Foregone Conclusion

Paulina has cancer.  She wrote me and said she believed she was cursed, certain she would lose her hair and die, and asked how my father dealt with it and how I dealt with him having it.

“I don’t know, “ I said. “Denial, I guess.  I just believed he would live.  I suppose he did the same.”

Though, the tests weren’t back, Paulina was certain things were at their worst and my advice was to counter delusion with delusion.

We imagine the future often with such certainty, even when we have such little information about it.  When the future comes, at least in my experience, it rarely resembles anything I imagine.  Still, despite my errors, over and over, I keep constructing would-be futures in my mind’s eye.

It was in Othello where the term “foregone conclusion” first appeared.  Iago introduced the idea that Desdemona was unfaithful to Othello and Othello, in turn, dreamed about it.  It was just a dream, something based on the past.  But like so many have throughout history, Othello took it as a foretelling of the future.  The foregone conclusion, the supposedly certainly future, was anything but.

The foregone conclusion is as paradoxical as dreaming itself.  Dreams - fuzzy memories interpreted as certain prophecies.  We even use the term “to dream” as thinking grandly of the future when the action itself is more of an insular exploration of the past.

In the end, my father neither died nor was fine.  A third future I didn’t expect unfolded instead.

And again, I have a foregone conclusion that Paulina will be perfectly fine.  I still need to cling to my delusions.

But, deep down, I know nothing is ever certain and that’s what makes life so wonderful and painful, richly.