Chapter 14

He woke up the next morning at the Peabody with a tremendous headache, and realized that all of this escapism also came with a price. He vowed to do something more active today, and decided he would visit both Sun Studios and Graceland for a little education about the legends of music that had come out of Memphis over the years.

     He got the idea for his field trip after flipping through the channels and seeing that the movie “Walk the Line” about the life of Johnny Cash was on. He found himself reflecting on one particular scene where Sam Phillips asks a young Johnny Cash, “If you had one song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth, what would it be.” He thought about the question as it related to his own life. What was his defining contribution? He had written books and counseled thousands of people, but the thing in his life he had been the most proud of was truly having loved another person with all of his heart. Now that was gone.

     After his visit to Sun Studios, he headed over to Graceland, which was a place that had always been truly fascinating to him. The mystique of Elvis was such an interesting phenomenon from a psychological perspective, and since his first visit to Graceland as a kid, he had been intrigued by the whole experience.

     While he was on the tour, he couldn’t help but think about how Elvis had truly gained the whole world, only to lose his own soul. His eventual dependence on both uppers and downers to manage the ebbs and flows of his life was deeply saddening to John. Like John, Elvis had once found salvation in a wife and a daughter, but eventually lost it all. His eventual death in the bathroom from a drug overdose was as tragic as it was wasteful, and John reminded himself that he himself would also run out of time one day. Elvis was only a bit older than him when he died.

     The final stop on the tour was at the gravesite, where John observed a couple of older women silently weeping as they knelt over the tombstone. Elvis had left a remarkable legacy, and John watched the women closely, and wondered if anyone would ever weep for him when he was gone. He realized it was a selfish thought, but also knew that these kinds of feelings were actually quite natural in the face of death. Many of the tears at funerals were about this very thing.

     John took a quick tour of the Elvis museum to look at all of the cars and Elvis’ planes, and thought again about the false pursuit of materialism as a means to happiness. Many people spent a lifetime in pursuit of such things, and keeping up with the Joneses was an enduring part of American culture that John knew from his experience as a therapist was ultimately futile. Ultimately it is the depth and richness of our relationships that predicted happiness, as evidenced by Elvis’ sad and lonely demise despite all of his riches.

     He spent the rest of the afternoon drinking beer with the after work crowd in Memphis, and was again struck by how he was lost in America right now. He did his best to adjust to the southern accents and the conservative nature of the conversations, and found himself conversing with a number of people at the bar, which he took as a good sign. He was moving from a sense of total alienation and isolation to a feeling that he needed to slowly begin to rejoin the human race again. He found himself reflecting on the idea about human relationships as a predictor of happiness for the rest of the afternoon, and decided he wanted to take at least a few small steps in the direction of other people.