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Life Wish
By John Ingrisano and Sponsored by R.J. Maves Photography of Ellison Bay
Aug 3, 2011 - 8:53:34 AM
"I have a death wish," my brother, Lou, once told me with a shrug when I asked why he does medical mission work to the most dangerous places on earth. I almost believe it. Almost. He got mobbed by a group of street children in South America who discovered he had a knapsack full of tennis balls. (He brought them for the children, but had to abandon the knapsack for his own safety.) He faced armed and nervous teenage militants in Darfur who weren’t sure his papers were in order. (He kept working on patients in a makeshift clinic while, guns aimed at him, they sorted out the papers, which I suspect they could not read.) He got lost one night after going for a walk in Kabul, Afghanistan. (He ended up hunkering down with Pakistan troops behind sandbags until the U.S. Embassy opened in the morning.) Why does he do it? No, he’s not a thrill seeker or a glory hound. I believe it is because he has a “life wish,” a restless need to devote his life to something that actually counts and that actually makes him feel alive. I know the feeling. We all do. When he is at home, just doing the routine medical stuff at the hospital in Bar Harbor, Maine, he is bored to death, restless, and borderline (if not downright) miserable. That kind of explains why he created the “Outer Island Initiative” years ago, bringing medical care to residents of Maine’s offshore islands (and picking up a reputation along the way as one of the best Physician’s Assistants in the country); why he runs triathlons at the age of 64, even though his body is wracked with arthritis; and why he became a 2nd degree black belt in Karate (the hard contact stuff) several decades ago.
Why does he do medical mission work in dangerous places? First of all, he is drawn, almost magnetically, to the children. They haunt him in his sleep, he once told me. And though he never quite admitted that he has a need to feel alive and meaningful, he did once share with me that “this is what I do, this is what matters to me.” He is driven to fulfill a sense of purpose, to make sense of the often meaningless days and days and days of our lives. He didn’t write a check for Haiti relief; he went down there personally. My point: It is only when we feel focused with a genuine, credible purpose (not a mindless goal of beating our own best golf score or growing the world’s biggest pumpkin) that life matters. I am jealous of my brother; he reminds me that there is a meaningful, important reason why we were born. Lou makes me restless to go out and, once again, find my sense of purpose … real purpose. – jri “For the secret of man’s being is not only to live … but to live for something definite. Without a firm notion of what he is living for, man will not accept life and will rather destroy himself than remain on earth …”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (edited out copy from The Brothers Karamazov) Lou leaves this week for Libya, a hot war zone. He expects to be gone three weeks. Please keep him in your prayers and thoughts. I suspect that he will spend that time miserable, tormented, yet joyful in his own way. I am so proud of the old guy.
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