In 1998, I had the honor of being the best man at my youngest brother’s wedding. It was a great privilege to do it, but added to the prestige of doing so was something else: it was a chance for me to vindicate myself after having had this honor once before in my life and falling down on the job. That was on the occasion of my best friend’s wedding, a couple of decades earlier. I was completely oblivious to what my roles and responsibilities were as a best man, including making a wedding toast, and so did not perform them at all. In my defense, both my best friend and I were still just teenagers at the time. I think that we were both confronted with roles and responsibilities that most men don’t have to contend with until they are at a more mature age. Still, after my friend’s wedding, I developed the growing realization that I had really stumbled rather badly in my role as his best man, and it bothered me. In fact, for years afterward, I was like one of those restless, roving spirits, cursed to wander the earth because of some terrible wrong that was committed during its lifetime, perpetually re-enacting the critical event in the vain hope that it might be rectified or set right. In my case, I became a sort of “wedding crasher”: not because I went to weddings uninvited, but because, after the official best man made his toast, I would wander (or rather stagger, because I would usually pretend that I was drunk) up to the wedding party’s table and offer up a toast of my own, using jokes mainly memorized from a book that I had found called 2000 Insults for All Occasions. My wedding “roast” was generally met with peals of laughter from the audience, though I always felt guilty when I looked over at the best man and invariably saw a downcast expression on his face, because he now clearly felt that his own toast had come up short by comparison. But now, finally, I had an opportunity to genuinely set things right, with this second chance to be a legitimate best man myself.
And yet, with my brother’s wedding only days away, I found that I had no idea what to say in my speech. Could it really be that, after all those years of successfully making toasts at weddings where I had not been the best man, that I would fall down, again, when I legitimately had the role?
I desperately searched about for something to say – something to speak about. Aside from the salutary jokes (I still had the book that had served me so well in all those other weddings), what could I offer that was more genuine, and more substantial? Was there something from my own life experiences that I could share?
As it happened, there was something which occurred very recently that had left a very profound impact upon me. It came about as the result of an inspirational tape series that I had been listening to during that year, which prescribed a series of exercises that one should undertake to get in touch with one’s spirituality. One of these exercises was to go away on a personal retreat, away from other people, with nothing brought along that might keep one engaged with and bound to the usual day-to-day activities: no phones, no pagers, no homework from the office, and nothing to disturb the mind, like alcohol or caffeine. For my personal retreat, I rented a small, simple oak cabin in the southern part of the state of Michigan , in a heavily wooded area called the Dunes (so named because of the very tall sand dunes that are scattered about not far from the beaches of Lake Michigan ).
Now I hardly expected anything genuinely profound or life-changing to happen. After all, I was really not that far from civilization at all, and my stay was very short: just three days and two nights. This was a far cry from the extended seclusion undertaken by a solitary monk, yogi, or shaman, and was even just a minute fraction of the time that Henry David Thoreau had spent in his cabin on Walden Pond . I nearly laughed at the idea that I would get anything out of this. Still, I decided to keep an open mind, and go ahead with the experiment. I quickly found, after the first day or so, that I really was enjoying this solitude. It had turned out to be a perfect time to do this: in early September, when the days are still warm, but the nights are cool, and, since the regular camping season had drawn to a close, the area was nearly completely desolate. As the second full day drew to a close, I resigned myself to the fact that, while the experience had not and probably would not produce any profound – let alone life-changing – insights, it had still been a satisfying one, and a happy one. Of course, it is exactly at that point, when one genuinely expects nothing, that one is often rewarded. And it was my final experience at this retreat that I decided to share at my brother’s wedding.
On that second and final night of my retreat, I was sitting outside of my cabin, silently looking up at the sky. While gazing at the stars, I recalled reading as a child that the sun is also a star, no different than any of these others that dotted the night sky. In fact, it was explained that the sun is really undistinguished when it comes to stars, in terms of its size, age, and brightness. The sun’s brilliance to us is merely an illusion, the result of its greater proximity. The night was getting cold and very dark, and so I retreated back into my cabin to go to sleep.
But then I woke up in the very early morning hours. It was still very dark outside, and cold, but I felt a compulsion to leave my cabin and go out for a walk. I returned to a very tall dune that I had visited earlier in my trip. It was easy to find, even in the dark, because of the pathway of white sand that led up vertically along one of its faces. I had scaled the face along this path a day or so earlier, and it had been no easy undertaking, because of the steepness of the climb. After advancing each couple of meters, I would find myself short of breath and feeling a tightness in the chest that compelled me to rest for a few minutes before continuing on for the next leg of the climb. But after several of these halting advances, I had managed to reach the top, which afforded a comfortable flat place to sit and to take in a view of the surrounding woods. Now, in the cold darkness, I repeated this climb, with the same halting, labored advance upwards, until I was finally at the top. I looked around from my perch, but there was only blackness, and a deathly silence. For a long stretch of time I sat there, feeling the chill of the air, hearing nothing, and seeing nothing.
Suddenly, the sky began to brighten in the distance, and turned purple. The enveloping darkness began to disappear, even before the orb of the sun started to arise on the horizon, and as it did so, the world around me began to change. I could hear sounds: first the random chirping of a solitary bird, which quickly grew to a chorus of songs from many birds. There was movement, as many of these birds began to take wing. It was as if the whole world was coming to life. I began to see brilliant colors where there had only been shades of grey before. An entire panorama of deep surrounding valleys and tall majestic trees around me became visible. I realized that each tree had grown tall in a mutual competition to get closer to the sun, and that in fact every single leaf of every tree had oriented itself in the best way to catch the life-sustaining rays of sunlight. And this experience awakened me to a profound insight: the magnificence of the sun was no illusion at all – it was in fact the source of light and life to a world full of variety and beauty, and this set it apart from most, if not all, of the other stars in the heavens. And as I reflected upon this, I realized that this truth could be applied to human beings. While there are many ways that human beings are measured – in terms of intelligence, or physical attributes, or personal wealth – the true measure of a man or a woman is in how many lives they touch, how many people they reach as a source of love and inspiration. And, while there are many ways to touch people in this way, such as by being a counselor or a teacher, one of the most natural and immediate ways is through marriage. Because through marriage, one becomes a source of love, comfort, and inspiration to another, and, if children are produced, both partners become such a source to them and, eventually, to the extended family that develops. After I recounted this story at the wedding, I finished by asking that God bless my brother and his wife in their marriage, and invited the audience to join me in a toast.
And so I had finally vindicated myself as a best man. But the lesson that I had shared on that night came back to me in a very personal, intense, and immediate way eleven years later, in 2009, when a serious accident landed me in the hospital. As I lay there, virtually helpless, I was completely dependent on the goodwill of others. And my angel of mercy came in a most unusual form. She was a woman who looked like someone who had been raised in a very bad neighborhood, someone who had to fight for everything that she had. She was rather stout in build, and had a hard, cold countenance that seemed to say “Stay away”. Had I seen a woman like this during my regular daily travels on the subway, I would have made a point of avoiding her – not out of condescension, but because I would be genuinely afraid to get too close to her. But this was the woman who – on many if not most of my days that I was in the hospital – cared for me each morning: bathing me, attending to my wounds, and dressing me afterwards. She did it with a stoic dedication, but also with a gentleness and compassion that I sorely craved at that time, when I felt so damaged, helpless, and lonely.
I was in that hospital for two and half weeks, and one would think that after such an experience, a former patient would want to never return there. But for me, at least, the opposite was true. I loved returning to that hospital for follow-up visits: it was like taking a nostalgic visit to a college that one has graduated from. The time at that institution might have been grueling, and stressful, but the happy outcome bathed all of these memories in a pleasant, nostalgic hue.
I think that I saw her during my very first return visit. Since it had been only a short time since my release, she recognized me as well. (I’m sure that it becomes progressively more difficult for hospital caregivers to remember their former charges over time, given the sheer volume of them that they must tend to.) My face erupted into a spontaneous grin, which she answered in kind, and then, after I rushed up to her, we embraced each other. I think that tears even welled up in my eyes as I held her close to me.
Were I to see this woman on a subway now, I might still feel hesitant about sitting next to her, but only because now I might feel that I would be unworthy, taking a place alongside one of God’s own elect, an earth angel, a human sun unselfishly radiating love, warmth, and compassion on those who need such sustaining rays the most.
