My first year teaching out of graduate school, I couldn’t imagine myself in a better situation: I was in the select ranks of employed philosophers, on a path to stability and success in a visiting professorship at a small liberal-arts college. On the fall term’s first day, I stood before my “Life, Death, and Meaning” students and remarked, “We’re all going to die.” Most of them, ages 18 to 22, laughed nervously and shifted awkwardly. One, age 64, shrugged.
The outlier, an auditor named Daniel, was pale and gaunt, his hair wispy and beard unkempt. Without his eyeglasses, he seemed to belong among the Greek philosophers whose works we were soon to read. His ill-matching clothes didn’t fit, especially the giant yellow coat he wore almost year-round. A canvas grocery bag, stuffed with books and index cards covered with scrawled notes, was his constant companion.
When I tell people about Daniel, I always describe how he was on that first day: sitting in the front row, attentive and curious, taking notes and asking thoughtful questions. Neither of us could predict where we’d be only a year later: I’d be out of a job, and he’d be dead.
Most of the students said they were taking the course because “it sounded interesting” or “for the credits.” Daniel had a deeper motivation: “I want to know whether objectively meaningful lives are possible in my recently adopted atheistic framework.” He wanted to find some rational outlook to do the work God used to do for him, certifying that at least some lives are, in at least some ways, well lived. He was searching for definite and permanent judgments about value without a definite and permanent judge. This was a heavy task.
Difficult intellectual work, I’d eventually learn, was, for him, nothing new. Decades earlier, he’d tried for a Ph.D. but had abandoned it when the dissertation seemed impossible. He secured a yearlong visiting professorship, but after that he couldn’t find another academic job and wound up driving a delivery truck for a chain of pizza parlors. Unmarried and childless, his nights and weekends without responsibilities, he could read and write freely. Over the subsequent 25 years, he remained a habitual grad student, reading and taking detailed notes on just about everything published on his favorite academic topic, early Christian history.
In retirement, Daniel again took to the road, this time as a student. He worked his way through a couple of state colleges and a few private ones, and that’s how he wound up meeting me at Ripon College. The following year, he planned to head to the University of North Carolina, where his favorite scholar of early Christianity resided.
The next term, however, both Daniel and I received bad news.
Though my student evaluations were good and my colleagues liked me, the college’s low enrollment meant I wouldn’t be retained. My efforts on the academic job market were unsuccessful. By year’s end, I was unemployed.
Though Daniel was physically active and watched his diet, he’d been plagued by constant stomach pains and unexplained weight loss. A series of doctors’ visits determined that he had late-stage lymphoma.
The ancient Greek thinker Epicurus, whose work we read together, argues that death can’t be bad for those who die. After all, they’re not around anymore, and existing is necessary for having qualities. Though my students understood the Epicurean point, they pushed back: Death might not be so bad, but dying’s the worst. Even when we know the cancer is late-stage, there’s not a known moment of death for which we can plan. Instead we just linger a while, aware that our own personal fact of death, which has always been real, is now more immediate.
Daniel, though, was unfazed. Asked how he was feeling about his diagnosis, he shrugged and said, “These things happen.” He gave basically the same response over the next months as he started chemotherapy, was told it was working, was told it wasn’t, tried other regimens, was told they weren’t working, stopped chemotherapy, and moved to hospice.
Hospice means imminent death, but Daniel seemed not to realize. When I inquired whether he had any “bucket list” wishes, like riding in a hot-air balloon or driving to the beach, he laughed dismissively. His only current aim was finishing an essay he was writing on the early church’s conception of salvation. After that he might start investigating the theoretical underpinnings of a new translation of the New Testament. We ordered a copy on Amazon.
While Daniel was unperturbed about his situation, I was terrified about mine. After spending a decade in graduate school, earning poverty wages, I had almost no savings. I was also single, having destroyed more than a few relationships with my inability to balance the competing pressures of graduate school and love. Worse still, without continuing academic employment, I could find only one word to sum up both my academic life and myself: failure.
One perk of unemployment was freedom to visit Daniel regularly. For the last few months of his life, we spent a few hours together each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Initially our meetings had three distinct segments. First, we’d chat about life, then he’d show me what he’d written and I’d offer comments, and finally we’d play Scrabble. As his disease progressed and he tired more quickly, he could tolerate only short visits. But all three of the daily tasks still had to be completed. I suspect we sounded ridiculous to nurses and hospice volunteers as we talked early-church and personal history while tabulating Scrabble plays.
In the last visits, there was no more Scrabble, no more stories. His breathing became raspy, and he had trouble staying focused. The day before he died, he slipped into unconsciousness. I visited at our appointed time and found the New Testament placed where I usually sat. He’d gotten about 10 pages into the translator’s theoretical introduction. Sitting down, I read aloud, once again taking up ideas together.
What’s best about the academic life — pursuing truth, following one’s interests, working through ideas with other curious people — doesn’t happen only on the campus, in the classroom, or with the safety of a tenure-track professorship. Investigating, sharing, and learning happen at home, on a lunch break in the passenger seat of a delivery truck, or while holding a friend’s hand in a hospice bedroom. The only real failure is forgetting these possibilities.
