Ryan Holiday’s “The Daily Stoic” – generally inspirational although too hard on Alexander the Great and too easy on Marcus Aurelius – says that December is the month of endings in which we must contemplate our own. Meanwhile, there have been a number of high profile endings of different sorts, so let’s delve into them, shall we?
Pope Leo XIV has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who at 75 had to step down – or did he? Cardinals have been known to stay on once they’ve handed in the requisite resignation. But the measured Leo, a protégé of the progressive Pope Francis, nonetheless moved swiftly to replace Dolan, a garrulous conservative, with Bishop Ronald Hicks of the Diocese of Joliet, Illinois, a quieter, more liberal ally. Oh to be a fly on the wall when Dolan realized a request to extend his services wasn’t forthcoming. Maybe Leo asked, and Dolan said “no.” I doubt it. He seemed to enjoy that fat-cat spotlight too much.
So there is one less prominent conservative in New York and soon to be two as Elise Stefanik has withdrawn from the governor’s race and will not seek reelection to the House of Representatives – a turn of events that offers so many life lessons. Stefanik was a moderate Republican from upstate New York who remade herself as Trumpier than thou in the hope of a cabinet position or the cushy United Nations ambassadorship, a job she was actually in line for.
Her high-water mark came at the Congressional hearing in which she bulldozed a trio of airhead Ivy League presidents – who were, we must acknowledge, clueless on the subjects of leadership and the performative nature of Congress – weaponizing anti-Semitism only to create more anti-Semitism. But Stefanik failed to understand that to a narcissist, loyalty is a one-way street, and looks matter. Stefanik may be as tough as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or Attorney General Pam Bondi, but she could never approximate their faux Palm Beach look. All President Trump had to do was gaze into the big brown eyes of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whom Stefanik planned to label a jihadist all the way to the governor’s mansion in Albany, and it was all but over for Stefanik. Trump declared Mamdani “a rational person,” thereby throwing her under one of the mayor-elect’s proposed free buses. Next thing you knew, Stefanik was being primaried. So much for her Oscar-worthy performance.
What Stefanik – who did herself no favors by appearing to be less than grateful (his words) to her immediate boss, House Speaker Mike Johnson -- did learn was that the kiss-up, kick-down approach to narcissism has its price. All those you abuse as you suck up to the boss are waiting for you like a pack of jackals on your way down. Stefanik was savaged – by hecklers; by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, whom she would’ve never defeated; and by the press. (See “The Bulwark” podcast here. And for what? The biggest takeaway is that you never remake yourself for someone else, especially if you’re a woman.
Careers end and life goes on. Sometimes life doesn’t. We lost Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle, 15 people on Bondi Beach and two students at Brown University where nine others were injured. What all these killings have in common is that they were committed by men with a disproportionate rage at some perceived rejection, usually of their own making. We need to address the gun problem in this world. But we also need to confront the power dynamic that makes men feel so entitled and aggrieved.
These were deaths that could’ve been prevented. Some cannot. Former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) has announced he has terminal pancreatic cancer, noting with profound grace that “the process of dying is still something to be lived.”
On Nov. 22 — the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — science writer Tatiana Schlossberg announced that she had terminal acute myeloid leukemia. I interviewed her during the pandemic, and I remember how concerned she was for her husband, George Moran, M.D., a urologist, because he was working at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and might not survive. Now she is the one who is leaving him.
In her affecting New Yorker piece, Schlossberg stops readers cold by writing that her two children, ages 2 and 1, won’t remember her. But I think they will, not just in her words and images, but in the love their father and others have for her.
I think of an article that described Prince William’s children making Mother’s Day cards for their grandmother, Princess Diana, whom they never met. One from Princess Charlotte said, “Pa misses you every day.”
Those who love are never lost. As Thornton Wilder writes at the end of his novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”:
“We ourselves shall be loved and then forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”