How My Mid-life Crisis Helped Me “Get” Poetry

The strange collision of my grandfather and my search for religion

Maria Ter-Mikaelian
5 min readAug 3, 2021
My grandfather at age 97 in his ubiquitous tracksuit

It’s a year or two after 9/11. We’re in my cramped New York apartment, complete with a hissing radiator, cracking paint, and second-hand furniture. My grandfather sits in an armchair, wearing the faded green tracksuit he always uses as a house robe, solemnly reading aloud out of an equally faded book. “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore!’” he declaims emphatically. Over the last few weeks, he’s been trying to get me into poetry by treating me to some of his favorite poems after dinner.

I’m listening politely, but I’m rather bored. To be honest, it all sounds a bit pompous and overwrought. How can I relate to people whose go-to analogy is some obscure Greek myth?

My grandfather is in his eighties, and hovering over our interactions is the uneasy feeling that he might not have much time left. I would hate to have been inattentive or rude if this turns out to be one of the last times we spent together. Still, I wish we could bond over something else instead. I’d love to tell him about the research I’m learning about in grad school, but he never asks.

Fast-forward nearly 20 years. A lot of good things have happened in the interim, and a few terrible things.

Death really makes you face your core beliefs. In the comfort of mundane life, I was pretty good at laying out a logical argument for why God is an irrationality. But seeing a familiar face on a cushion with the life gone out of it confronted me with the obvious questions. What is life? And where did it go?

My neuroscience degree can’t help me here. Grad school was all about deconstructing the brain into smaller and smaller pieces and figuring out how each of them works to understand the whole. But here’s the problem. If we get down to the cell, which, as everybody learns in biology, is the smallest unit of life — we don’t actually know why it’s alive. Take it apart to its organelles, and the pieces are definitely inanimate. It’s too delicate for us to put back together, but if we could, would the cell magically come alive? How?

In short, welcome to my midlife crisis. It’s a fun time. Of the cliché options available, I chose the spiritual search. Like many before me, I trod the familiar paths first. Seeing others find comfort in the church, I tried to revive the Catholicism of my youth, but that was a non-starter. I read some issues of Philosophy Today and the New Philosopher. They were clever, confusing, sometimes touching, but they didn’t get to the bottom of my problem. Then I read about modern Druids, Buddhism, animism, meditation, Norse polytheism, tarot cards as a way of exploring one’s subconscious, and tarot cards as a way of divining the future. I spent some time at the Metropolitan Museum, looking at ancient fertility goddesses with new eyes.

The religion my science-trained brain could accept with the fewest reservations was naturalistic pantheism. Probably because, as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once put it, it’s “sexed-up atheism.” Basically, it’s feeling a sort of reverent awe of nature and the universe, but stopping short of believing that rocks have souls or that there’s a creator. Still, I hoped it would bring a much-needed spiritual component to my materialist worldview.

The problem is, people of other religions go to church, or pray, or meditate, or decorate altars. What do naturalistic pantheists do? Well, for one thing, they probably protect the environment, so I was already a bit of a fraud. I wash my dishes with commercial soap instead of vinegar, and our apartment building stopped offering a compost bin after vermin became a problem. Anyway, I was more interested in soul-searching than in acquiring a political cause.

Another thing naturalistic pantheists do is, well, contemplate nature. I like watching wildlife documentaries, and I’ve occasionally spent an afternoon painting flowers in watercolors, but that didn’t quite scratch the itch. I tried to wax poetic, looking at the moon while walking my dog, but it was a bit lonely. I felt just as insignificant a speck in the universe as I actually am.

Finally, in a fit of desperation, I went to my bookcase. Surely, I had once purchased and failed to read a book that would be just the thing. In fact, I have an entire shelf of unread books. They’re poetry collections, mainly from the 19th century and earlier, given to me by my grandfather and never opened but by him on his annual visits to the U.S. I picked the least intimidating one, a sort of “top hits” of English-language verse. I opened it at random until I found a poem about nature.

It was an easy read — a poem that rhymes is something I can tolerate — until I came to these lines:

In all of spangled space but I
To stare moon-struck into the sky;
Of billion beings I alone
To praise the Moon as still as stone.

And there I was, right there with the author, walking my dog, trying to admire the moon, feeling alone and insignificant in the universe.

I’m not sure how it helped that Robert Service, a man I’d never heard of who died in 1958, had once felt the same way. But it did. The poem went on to say that he felt a little crazy as he wondered whether it would make any difference to the moon when, one day, he was dead. I could relate to that. And so, I guess, could my grandfather, as well as countless other people, since this poem had made its way into an anthology. Strangely, it made me feel connected to humans of the past in a way that was… well, rather spiritual.

My grandfather died just a couple of months shy of his 100th birthday. I never got to tell him about my newfound interest in poetry. We didn’t really email, and he could barely hear me on the phone, so I was saving it for an in-person conversation.

Still, it feels okay that he never knew. Spiritual wandering is a solitary pastime, and if I’m lucky, I’ve still got a few decades to retrace his steps along the pages of his poetry books.

It’s not quite a religion. I’m not sure it’s even “sexed-up atheism.” But it’s a start.

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Maria Ter-Mikaelian

Maria has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and writes depth pieces about the biology of humans and other animals. Follow her on Twitter @MariaTerScience