A couple of days ago, with some time on my hands, I started thinking about tragedy and how, like everything, the actual value of tragedy is subjective.

Jon is my oldest, dearest friend. We’ve been friends without break for nearly twenty years. It would be fair to say that we’ve grown up together.

We’ve played music together, traveled together, drank and drugged together – sometimes uproariously, sometimes bitterly. We shared a lot of adventures I still like to recount. Once, we dropped acid and walked through the warm summer rain in the wee hours of the night until we met a man who spoke to us in Russian. I was astonished when Jon spoke right back until he told me the next morning that the man had simply asked him, in English, for a cigarette. It was my own tangled synapses that had heard Russian. We shared awesome stoned feasts of Mexican food and salads made from whatever loose ends were left in the refrigerator, swearing that whatever we were eating was also the best thing we had ever eaten. Another time, without the convenient excuse of drugs or drink, we nearly got ourselves thrown off a train after coating a matronly woman with debris from an exploded cream packet.

We drank together when our hearts had been broken by evil women or our families threatened to destroy us. Late at night, we shared our secret plans and fears in long, wide-ranging conversations.

I knew that he was going through some bad times and what might cause him to drink all night and then leave his apartment intent in dispatching the neighborhood crows who were keeping him awake when he finally felt like he might be able to get some sleep.

I received a call from him at the outset of this dark period, early on a Sunday morning. "You’re calling at nine on a Sunday morning? Who died?" I joked. And then he told me what was happening in a voice that was hollow and raw. I went to pick him up and take him from the immediacy of what was happening. He hadn’t slept in a couple of days when I picked him up and he and I drove in a silence rarely broken. I got him back to my house, fed him and made him lie down and try to go to sleep in my spare bedroom.

In my own bedroom, I sat on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands. My wife rubbed her hand across my back. "You’re a good friend, dear," she said.

"But can I be good enough?" I asked. At that moment, like a character in a New Yorker short story, I had the most profound sadness I’ve ever felt.

But I doubt that you can feel that sadness. Most likely you’ve already developed a feel for Jon as sort of a ne’er-do-well character, some kind of a loser who can’t cope with life and drinks instead. Fair enough, I guess, since you don’t know and love him like I do.

All I want to present to you is the most tragic story I know about right now. My oldest and dearest friend is experiencing an almost insurmountable pain and a long dark night of the soul. And the odds are pretty good, no matter how eloquently I’ve recounted his tale here, that you, the reader, are having less sympathy evoked from reading his tale than you might from seeing a picture of a starving war orphan.

I have Multiple Sclerosis. I was diagnosed with it over four years ago. There is no cure.

The cold hard facts of a statement like that can be a little unnerving. It’s the same condition that leads a frightening number of Jack Kervorkian’s patients to him. And it’s probably going to get worse. There are plenty of ugly things that are invariably mentioned in the accounts I read about the disease that I haven’t experienced yet. Things like incontinence, impotence, and loss of motor skills. It’s also probable that the MS will shave some years off my life span, regardless of how much or how little it affects my body first.

It should be a big deal. But it’s not. Thus far in my career as a MS patient (and notice how I avoid saying ‘MS sufferer’ like most news reports do when they talk about someone famous who has the disease), there hasn’t been much in the way of bad stuff I’ve had to deal with. For a while I had optical neuritis, which caused me to lose a good portion of the sight in one eye. Inconvenient, (to get a feel for it yourself, try driving on a desolate highway during a blizzard some winter night with one eye squinted shut) but not fatal. For a while I had a difficult time lifting my right arm to brush my hair in the morning. I brushed with my left instead.

The worst thing for me so far has been an intramuscular drug I was on for a while. Once a week, I had to inject myself with a sizable needle — no girly-man insulin needle, this, but a two-inch monster that had to be plunged deep into my leg. I joked about taking a break from stressful days at my job to retire into my office — which had a large window that faced the public — and administer my medication, returning to my coworkers with a glassy stare and a calmer demeanor, as if the shot consisted of something more enjoyable.

Shortly after my diagnosis, I heard that another friend, M. (whose name I will not expand here, since I never told her she was to be the subject of a tell-all article) was suffering from cancer, some particularly nasty organ-related kind. A mutual friend ran into her at a reunion. She was bald from the chemotherapy, our friend related. And she wanted to talk to me, because she had heard that I had MS, and she wanted to talk ‘survivor-to-survivor’.

I never called her, mostly because I didn’t know what to say to her. I felt like a Pop Warner football player hearing that Brett Favre wants to talk to him ‘player-to-player’ — I’m just not in the same league. What M. is doing, fighting a disease that really wants to kill you - not just play little pranks with your body - by absorbing chemicals that are designed to kill the same cells that are the basis of your life. That, in my mind, is better than I could ever do.

There you have it, three theoretically tragic tales. A man adrift in his life, and a pair of disease-sufferers. The most saintly of readers may think all three stories are equally sad. Most readers are probably ranking us right now — M., battling a disease everyone knows the name of; me, with a potentially crippling neurological disease, and; Jon, victim of some, unnamed bad turns in life. But there’s an interesting point.

M., who was fighting cancer, thought my own disease equaled or surpassed hers. I think that both hers and the story of my friend Jon are sadder than my own. Jon, in turn, tells me he has dreams in which he kidney-punches God for giving me MS.

In a time when TV newspeople thrust a garishly-colored microphone into the face of every new orphan and homeless family and ask them how they feel, it’s too easy to perform a sort of mental triage on the unspeakable things we see every day. What I’m clumsily trying to say is that tragedy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Things that we see as horrible in the lives of others may be perceived differently at the center of the maelstrom. Other people may let seeming trifles drop them in their tracks.

Tragedy is in the eye of the beholder. Let that thought color your perceptions of the things you see around yourself.

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I wrote the above article with all of the bravado that comes easily to a stupid, stupid man. Stupid because, even as I wrote about MS and the horrible things it could do to me at any time it chose, I forgot to consider that it ever might. I worked with the same sense of immortality that is standard-issue with teens and drunks.

Maybe a week or two after I finished the article, I noticed a tingling in my left arm. I made an appointment to see my doctor, blindly faithful that organized medicine, which has taken care of me and kept me alive so far, would make mincemeat out of this little MS exacerbation — with my life changing little or none in the meantime.

I began to have some difficulty walking and grasping things with my left hand. Normal things became inconvenient, sometimes filled with peril (things like taking showers or walking down the stairs, which require more balance than you’d normally think about). My doctor referred me to my neurologist, who could see me soonest in a couple of days - the following Tuesday. Over the weekend, I started feeling drained. Changing channels, even with my right hand using the remote control, seemed like it was just too much work. I made it to work Monday and planned to take Tuesday off after the neurologist and rest, then return to work on Wednesday and slack off and lay low there the rest of the week while I recovered.

Except things didn’t work out that way. The visit to the neurologist turned into a battleground with the monolithic insurance company that claims to manage my health care, leaving me even more drained and about as depressed as I can ever remember being. The insurance company refused to cover my visit, refused to okay any treatment by my regular neurologist (a man who had steadfastly earned my trust since my initial diagnosis me three years ago by, among other things, fighting with other insurers to make certain I was covered for various procedures and treatments).

Instead, they told me to find another doctor from within my own hospital network. The first two I called were either not accepting new patients or not making appointments for the next three months. A call to my hospital network for assistance revealed that they had no record of my being a member — this, despite the fact that it was the same network who had made the final decision in denying my attempt to see my original neurologist.

While the futile hopelessness of battling faceless voices by phone - for what I viewed as nothing less than my life - battered me, I began to perceive a dimming in my right eye, surely a recurrence of the optical neuritis that had left me half-blind during my initial onset of MS. I moved slowly between phones by my bed and the kitchen counter, a distance of ten feet, which took minutes and clutching at anything sturdy and upright to navigate, talking and pleading my insurance case with anyone who would listen. Finally, with little hope, I started calling emergency rooms, looking for one who had a neurologist on staff, explaining my MS situation and adding that I was now starting to have tightness in my chest and a immense anxiety attack. "By tonight, I’m gonna be under a doctor’s care for something. You can decide if it’s for a coronary or just MS."

That got some attention from the insurance company at last. They called my doctor’s office and accused them (as near as was able to recount after the fact from the principals) of mishandling my relatively minor case into a coronary. The doctor’s office called me and accused me of rattling cages. I agreed, then quickly assumed a tactic I am still amazed I had the maturity and calm to try. "Yes, I’m rattling cages. Now, how are we going to solve this problem?"

From then on, with every person I met or spoke with, I took the time to explain to them that I knew that they were doing the best that they could, and, no matter what I sounded like, I wasn’t mad at them. After that, things started to work a little more the way I think we all wanted them to. My regular doctor found a neurologist for me who the insurance company would cover and, more importantly, could see me in days. I began to have hope again and thought of a memoir I’d read, written by a wartime emergency room. There were two kinds of people who came through, she remembered - people who screamed and yelled and cried and fought everyone and everything and people who maintained composure and were polite and thankful. The pleasant people were the survivors, more often than not.

At the onset of this episode, in the midst of the worst of my battles with the insurance company, I called my friend Jon, who had been intending to stay with me for between homes. He heard it in my voice, before I could explain: "Is it bad? How bad is it?" "Bad," I choked out, "very bad."

Within minutes, Jon had the whole story from me and was making me laugh and calm down. Within the hour, he and his soon-to-be-ex-wife had numbers for MS support groups and handicapped advocates. At a time when I felt that my wife and I were about to be crushed under the treads of a giant corporation, it was invaluable help — both in content and intent. My spirits buoyed, I began to carry on. "Um, I don’t think I can really follow through on your staying here right now," I joked, "I’m a little under the weather."

Which was when Jon told me that he had severely broken his leg a day or so before. All of the plans he had for moving, plans which had truly seemed the dawning of a new era, a new positive movement — all of those plans were on indefinite hold while the doctors decided if they had to put a pin in the leg.

There was silence. I didn’t know what to say. Sorry hardly seemed enough. I knew how much he’d focussed on getting through the weeks leading up to his move, how much he was counting on it.

Then Jon started laughing a little. It was contagious. I started too. It was nervous but vigorous laughter, and when it died down, one of us would say "Look at us!" and start it all over again. At last, the scales of tragedy were balancing.