Leaving the World Read Free

one of her rare moments of perfect lucidity right now. We had spent years sidestepping this issue. But in her mind I was still to blame for my father’s departure.
    ‘You did say those things, didn’t you, dear?’
    ‘Yes, I said them.’
    ‘And the next morning, what happened?’
    ‘You know what happened, Mom.’
    ‘I don’t blame you, dear. It’s just . . . well, cause and effect. And maybe . . . just maybe . . . if those things hadn’t been said at that specific moment . . . well, who knows? Maybe your father wouldn’t have packed his bags. Maybe the bad feelings he was having about the marriage might have passed. We’re so often on the verge of walking out or giving up or saying that it’s all not worth it. But without a trigger . . . that something which sends us over the edge . . .’
    I hung my head. I said nothing. Mom didn’t finish the sentence, as she was racked with one of the small convulsions that seized her whenever the pain reasserted itself. She tried to reach for the morphine plunger that was attached to the IV bag by the side of her bed. But her hand was shaking so badly that I had to take it myself and press the trigger and watch her ease into the semi-catatonic euphoria which the morphine induced. As she drifted into this chemical stupor, I could only think: Now you can fade away from what you just said  . . . but I have to live on with it .
    Words matter. Words count. Words have lasting import.
    We never spoke again. I did take some comfort in the knowledge that my parents could never stand each other and that my long-vanished father would have ended it with Mom no matter what.
    But – as I’ve come to discover – there is a profound, vast gulf between understanding something that completely changes the contours of your life and accepting the terrible reality of that situation. The rational side of your brain – the part that tells you: ‘This is what happened, it can’t be rectified, and you must now somehow grapple with the aftermath’ – is always trumped by an angry, overwrought voice. It’s a voice railing at the unfairness of life, at the awful things we do to ourselves and each other; a voice which then insidiously whispers: And maybe it’s all your fault .
    Recently, on one of the many nights when sleep is impossible – and when the ultra-potent knockout pills to which I am addicted proved defenceless against the insomnia which now dominates my life – I found myself somehow thinking back to an Introductory Physics course I took during my freshman year in college. We spent two lectures learning about a German mathematical physicist named Werner Heisenberg. In the late l920s, he developed a theorem known as the Uncertainty Principle, the details of which I’d so forgotten that I turned to Google (at 4:27 in the morning) to refresh my memory. Lo and behold, I found the following definition: ‘ In particle physics, the Uncertainty Principle states that it is not possible to know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time, because the act of measuring would disturb the system. ’
    So far so theoretical. But a little further digging and I discovered that Einstein abhorred the Uncertainty Principle, commenting: ‘ Of course we can know where something is; we can know the position of a moving particle if we know every possible detail, and thereby by extension we can predict where it will go. ’
    He also noted, rather incisively, that the principle flew in the face of a sort of divine empiricism, saying: ‘ I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe. ’
    But Heisenberg – and his Danish theoretical collaborator, Niels Bohr (the father of quantum mechanics) – countered Einstein with the belief that: ‘ There is no way of knowing where a moving particle is given its detail, and thereby, by extension, we can never predict where it will go. ’
    Bohr also added a little sardonic retort at the end,