AFTER ANNUS HORRIBILIS, LETS HOPE FOR LA BELLA VITA

Years ago, when I was living in America, we were invited to a birthday party that a very close family friend was throwing for her father’s 70 birthday. Our beloved friend was a professor of organizational development at one of the universities in Silicon Valley. I did not understand exactly what organizational development was and what it studied. For those of us in the sciences and or engineering fields of study at the time, those like topics were not worth getting a Ph.D. Now, of course, I do not think so. Anyway, my friend’s dad was a real cool guy, an engineer by profession, and an entrepreneur, a successful business executive out of Istanbul. In those years Turkey’s economy was small and certainly not the size and complexity it is now. Therefore, starting a business and growing it certainly required an extraordinary effort, stamina, strong financial backing, and definitely fertile connections to make the business sustainable. Hence, I had a lot of admiration and was filled with envy for the family and especially the man as the evening wore on. This was his second marriage and the lady who was caring for him was so elegant and so kind that I filled with envy. ‘My dear Orhan, what can I bring you?’ she would say and return with a loaded plate of food. ‘There is a slight breeze out there on the patio. You will catch a cold. Come inside.’ I liked that overtly caring attitude and dreamt that I would have somebody caring for me like hers when I arrive at my old age, like him. I thought I would give a party like his on my 70th birthday… I invite friends, open expensive champagne, tell stories, talk a lot, laugh a bunch… in fact I was so determined to do something like that, I took time off on my 69th birthday and traveled to Nepal and did the Annapurna circuit to start a tradition of sorts. The year before that, I spent my birthday visiting Jordan and Petra city and stayed in tents in Wadi Rum. However, this year turned out to be some horrible year that none of us would have even dreamt. On my birthday, December 4, 2020, I was in bed at a hospital near Istanbul connected to an apheresis machine extracting my tiny stem cells and collecting them in four small plastic bags later to be injected back into my body after a massive chemo treatment.

The misery initially of seeing so many people get sick and die and the disruption to our lives was unfathomable. Initially, it was intellectually curious to wonder if the virus had jumped from the animals in some live animal market in China or leaked accidentally from the lab or even worse it was planned to be released. All these conspiracy theories about the covid and the controversies about one mask, double mask, or putting something on your face to protect others and yourself made our senses and nerves numb. All the stuff about Trump and Trumpism exacerbated the pain inflicted upon us and the atrophy of being shut out in the house with deliberate distancing even to your loved ones was anathema to everything that we all learned not to do. Moreover, in the midst of the pandemic, I took a gigantic leap of faith, had my stem cell transfer, and stayed a long three weeks at the hospital. This is like deleting your operating software on your computer and uploading it with new applications onto your clean and unadulterated operating system. Hence, I will have my childhood vaccines shot again and later will have to have the covid shots to show my face in the crowds. I hope that by that time the erasure of covid will be final from our lives and we will not question if we can enter a closure with four walls and a roof with the mask on and or vaccine of some kind doing its thing in your body.  

Overall, the 70th anniversary was a dim light away in my memory and like a short unsatisfactory fireworks show that petered out too soon. Yet, I am happy to be healthy again and full of vigor and appetite to continue to move mountains again in a new normal that we all will learn to deal with. After this annul horribilis, let us hope that la vita bella awaits us all.