I've been thinking about what I can (and can't) figure out.

For about a minute at the breakfast table on Sunday, January 4^th, I had trouble catching my breath. The problem recurred whenever I climbed the stairs, and more often on Monday. I should have called my doctor but didn’t. By Tuesday it reached the point that I got worried that something was wrong and should have dialed 911, but convinced myself that I could deal with it, hoping it would just disappear. By Wednesday afternoon I couldn’t breathe, thought I was going to die, and finally got to my doctor’s office; the first thing he did was call 911. I wound up in the emergency room of our local hospital with a severe case of Pulmonary Embolism, blood clots in both of my lungs. Once I got home from the hospital, I wrote in detail about the four days of increasing danger and my foolishness in not getting help.

I spent the rest of January recovering at home, which allowed me time to consider why I so recklessly let myself get dangerously ill before asking for the help that was readily available and which I so obviously needed. I was encouraged to explore these decisions by several notes, emails, and phone messages from close friends, all of them expressing gratitude that I’d survived but also pointing out my madness. Here is a sample:

From a former client:

WTF?? For over a decade you drilled into my brain that we are not [heroes], my job is to make my life work, and to ask for help when I need it. Please don’t treat someone I love the way you treated yourself on the 4th-7th. I’m assuming your family has already made that clear to you, but you taught me so many important things that I want to make sure you follow your own wise counsel as I have learned to do.

From my trainer for two decades:

Holy Shit Rick…. next time call 911 - jeez man - I was sweating when I read [your account of] it and then I realized you WROTE it so it must have turned out OK.

From a current therapy client:

I’m wondering whether I should trust my therapist to take care of me if this represents his best efforts to take care of himself.

Several messages used the word stupid, perfectly summed up by this from a close friend:

I love you, but you’re an idiot.

Why did I act like an idiot?

I went back to work the second week in February and a client who is a chemist (and who began with how foolish I was not to call 911) explained why I didn’t think to do this on Tuesday or, especially, when I couldn’t breathe on Wednesday. When I finally got to the emergency room my blood oxygen measured in the low 80s, when normal is in the mid to high 90s. By Tuesday and quite significantly by Wednesday my lungs were getting so little oxygen to my brain that, as my chemist friend put it, I wasn’t thinking.

Once I got the idea to call my doctor, I refused offers from the building’s security guard and friends from the building whom I ran into in the lobby to call 911 or take me to the emergency room. My doctor, whom I’d called just after 3pm, could see me at 4:30pm, so I had the single-minded goal of getting to him. I couldn’t think well enough to consider other, wiser options. Of course, when I got to his office the first thing he did was call 911!

I don’t raise this issue of my blood oxygen as an excuse for my stupidity, only as an explanation for why my brain wasn’t thinking clearly enough to do the right thing. But this failure to ask for help when I needed it was not just a matter of brain chemistry, it was a product of my personal history.

I was raised in a culture that taught me that men take care of themselves. Even when we marry and have children, our task is to provide and care for our family; we don’t think much of our needs nor their responsibility to take care of us. Perhaps there has been some adjustment to this notion about men, but it hasn’t disappeared.

Our seventeen-year-old grandson badly sprained his ankle playing soccer, is on crutches, and may miss the final games of his senior year. He receives great sympathy and care from all of us who love and root for him but still remind him that it’s up to him to do the necessary things to mend his ankle and rejoin his teammates. Perhaps young women now receive this same message; I only know it felt very familiar to me to hear him receive this ancient reminder: it’s your job to take care of yourself.

The bits and pieces I remember from my childhood remind me that, time and again, my circumstances pushed me to take care of myself, sometimes in curious, unconventional ways. I lived near my same-aged cousins, played in their yards or in the vacant lot across the street from my house, went to school with them. Their parents, like mine, both worked so we weren’t closely supervised. In many ways, we helped raise one another.

In the second grade, we would sometimes sneak away from school at lunch time and ride our bikes to the quarry a mile from campus to have dirt clod fights, occasionally not returning until well after lunch was over. In fourth grade we decided to give up shooting marbles in the dirt at recess and instead played tackle football on the gravel playground, which not only tore away the knees from our jeans but also took the first layer of skin. The rules in summer were simple: be home before dark, with little inquiry about what plans we might have. Truth is, we just made up each day moment by moment, game by game, adventure by adventure.

More of the same in high school. Because I was deeply involved in the youth program at church, my parents assumed that I was a good young man which, for the most part, I was. I had no curfew, was never asked where I was spending afternoons and evenings, never asked who I’d be with. I was unmonitored whether with my friends or my girlfriend.

“Let’s go to the beach and skip afternoon classes.”

“Your parents aren’t home? Let’s hang out at your place.”

“Sure, I can go to Palm Springs for the weekend.”

Figure it out. Push the boundaries. Step over the line.

After two years at California State College in east Los Angeles, I transferred to UCLA, determined to get the best education possible before applying to Princeton Theological Seminary. I took eighteen units each of four semesters, worked two or three part time jobs, and relied on Becky, my girlfriend since high school, to pack me a lunch from her sorority house. One Christmas vacation, when I was living with three friends in an apartment near campus, my roommates and Becky had gone home for the holidays. I stayed on campus for work, stopped every night at the market in Westwood Village to buy a nineteen cent Stouffer’s frozen chicken pot pie, heat it at home for dinner with the Diet Pepsi I bought in large bottles. My one meal for the day. Figure it out. Make it work.

Becky and I were married Friday night, September 13th, 1963, and the next day climbed into our packed VW Beatle for a five-day driving honeymoon to begin my studies for the ministry. Three years at Princeton seminary were an eruption. The bliss of newlyweds in a 300 square foot dorm suite was crushed in November when President Kennedy was shot, the first in a line of assassinations that curled through those years: Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy. After a summer back home at the end of this first year, Becky decided to stay in L.A. to finish her college degree, so for four months I lived by myself in a small cottage ten miles from Princeton.

On their way back to Princeton, my close friend and his wife of two months were in a traffic accident near Needles, California in which she was killed. Like me, he was alone that fall in Princeton, and I spent hours with him buried in grief and the beginning of a mutual lifelong questioning of the faith we were raised with: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Paul’s letter to the Romans, 8:28) It was, and still is, barely possible to find the goodness of God in such pain and suffering.

With these personal and cultural upheavals and my increasingly liberal studies, and as we marched and wrote and some of my classmates burned their draft cards, in three years I transitioned from an incoming evangelical conservative to a graduating progressive social activist. With each new disruption, Becky and I figured it out, made it work.

A decade later I was an assistant pastor of San Marino Community Church, in a suburb of Los Angeles which was one of the wealthiest and most conservative towns in the country. I loved the political and cultural combat with the congregation’s majority, and they were fond enough of me that, after four years on the staff, they chose me as their senior pastor. I was young, with little leadership experience, but believed I could figure out the process of overseeing a congregation of two thousand with a staff of nearly fifty. Becky and I were welcomed into the social world of the church and community but at home wrestled constantly with how to pay for our family life. We had three children and scads of friends, but hardly the income to feel like peers with the congregation. I worked my ass off, did a commendable job, but also turned myself into a highly anxious thirty-something.

After thirteen years of this, my ability to adapt, that curiosity that had figured it out in so many previous challenging situations, collapsed. To soothe myself, I followed my impulses across moral boundaries, was found out, and lost both my job and my career. It took a year to simply get my bearings, dealing with grief and pain in my family, the loss of income, decisions about next steps. What should I do? Figure it out.

I went back to school, got a master’s degree in psychology, and was licensed as a Marriage and Family Therapist. I was in my early forties, a decade or more behind in experience from the community of therapists, and academically deficient compared to my closest professional colleagues, who were PhDs. I worked my ass off trying to make up for what I lacked in education and experience. It wasn’t until my mid-fifties that I settled into a comfort level as a professional. I’d figured it out. I’d made it work.

No wonder then, when I had trouble breathing in early January, I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t call my doctor, or let my friends call 911. I relied instead on a lifetime of experience that taught me to take care of myself. Even in dire straits, I could figure it out. I could make it work. I could take care of myself. I always had before - why should this be any different? Even in moments of extreme stress and difficulty, I’d always been able to take care of myself, so when my brain didn’t have quite enough oxygen to function well, of course I defaulted back to my most deeply-wired assumptions, and knew I could figure it out.

I couldn’t, of course, and it almost cost me my life.