The Words

Defenses

I believe my wife began writing her dissertation long before we met, if only in her head. She'd focused obsessively on that topic since an early biology lesson in grade school. She'd learned that human beings consist of trillions of tiny invisible things called cells. She'd replayed the discussion she had with that teacher ever since.

"If cells keep dying, why don't we just disintegrate?"

"Because cells also reproduce and replace themselves continuously."

"Then why do we get old and die? Why don't we live forever? Why aren't we doing anything to fix that?"

Perfectly reasonable questions she'd believed at the time and had found no reason to alter her thinking since. Except, much to her frustration, she discovered that these weren't topics that she could discuss openly with just anyone. Not anyone she'd found who mattered. Either they refused to take her seriously or were morally offended by the audacity of such questions and suppositions.

This latter group was her primary source of discouragement early on. She disliked scoldings by indignant stupid people who assumed they were more intelligent because they were the adults, and she was just a kid. Although, not that much changed when she was no longer just a kid, and the evidence mounted of the unlikelihood of them being more intelligent than her. Still, there seemed to be no end to stupid people and the impossibility of them understanding the arguments that might convince them to at least stop shouting at her long enough to listen. But she found herself benefiting from the increasingly rare need to interact with this particular group of stupid people and their opinions, indignation, and outraged rants and ever more easily dismissed these as no concern of hers.

Then the weight of my wife's concerns shifted toward those of not being taken seriously, being labeled a flake or a nut job. This came not because of a fragile ego but her increasing awareness of the difficulty she'd eventually have finding a job or procuring the funding to pursue the questions she wanted answers to. Yes, teachers through high school, those she came to trust enough to share her thoughts, had scoffed or smiled indulgently anytime she raised her unanswered questions. She was a teenager. Teenagers had crazy ideas. It wasn't until a college professor told her, less than kindly, that she was wasting her time and the gift of her intelligence chasing a Chimera. The fountain of youth? Ridiculous! Don't be a fool! Cure cancer! Do something useful and achievable.

Following that exchange, she shut up for the duration of her college education, then through grad school and medical school. But she never gave up her burning need to answer a simple question: If nothing else kills us, should growing old and dying of old age remain inevitable? She believed the answer had to be no. So maybe she'd cure cancer, too, once she had plenty of time for anything else that might interest her. Once, she had forever.

But, instead of a mere brain drain of the thinking she'd accumulated since childhood, I found my wife grinding away at her dissertation for hours each day. The subject of which she complained was a ridiculously evasive end-run around the questions that she honestly wanted to address; for the topic of her dissertation to be acceptable to her thesis advisor, then the panel of stuffy academics she'd need to stand before to defend it.

Banging her fist on her desk in exasperation one evening, she looked up at me to explain: "We are already in our mid-twenties, so thirty is not a realistic goal. Not even thirty-five, since I still need to complete my Ph.D. Land a job at some lab or facility where I can continue researching what occurs within our cells as we age. All with the expressed goal of extending the quality of life, an acceptable thesis topic, and the research considerably more likely to procure funding."

What she disdainfully referred to in private as 'Better looking corpses. Smart as a whip to the bitter end.'

"Rather than extending life itself, perhaps forever, which is far less likely to be funded, as in, you must be kidding. Unless - as one of my fellow med school students joked, after stupidly confessing my secret intentions - I give some eccentric billionaire one hell of a blow job. Which I told her was precisely my intention. So, you," she reminded me again, "need to hurry up and become that eccentric billionaire since you've been regularly receiving more than just blow jobs as prepayment."