I grew up in New York.
The front door to our apartment had two dead bolt locks, but I paid them no mind. Perhaps I paid the locks no mind because I could not bear knowing the truth.
Many, many years later I realized/explained that the locks were there to protect me and my family from my natural father coming back and doing something unspeakable. Whether this was the “truth” I will never know. All the people who could explain the locks are long gone.
This morning, as I was leaving home a SUV drove up out of nowhere and stopped a few feet from my driveway. A woman gets out and comes towards me carrying some papers. She appears to be familiar, and I become anxious. She reaches into her papers and hands me a leaflet. It is from a religious group detailing the coming end of the world. I am relieved and shaken. Her group believes that they know the truth.
Several years ago, a mentor of mine killed himself. His detractors posted his autopsy report on the web. When alive, the mentor would call me late and night and ask “Why do these people hate me so much?” I never had a satisfying answer.
Because I am not sure anymore if these sorts of experiences can be explained. Explained to be explained away. Words used to substitute for a perhaps intolerable experience. Words used to make the experience more tolerable and perhaps go away? Words used to filter/buffer that which can’t be filtered/buffered, perhaps only distorted and transformed into some untruthful facsimile of the “truth”.
Years later, when my mother dies, we travel to New York one last time. We drive past the apartment with two dead bolt locks. I think to stop and see the apartment again. Perhaps I can find the truth. But of course someone else lives there now.
As for the truth…
A young man discovers a truth he should have never known. His boss, a psychologist is sleeping with female patients. The young man tells the authorities. They don’t believe him. They think he is lying and don’t investigate.
Years later, a female patient comes forward. The authorities investigate. The psychologist admits, but only to having sex with this one patient. The authorities let him continue to practice.
Then several other women come forward. The authorities realize they have been lied to and want to revoke the psychologist’s license.
It is too late.
He voluntarily surrenders his license.
I sit in the first pew, again, waiting my turn to testify.
The couple in front of me sit waiting for the judge to enter the courtroom.
They will argue/compete/contest for a child or the “truth”.
I have been witness to too many of these competitions for the truth.
I seem to see a pattern. The couple and the third. Someone will have to be sacrificed. Perhaps the child. Perhaps me. Certainly the truth.
A patient recently tells me that they believe that all truth is a conspiracy. The “truth” is merely a spin that they want us to believe.
The real “truth” is what underlies the “spin”.
I look up belie and belief in the dictionary.
One letter separates them. The truth and the lie.
I wonder if they are somehow connected.
Then I wonder about a bright lite-at birth and at death.
What if the light is the truth that can’t be known, but only experienced.
What if before we are born, perhaps before we are “conceived”, we experience the “truth”, the white light, and as we travel down the birth canal we forget it because it is such a shock coming into this other world?
And what if we spend our lives somehow looking for that unknowable truth, that white lite, only to be re-connected with it at death or at a moment of sacrifice?
Is that why sacrifice is considered a sacred act?
The last words my dying wife spoke to me were “Can I go?”
I lied and said “Of course”.
Some days I wonder if there is a white light out there waiting for me.
Or is the truth really that this is just another lie?
Dr. Brody