A Highway of Diamonds

Bob Dylan, Diamond Highways and Death

Photo by Nicki Eliza Schinow on Unsplash

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Ever since seeing the new Bob Dylan movie in theatre a week or so ago, A Complete Unknown, I’ve been rather obsessively listening to Dylan. First it was Highway 61 Revisited, and then, creeping backwards, his 1962 self-titled album (which I love) and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second record from 1963, the one with the cover of he and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking along the street in the West Village.

This morning, as my wife did yoga in our shared office, I did something uncharacteristic of me in the mornings: I listened to music. This is very rare. Just about always my routine is: Caffeine and then reading. After finishing Intermezzo and All Fours, I started yet another New York Times Top 10 Novels of 2024 novel, British author Dolly Alderton’s Good Material. *(I’m about 80 pages in: So far I generally like it but it’s not exactly what I would call ‘deep fiction’; it comes off as more like a fun, trendy beach read than anything else, The Girl on the Train circa 2015. But I’m still only about 1/5 of the way through. Definitely it’s entertaining and psychologically sticky, making me want to keep reading. But she doesn’t seem so far to be aiming exactly for spiritual depth.)

Anyway. This morning was different. I don’t know why. Instead of reading I hit a 6:30am Zoom A.A. meeting (a Portland one) and just listened. Sometimes—say a few times a month or so—I feel like I need some spiritual medicine, and Alcoholics Anonymous generally does the trick. (There’s a real-life in-person meeting I go to in Mount Tabor on Saturdays.)

So I caught the meeting and then, very unlike me in the mornings, instead of reading with the remaining time that I had before my wife finished and I started writing (she generally does yoga/works out from 7 to 8am, plus or minus), I put on Bob Dylan, Freewheelin’, and listened, sipping another cup of delicious hot Irish Breakfast tea mixed with a dollop of Half-n-Half.

The music calmed me. My mind is generally a little too tumultuous in the mornings; not angry or frantic or wild, just a little O.C.D. and restless. Bob’s mellow guitar and voice soothed me. The classics: Blowin’ in the Wind, Girl from the North Country, Masters of War. Unlike in the past when I energetically listened to Dylan (as in my early twenties, 20 years ago) I really listened to and focused on the lyrics. This made the listen that much more special.

When I got up from our big, long kitchen table to make another mug of tea, with my air pods in, A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall came on. It’s a classic, of course, and over six minutes long. As I boiled the water, our nearly 16-pound, handsome white Siamese cat, Kitty-Bear, leapt onto the counter and slowly crawled onto my shoulder like a nefarious, coddled baby. (He’s four-and-a-half, the baby of the three cats, and extremely vocal and needy.) I held him and then slowly started dancing to the song with him on my shoulder.

It was a beautiful moment. I knew better than to interrupt Britney doing yoga behind the closed sliding wooden doors…but I was tempted.

The line from A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall that struck me the most, which I’d never caught before, was, I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.

A highway of diamonds with nobody on it. Wow. I could see that, could vividly envision it. What was the highway of diamonds? Peace? The end of war? The end of capitalism? A utopia? Total, complete love? Forgiveness? The end of suffering? And why was nobody on this diamond-highway? Was this because humans didn’t know what was best for them? Because humans are full of arrogance, ignorance and folly and couldn’t get out of their own way? Because humans were lost, confused and clueless, genetic and environmental pawns playing a game that was already scripted for them since the dawn of time?

It was lovely. And sad. And felt true, even if I didn’t actually have a precise “meaning.” (Often with Dylan there was no precise meaning. He was and is a poet.)

Next, after Kitty-Bear jumped back off me, the song, Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright came on. I stood alone now in our kitchen. I’d heard this probably a hundred times over the years in various forms, from Dylan and from bands that covered the track, including my favorite early 80s SoCal punk band of all time, Social Distortion.

And suddenly—memory and emotion are a funny thing—I thought of my father on his deathbed, in the six weeks between when he miraculously returned from a long stretch in the hospital and when he finally stopped breathing at 4pm on June 2^nd, 2023, a year and seven months ago now. He had terminal Melanoma. My mother and I caretook for him for 23 months until he signed off. It was both a very difficult situation, an honor and a profound experience.

I saw my father, as the song progressed—and the song is about a young man traveling on, saying goodbye to a woman he’d stayed with along the highway—laying in his bed, weak and skinny, a shallow bag of bones, waiting for death to come. All the times Mom and I told him we loved him. Listening to podcasts with him even just the day before he died. The Morphine, fentanyl, etc. His slow, light breathing. The silence after two years of hard work. And then checking his oximeter, until we knew he was barely holding onto life, and this only a technicality, since he was already gone in any human-consciousness sense. He was there and not there; alive and not alive.

And then his final breaths. I was downstairs writing. Mom called me. I came up the stairs. It was bright and sunny out, a beautiful early June day in Santa Barbara, that ironic paradise which I left Manhattan for and which, due to circumstances, never felt like a paradise to me.

There he was, my father, mouth ajar, head slightly turned, eyes open, body already cold and rigid and lifeless. I had an out-of-body experience; I felt like I was on acid; it didn’t seem real. How could this be my father? How could he be dead? I remember hugging my mother—she looked up at me with eyes so wide in shock that it was hard to know what she was feeling; probably nothing at that moment—and then she went into the kitchen to get something and I looked at my father and felt his arm: It was cold and hardening. I don’t know why but I instinctively opened his eyes further with my fingers, as if to check, to make sure he really was gone, that he wasn’t somehow just faking it.

But it was real. He was dead. Gone. I swallowed, alone with him. I gently shut his eyelids. I placed my warm palm against his cold forehead and said, Goodbye, Dad.

My mom returned and sat in her favorite chair. I opened the side door to the bedroom. Birds chirped. The sun beat down. I leaned against the open door frame. Behind me were plants, the outside stone stairs leading down to the gate and the driveway. I felt the sun against my body. Adrenaline was slowing. It no longer felt as immediately out-of-body. Mom and I didn’t speak. We just stared at my father’s corpse. On the bed. Unmoving. What was happening to him now, his soul I mean? Nothing? Where was he? Nowhere? Could he sense us, see us, feel us, hear us?

My father had never been a religious man, but in the weeks before he died he did seem to lean into something loosely describing spirituality, or at least a distant cousin of spirituality. He and I were very similar on this score.

I’ve always felt when we die that’s it; from nothingness we emerge and into nothingness we return. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust. I actually find this comforting rather than morbid. Why does there need to be an afterlife? A holy, golden eternity? Why not just…total emptiness. Because all we have is metacognition—awareness and ego and self-reflection—I think we tend to create myths and stories to comfort ourselves about death. But for me, it’s a void. A Black Hole from which we do not return. There is no pain or suffering because there is no more “us” to experience it. “We” dissolve. Our minds, our egos, our emotions, our metacognition: All gone. There won’t be a “you” to be concerned with.

But then of course you can ride that horse all the way to the first origination of anything in the history of the universe. The first thing: Where did that come from? And what about the thing before that? Or the thing that created the first thing? It always comes back to The Great Mystery or, if you like, God. But even if you believe in God: Where does GOD come from? How did the very first anything anytime anywhere begin?

Clearly, we can’t understand this. Hence why so many turn to religion and faith.

I don’t think it’s important, really. Life is what it is, whether it’s a random collection of atoms and elements evolving over billions of years (as I believe) or a Supreme Being who brought it all into the light.

Either way; I find comfort in knowing I got to really know and love and even, to some small degree, know my father, who had been a mystery to me all my life, before he died. He was a good man. The best man, really. I carry his genetic legacy, of course, but not his brilliance, not his classical stoicism. He left me many things, like a love for backpacking, the knowledge that he always loved me even when I didn’t feel it totally, many of his physical characteristics, and the ability to be on my own, do my own thing, follow my own unique path.

When I was younger I saw my father as my complete opposite: He was hyper-conventional, a classic capitalist, a “bourgeois,” a man of a very different generation who couldn’t tackle emotions, couldn’t have a deep conversation, and loved all the things I rejected: Sports, finance, convention.

But over time I have come to realize how similar we are.

My dad was obsessed with work. So am I. For him it was computer engineering; for me it’s writing. He stood up to his demanding, controlling father and, instead of getting a PhD and going into business, he got two Master’s degrees and first taught college and then got into computers. He married my mother against his father and mother’s wishes when he was in his twenties even though my mom had a rocky mental health background and was a young divorced mother. Dad stood up to his parents and to anyone who got in his way. Not because he was a rebel, but because he believed in his own values, his own free will and agency, his own power.

This describes me to a tee. Some of the same battles Dad fought with his parents I even fought with mine. But, like with him, it formed me as a man. Taking care of him those final months and weeks was a huge privilege. I’ll never forget it.

I may not believe in a literal afterlife, but I do believe in symbols and metaphors. I hope my father, at least symbolically, is out there somewhere, walking the highway of diamonds with nobody on it.

One day I’ll join him there.