where the truth and the right seem to lead
you.
Neither Sarah nor I were raised in the Catholic Church. You
might be interested in how we wound up there. As of this writing the tendency in
America is for people to move away from Catholicism rather than toward it, so
perhaps this seems like water running uphill. I can’t speak to why your mother
became Catholic, but I can try to express what moved me in that direction.
People matter. If there’s nothing else that seems constant
in life to you, that should be constant like bedrock, constant like the beat of
a pulsar, constant like the speed of light in a vacuum. If you move through
life operating as though people are obstacles, objects, or obstructions, who gives
a damn what else you’ve done? If you should gain the world, and lose your soul,
what profit is it to you? I think Jesus was trying to express something like
that.
The philosophical temptation I always had in life was to see
things in a materialistic and mechanistic way. The basic assumption that science
is built on is that there exists a set of rock-steady laws that are allowed to
play out like a mathematical proof. It works remarkably well, doesn’t it? The
predictive power of this method is so compelling that I feel tempted to say
“Forget anything else. What else do you need?” There’s a story that Napoleon
asked a noted astrophysicist of his day why he didn’t speak about the will of
God in his derivations and predictions of the movement of the planets. “I have
no need of that hypothesis,” he replied simply.
Follow this idea to its conclusion, and people are basically
iterated chemical reactions. That’s a problem. People need to be more than
matter to matter. What does it concern you, how kerosene burns with compressed
air, or how fluorine etches semiconductor chips, or even how the complex
organics of synthetic drugs are manufactured? None of these actions are
ethically compelling in any way. Yet the suffering and joy of human beings is
immediately, pressingly compelling. It’s not just that humans are a
particularly complex sort of chemistry that then requires an adjunct of ethics
along with the equations of state. We’re different, in a way that a worldview
too fixated on matter and physical law alone is impotent to speak of
meaningfully.
So I was uncomfortable being an atheist and I looked for
something else. I won’t pretend that I fairly considered all the philosophies
and religions people have put forward over the history of civilization. Lump
together the most common 90% of the beliefs and creeds of current humanity and
I didn’t even look at most of that. Unless you become a scholar of philosophy,
religion, or history, you won’t either. There isn’t time in our too-short
lives.
Biased as it was, I looked at what my eyes found. I imitated
my friends and family and tried their ideas on for size. I found myself
compelled, in that limited mix, toward Catholicism. This was primarily a
non-rational compulsion at first. I found myself enjoying going to church,
something that never happened to me as a child. I found myself finding the ceremony
and magisterium at church meaningful, ditto.
Do you want to break this apart to the base psychology?
Partly I appreciated the simple sensations of Catholic Mass. I liked the aroma
of incense, the warm embrace of the sign of peace, the rising and falling on
the pews and kneelers, the heartbreakingly beautiful and feminine English and
Latin from the choir. Smells and bells, they call it. My personality is average
in many respects, but I’m at least two standard deviations from the norm when
it comes to openness to new experience. Part of me just likes to wander and
dabble. Catholicism was appealingly different to my Methodist roots, yet
familiar enough to be accessible. I wanted to immigrate, but not too far from
home.
All that made me interested in being at church, but none of
that is enough to commit to raising you, my children, in the Church and saying
the Nicene Creed at least weekly with at least some sense of directness. Think
about what the Church teaches about the life and death and resurrection of
Jesus. Think about how diametrically opposed that is to all of your actual
experience of life. The rules of the road are the same for everyone, right? No
one gets to be a miracle worker, everyone has to die pointlessly, no one gets
to live again. Then, the Gospels say, comes Jesus, and everything is turned
upside down for him. This needs to be literally true or there is no reality to
Christianity.
Since the events of the Gospels happened two millennia ago
it’s not possible to evaluate whether they really happened in the way we can
evaluate recent events. There’s no forensic evidence or other sources to look
at. Perhaps it all really happened! Indeed. Then again, with no smoking gun
that persisted and with so many other legends and myths we so readily dismiss
out of hand, isn’t it completely natural to assume it’s all just a story? Perhaps.
Those ideas troubled me as I dove into what the Church taught
about how people should treat each other and what’s right and wrong. I appreciated
that the Church was fixated on the dignity of humanity. There’s a no-nonsense
quality to it. Like, “Hang your metaphysics and your solipsism and your theory and
just fucking take care of people for a change.” That’s what Catholic social
teaching seemed like to me. I thought the Church was absolutely correct about
abortion, that it’s abhorrent, and that this was the right place to be standing
orthogonal to the march of western culture. With the philosophical structure of
the Catholic Church you can get from here to there. If you’re doing it all
yourself, how do you do that? I couldn’t figure it out. The Church already
seemed to be going in more-or-less the direction I wanted to go, and she had
been doing this for the last two thousand years. It made sense to hitchhike.
That’s not to say that there was nothing that unsettled me.
The Church teaches that homosexuality, masturbation, and sex outside of
marriage are all inherently sinful. Regarding same sex relationships,
especially, that seems backward to me. Is it so backward it reveals the whole
enterprise as something other than a truth-telling thing? If you judge me to
backward, retrograde, insufficiently woke, or just stupid and hateful for doing
this, I will understand your point of view. Speaking from the future, you’re
more likely to be on the right side of history than me. What I found was that,
where these teachings directly conflicted with what I felt compelled to do, on
balance I found myself trusting the Church enough to think it’s a truth-telling
thing anyway. When the teachings didn’t directly impact my life, I found people
who were impacted who believed the Church was the way anyway. Maybe I just
wasn’t woke enough and I was rationalizing.
I think what made the most sense, what pushed me over the
line from having something like faith outside the church to having something
like faith inside the church, was the idea that God is love. The idea
that that’s a piece of the bedrock of reality and not just a fun little slogan
got me there. God is that which is most mysterious, that thing that set the
laws of motion and fundamental constants and doesn’t just obey them, that thing
before the Big Bang and that sets the boundaries in which we can know what is
real. Take that idea, as God, and then add this. That God is also love, that
which cares for all that’s worth caring for, that stokes the beautiful fire of eros,
that works and aches only to protect and nurture, never to break down by the
rule book. I had enough experiences in my life that convinced me that the union
of those ideas of God was possible that it made sense to take the jump. Does
that seem crazy? I did what I did. You may be my judge, and by default, I’ll
accept your judgement.
However I got there, I got there. I made the leap
non-rationally, then rationally. For all the reasons discussed, the Catholic
Church is like a garment that only seems to half fit me sometimes. But it feels
better, and more truthful to my self, than being naked.
It’s entirely possible that you’ll be more faithful than I
was, not less. In that case know that I would support you earnestly if I could
be there to do so. You should pray and look into your soul and think rationally
about what your vocation is. If you find a vocation to the priesthood or to
holy orders, then the best thing you can do is follow it. Nothing would make me
more proud. Looking into my own soul, I’m convinced that I’m not cut from that
cloth. I was made to cleave myself to womanhood in marriage. But you may be
built differently from me.
One piece of freedom I wanted to make sure you would have is
the freedom to follow the careers you find yourselves most suited to. Your
mother and I won’t leave a family business for you to inherit, but even if this
was the case, we’d want you to find for yourselves what you want to do with
your working lives. I do encourage you to think carefully about what your
options are, though, and I encourage you to find any way you can do work that’s
meaningful without being draining and overwhelming.
I have no doubt that you’d all make excellent doctors, and
that’s part of the polylemma you’ll face. You’re so talented, you’ll be able to
take on almost any task that would seem supernaturally hard to an ordinary
person and achieve the goal. If you do so, but wind up miserable in the
process, what have you gained? There are many opportunities to do work that’s
meaningful and makes the world a better place that don’t involve throwing your
life in a trash compactor the way medicine does.
Conversely, I encourage you to consider the practice of
engineering. When I look at the career paths of my family, I feel like I lucked
out winding up where I am. If you become an engineer, your undergraduate education
will be arduous and difficult compared to many of your peers. You’ll be annoyed
that you’ll be more constrained with coursework and less free to ramble through
your late teens and early 20s. But in exchange for that you’ll have a lucrative
career available for you at age 22, with no advanced degree, where you can do
work that will impact people’s lives for the better while working on
interesting challenges. I think it’s a pretty good deal.
Are there any particular specialties within engineering I
recommend? I’ve enjoyed working in rocket propulsion and launch vehicle design.
Partly this is because it’s fascinating work that has a real chance of
impacting humanity for the better, and partly it’s because this work lines up
well with my interests. I happened to come of age during a renaissance in
rocket propulsion in the United States. You might not have the same
opportunities here I had, and you should pay attention to where the most
interesting and exciting work is happening.
Given my interests as a child, it seemed like aerospace was
where I needed to go. Perhaps I should’ve been more open to vocations not so
obvious in childhood. In retrospect I think I would’ve enjoyed nuclear
engineering. The set of physical laws that go into nuclear machines are richer
than anywhere else in engineering, and machines that make nearly endless power
by splitting matter apart are deeply compelling. If the long-awaited nuclear
renaissance ever comes about, your helping it happen will be a wonderful way to
make life better for your grandchildren and their descendants.
My respect for civil engineers has grown as well. The basic
infrastructure of modern life might look bland to the unappreciative eye, but
each bridge, overpass, and pipeline is unique and took thought from an
engineer’s soul to conceive. That sounds like a nice way to make a living to
me. My personality resonates with the mechanical, but electrical engineering is
a deeply interesting field as well, of course, as is computer science and
engineering. I just never particularly enjoyed coding. You should try it, and
if you like it, this could be a good career for you, too.
An advanced degree is not essential to an engineering
career, but I would encourage you to consider getting a master’s immediately
after graduation if you become an engineer. There are options to fast track this
at some universities that you should consider. I don’t think this will make you
a better engineer per se, but it will give your career the most
flexibility at the earliest possible time. You’ll be eligible for positions
that require advanced degrees and won’t be pigeonholed to very specific niche
work around an area of PhD specialization. I think I have the savoir faire
I need with just a bachelor’s, but there have been a few jobs that intrigued me
(among them astronaut selection) that I was ineligible for because of my lack
of an advanced degree.
You should probably not get a PhD unless you’re very sure
that there’s a specific area of work you want to advance. With a PhD you’ll be
overqualified for many positions you’d otherwise be considered for, so be sure
your area of specialization is somewhere you really want to be for the next few
decades. It’s inherently painful to deal with academia long enough to obtain
any kind of terminal degree, so this is the kind of path you must pursue only
for the right reasons. If you know there’s something you want to do with a
clear path that runs through a PhD, though, by all means, pursue it.
Of course, there are many other careers that you can and
should consider beyond the broad strokes here. I wish I could be there to discuss
what you’re looking for and what your talents are to help you find the best
path to meaningful happiness in work. Whatever you decide, it will be best if
the decision comes from within you and isn’t imposed from outside. Follow your
bliss, and I’ll be proud of you.
I hope that you might find yourselves facing a dilemma your
mother and I didn’t have the privilege to confront, whether you’d like to live
most of your life here or on the planet Mars. Space travel was such a rarified
thing during my life. Making it something accessible to ordinary people was the
greatest, noblest passion of my career. Perhaps, if things go very well on this
front, you’ll be able to set sail for the planets and the micro-worlds of the asteroids
beyond Earth. Historians will say this was the vision of men like Musk and
Bezos, but you should know better. The blood of tens of thousands of women and
men ran hot with this idea, and we worked as hard as we thought we could to
make it happen. Think for a moment that I did some little part of making this happen,
and then you should consider what you want to do, assuming you face this choice
someday.
I can’t imagine that I would choose to relocate permanently
beyond Earth, either to Mars or to some artificial world built of stuff from the
Moon or the asteroids. I love Earth too much. Earth may have begat life, but
now that life has reshaped Earth in its image. I would love to see another
world up close, to feel the crunch of its regolith under my feet, but I don’t
think I’d want to live the rest of my life there. You should consider what you’re
giving up by leaving Earth behind.
Consider also, though, that human civilization was built by
people who gave up what they knew in favor of the hope of the frontier. Someone
had to leave the valleys of east Africa, had to cross the land bridge across
the Bearing Sea, had to sail in little outrigger canoes from one island to
another across the Pacific Ocean. Many suffered from their wanderlust, and you
should know that you might too, but many also found new lands, ready to give
the human experience new microcosms to call its own. Now you might get to do
the same with another full-size world. Whatever you decide, I understand, and
if you take the leap you should know that I would be proud to know my
generation was the last to stay rooted to the Earth that bore us.
I’m sorry that I seem to be leaving this planet and our
country in a terrible state for you to inherit. Maybe that’s self-centered of
me to think that I could somehow put a dent in the rising concentration of
carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, the erosion of respect for
science, and the insanity and fetish for authoritarianism that’s gripping
American politics at this moment. I recognize how little I can do to turn the
ship here, but it still pains me to think about where you might be headed.
Remember that politics wasn’t always like this. I remember a
time when reasonable people could stand on opposite sides of the aisle and
still respect and work with each other. I remember a time when everyone
recognized limits to the lust for power, and excursions would not be tolerated.
You can have this again, someday. Remember also that there was a time when lead
paint, atmospheric nuclear testing, triethyl lead in gasoline,
chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants, and asbestos insulation were all tolerated. We
realized what rape we were committing to Earth and to our fellow man and woman,
and we stopped these practices. You can do this too, with climate change and
the new crises you’ll find.
Moving beyond the practical, I wonder if there’s anything
profound to say. When I was young, I was deeply interested in philosophy. I was
curious about what other people had thought, and it gave me a little thrill to
consider ideas novel, offensive, or – best of all – convincing and persuasive.
I also wanted to “figure it all out.” So much of my life was focused around
academic success, where I was being judged constantly on my ability to quickly
absorb and understand concepts. Why shouldn’t I try to figure out what made
everything tick, down at the bottom of existence?
That was my brief foray into narcissism, I suppose. I
realize how absurd the notion seems now. Still, I wasn’t comfortable drawing a
line and saying “Alright, I guess I won’t understand any more about this, and I
don’t care.” As my life went on the banal realities caught up with me. I spent
less and less time trying to figure out what the meaning of life was, whether
free will exists, what consciousness is, and which system of ethics was closest
to the truth. When there’s work and a household to keep and children to change
and read to and rock and play with, there’s barely enough time to sleep, let
alone find the profound grandness of life.
I hope, reflecting on that, that you don’t find yourself
bogged down long in the search for ultimate truth. That search is worth going
on, but I confess I haven’t found a way out of the conclusion the wiser older
people seemed to reach before me – that it’s more about the questions than
about the answers. Maybe you’ll be more clever than I was. I certainly hope so
and won’t be surprised when this happens. Still, you may find yourself needing
to be content with unanswerable questions, and that’s okay.
The poet Mary Oliver wrote this about a life well-lived:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
People sometimes want things they shouldn’t want, and don’t
want things that they should want. Leah Libresco, a writer I admired, said
half-facetiously that we know this to be true because there exist serial
killers and people who hate math. It’s not enough to dive after the fluid
pleasures of life. I trust, however, that your desires are generally good. You
will want to do the right thing and to be with people who are good. Your appetites
for food, comfort, sex, wine and beer, companionship, achievement, and justice
are all good. Don’t let them dominate you, but let the soft animal of your body
and the conjoined twin fires of your spirit and soul grow and love and dive
into the goodness of life. I trust that you will be good, and I would reassure
you that you are if I were still there.
There was nothing in my life I loved more than you. I loved
your mother ferociously. I would’ve gladly laid down my life for hers without a
second thought. That love was like a two-dimensional schematic compared to the
rich three-dimensional love I felt for all of you immediately. I would trade
everything in my life now, including my life itself, if it guaranteed you all
happiness and love for the rest of your many days. I’m sorry that I didn’t live
to see you grow up into the wonderful adults I know you’ll be, but I’m glad I
was able to be part of your journey in the beginning. Go forth, live, love, be
kind to your mother, be passionate and loving with your spouses, be gentle and
adoring of your children, make your own paths forward. The world is better
because you’re in it.
Love,
Your dad
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