| A Visit To "Angels On The Moon" |
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By: Dr. Judith Guedalia and Chaim K "Do you dream, that the world will know your nameSo tell me your name Do you care, about all the little things or anything at all? I wanna feel, all the chemicals inside I wanna feel I wanna sunburn, just to know that I'm alive To know I'm alive" ("Angels on the Moon," Lyrics by Thriving Ivory) _option_option_option_option
The first time Chaim K. played this song for me, it was on his mobile phone. Then we listened to it again on the computer so I was able to view the words. I was struck by Chaim's ability to find published songs that express his reality so well. "The music I hear and the songs I choose are the way I speak volumes of the pent up feelings that words alone can't express, " Chaim explains. Some of his 'dreams' have been fulfilled. A world of readers knows his name, because of The Jewish Press. Wherever I go, when I am introduced, someone asks me if he is, in reality, the way he sounds in the articles we write together. My answer is always, emphatically: Yes! The song continues:
"Don't tell me if I'm dying, 'cause I don't wanna know If I can't see the sun, maybe I should go Don't wake me 'cause I'm dreaming, of angels on the moon Where everyone you know, never leaves too soon"
This song says a lot. He wants to feel life's pains and joys even though he may not be able to sense them. Ironically, even before he heard the song he had told me that last summer he 'davka' went out to get a sunburn. He smiled through the stinging pain of the burn and pealing of his face, because this sensation told him that he was alive and could feel just as everyone else does. The choice by the song's author, of the moon for the place where angels are found, struck me as very interesting. Since 1966 when Neil Armstrong not only landed, but walked on and then returned from the moon, proved impermanence to 'leaving earth'; doing the up-until-then impossible, going to the moon and coming back!! "When I am dreaming," Chaim says, "I sometimes liken the experience to the floating weightlessness of being in space. I had a dream that I was in a gravity-free zone and was moving myself as if without the pull of the laws of gravity. I was singing - I can move of my own volition. Maybe signing up for a space shuttle trip is the answer for my dreams."
"Do you believe, in the day that you were born, Tell me do you believe? Do you know, that everyday's the first of the rest of your life."
This attitude is the one so many of my patients would love to acquire from Chaim K. They feel that every day is their last day, every day cannot be altered to bring them peace or serenity. Chaim does not feel that way. He feels as the song does - that we need to joyfully and festively accept our birth into this imperfect world with an unexpected future.
"Don't tell me if I'm dying, 'cause I don't wanna know If I can't see the sun, maybe I should go"
"When you are standing on the dark side of the moon, you feel that the warmth of the sun will never come," says a life-wizened Chaim. "It requires so much faith that even when you can't see it, you must believe that there is hope on the horizon."
"Don't wake me 'cause I'm dreaming, of angels on the moonWhere everyone you know, never leaves too soon"
In his seminal work on Existential Psychology, Viktor Frankl (1946, Man's Search for Meaning) relates that while in the concentration camps, someone who knew he was a psychiatrist approached him, asking that he help a fellow prisoner who was having horrible nightmares. Don't wake him, advised Frankl, the reality of day-to-day life here is a greater nightmare than the one in which a sleeping man exists.
"You can tell me all your thoughts, about the stars that fill polluted skies And show me where you run to, when no one's left to take your side But don't tell me where the road ends, 'cause I just don't wanna know, No I don't wanna know" "Most people are afraid of death, I'm not," says Chaim. "The end of the road is something no one wants to know and yet from the moment we are born, we are on that road which ends. What I do know is that no matter how aware you are about how short life is, you must keep living as though the road will go on forever. That's what I wanna know!"
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