The Collapse of Margaret McGillicuddy
I have been practicing law for almost 50 years now, or so I'm told by the little bar card I keep in my wallet. For about 40 of those years I have known Margaret McGillicuddy, first as a colleague in the state service, and then as a friendly competitor in the world of state tax defense. The niche is a narrow one and the community is small and tight knit. Accordingly, I would see Margaret pretty often at conferences and in the courthouse. We were friendly, as I say, but certainly not friends. I have nothing at all bad to say about her, but the truth is that we never really clicked on a personal level.
In a dream that invaded my psyche 'round midnight last night, I had a meeting with Margaret in her office. Her office was located in a stately old Boston building. The decor was almost comically old-fashioned; it could have been the office of Perry Mason! The other noteworthy environmental things about it were that she practiced alone, and that she did not maintain even a single administrative staffer. So if you met with Margaret, you met with Margaret, alone.
When our meeting was done, I said so long to Margaret and left. But as I was walking down the hall towards the elevator, I suddenly remembered that I had left my briefcase in her office, by the door. It had many important papers in it, but more than that I had a sentimental attachment to it. I certainly did not want to lose it!
When I came back to Margaret's office, her door was just ever slightly ajar. I would not open it unannounced, of course; she might be indisposed. I knocked twice, rather hard. After a pause Margaret said "Just a moment!" Her tone was very odd, odd enough to cause me some concern. Clearly she was indisposed in some way. My mind raced through a number of silly and highly "improbable causes." Had she cut her leg on something, and was there blood running down her stocking? Had she just washed off her make-up in the bathroom sink? Was she, unbeknownst to me, wearing a wig, and had it fallen into the toilet? Had she taken a couple of swigs from a whiskey bottle that she kept in a drawer?
Shaking off the nonsense scenarios, I said, through the door, "Sorry to disturb you, Margaret, it's just that I think I left my briefcase behind!" There were a few footsteps. "Just a second!" she replied again. And then she opened her door about halfway with her left hand, and offered me my briefcase with her right. But no sooner did we make sudden eye contact than she threw the door completely open, broke into heaving sobs, and collapsed into my chest. (The briefcase had fallen to the floor.) Instinctively I embraced her.
The situation on its face was awkward in the extreme. But somehow I did not feel uncomfortable. Rather, my higher moral instinct seemed to have risen to the occasion, and I did my best to comfort her, as a brother or a father might have, even though before this day I had never had any physical contact with her beyond a rather manly handshake.
After perhaps 90 seconds, her sobs began to subside. I asked her what the matter was, "for goodness' sake!" She answered me in short, staccato phrases, in many fewer words, in fact, than I need now to recount her tale to you. It was as if she were speaking to me both in words and in a kind of stress-enabled telepathy!
"The matter" was that she was going blind, and going blind in the moment! And she was losing her sight in a most peculiar way. She said that if she concentrated intensely on her dilemma, her sight was fine, but as soon as she let her foot off the gas, as it were, she began to lose it. So her sight was flickering on and off as she struggled to keep focus. At the same time, she knew that this was a losing battle, because it was impossible to maintain the required level of concentration. Like a drowning person who knows that she will soon have to concede defeat, open her mouth and swallow water, Margaret fought but without hope for a happy ending.
And it was worse even than that. What she told me next was that she realized, for the first time, that her sensory input, taken in the aggregate, was her Self, her Being, her Everything. Without them there simply was no Margaret. And so, if her eyesight comprised, say, 30% of her sensory input, then when it flickered off she lost 30% of her Self; she quite literally died, in fact, precisely to that extent.
As I still held her in my embrace, her story told, I felt deep empathy for Margaret in her distress, but I also felt a terror I had never felt before for myself, for I knew that her awful struggle to stay in the light at all costs was a universal one.