Lucky to Be Me
Lucky to Be Me
What would we choose if we knew beforehand the fate of our children?
Therefore, O Man, beware, and look toward the end of things that be,
The last of sights, the last of days; and no man's life account as gain
Ere the full tale be finished and the darkness find him without pain.
It was ten years ago this December that I first sat down at a piano. I had long wanted to learn to play a musical instrument. Though I knew that the road to any kind of competency would be arduous, I was driven by the music of two men to aim at that far-off destination. The first was Johann Sebastian Bach, in whose compositions small and great I found an endless source of wonder, joy, and intellectual amazement. Much of Bach’s music is, I have always said, an algorithm that (when played correctly) turns into a poem, and the challenge of playing such music called to me. Even more than with Bach's music, however, it was with the music of William John (“Bill”) Evans that I had fallen in love.
My discovery of Evans began with his recording of “My Foolish Heart,” a 1949 composition by Victor Young. I had never been a fan of jazz, but one day I came across a version of this song by Evans online that left me awestruck. In a grainy black and white video, Evans, dressed in his trademark dark suit, white shirt and tie, sits hunched over an open piano. The song, before Evans arranged it, was a popular jazz standard but not a masterpiece of any kind. Yet from the moment Evans started to play, I could hear that it had clearly been transformed into something different. His version was more than someone simply playing a popular tune: it was a lyrical and melancholic statement about romance and loss that kept playing in my head. Evans’ rendering was soft, crystalline, and filled with grace. I watched video after video of Evans, and came to the conclusion that I could not rest without trying to learn to play as he did, no matter the effort.
For the past decade, on almost every day, I have sat down at my piano and played mostly “Bach and Bill” for far too many hours to count. I was very glad when Enzo one day decided to start playing as well, and one of the supreme joys of my life was listening to him at the keyboard, playing hesitantly at first but soon maturing into a fine young musician, for whom I even composed a few simple pieces to help him on his way. I never suggested he play — it was something he did on his own and, along with sports, was a passion we both shared and could talk about for hours. In the car, we would listen to Evans, and I would challenge him to recognize specific tunes from the first few bars.
I am not sure Enzo understood my obsession with Evans, but he was patient enough to let me play a song over and over, which I did whenever I started a new piece. Evans’ music is challenging, and learning a new song can take me a few months, so my wife and boys will hear it often when I am first tackling it. In April of this year, I discovered an Evans tune I had not heard before,“Lucky to Be Me,” and this was the song I was working on up to the moment Enzo was killed. Since that day, I have often reflected on the title of this composition. As with so much of Evans’ music, his treatment of the song is far removed from its original version in the 1944 musical On the Town. Where the show-tune is a fast-paced celebration of new love, in Evans’ hands the song is transformed into a tranquil meditation on fortune. In the slow tempo and expressive harmonies, a listener surmises that Evans is contemplating his own troubled life, which was marked by substance abuse and tragic loss. Anyone who considers me a lucky man, he seems to be saying, would think otherwise if they could see into my soul.
It was the complex interplay of emotions I perceived in the song that drew me to it, and it has crystalized a question I have discussed with those close to me: would I still have wanted to bring Enzo into the world knowing nothing of him except his awful fate? For anyone who has not lost a child, the answer may perhaps seem an easy one: of course you would choose to have your child, even knowing that he would die with his whole life before him. Having lived through that horror, I can affirm that the answer is not so clear. I shared only eighteen years with my son. Should I live another twenty years, which is not impossible, I would have lived more time on this earth with the pain of his loss than the joy of his presence. All that remains of him are memories. What will define my existence more, I wonder, when my journey reaches its end: the happiness that has passed or the sadness that is to come? Will eighteen years of memories make up for the anguish that I confront every dawn?
In Ted Chiang’s 1998 novella, The Story of Your Life, a woman encounters sentient beings from another world.
They inform her that she will bear a daughter with a man she knows but that the girl will die from an incurable illness at a young age. After the girl arrives, the mother confesses her foreknowledge to her husband, who in time comes to fear for his daughter and hate his wife for having had the child knowing its tragic fate. Before the child’s death, he leaves them both, unable to bear the sorrow to come. The story explores the possibility that we could see past, present and future simultaneously and the implications of such a state of understanding. To the woman, her insight presents a terrible dilemma: accept parenthood, however short-lived and painful, or reject it and surrender both joy and loss. The choice she faces echoes in other ways. My wife lost her father, a wonderful man, at the age of fourteen. I experienced a different kind of fatherhood with a man who yet lives. Which is the better fate: a short time with a beloved parent or a lifetime of distance and disappointment?
In medieval art, the wheel of fortune typically depicted a monarch in four stages: triumph, misfortune, tragedy and restoration. Its message was that no one, not even a king, would be spared both good and back luck. Knowing that the wheel must and will turn, one was advised to be humble at moments of triumph and hopeful at moments of tragedy. The wheel was a powerful symbol of the vicissitudes of life, and it lies at the heart of Carl Orff’s cantata, Carmina Burana — ironically, the very first concert I ever saw with Enzo. Because the past few years of my life had been such happy ones, I would sometimes say to my wife that I was fearful, for “I know the wheel turns.” Never — never — did I imagine that it would be Enzo who would pay the ultimate price when the wheel finally turned with its merciless inevitability.
These thoughts take me back to Evan’s recording. Am I blessed to have been Enzo’s father or damned to have lost him without even a moment to say goodbye? Was Enzo lucky to have experienced his short life beloved by all around him or cursed to be struck down in a moment of random misfortune? Perhaps more importantly, would Enzo have chosen to step into the world, if he had been shown his future? Was he lucky enough enough to have a father who helped make those eighteen short years worth it for him? These questions have haunted me the past two months such that I could not bear to touch the piano and play that song. This weekend, I finally managed to do so. In fact, I spent hours and hours at the keyboard with the music of Bach and Bill, and through it all the question lingered in my mind: Am I lucky to be me? If you are present, I will answer in the affirmative, for to imagine a life in which Enzo had never existed is as almost as painful as remembering his death. But if you leave me alone with my thoughts — with each note and chord resonating in my heart as I look up at Enzo’s photo on the wall across from my piano — I hear in the song’s quiet sadness my own questioning and my own inability to say for sure what the answer really is.
The novella inspired the 2016 film Arrival, by Denis Villeneuve. 2019’s You Will Die at Twenty, by Sudanese filmmaker Amjad Abu Alala, is based on Hammour Ziada’s short story “Sleeping at the Foot of the Mountain” and explores similar themes of fate and foreknowledge. The poet Edgar Guest, who lost two children, contemplates the same choice in “A Child of Mine.”