* * *
I found another mirror and teacher in Agnes, a woman I met at a spa in Utah where I was speaking to breast cancer survivors about the importance of self-care to promote healing. She was young, in her early forties, her black hair pulled back in a low bun. She had on a neutral-colored smock dress buttoned up to her neck. If she hadn’t been the first in line for a private appointment in my hotel room after my talk, I might not have noticed her at all. She kept herself in the background. Even when she stood in front of me, her body was barely visible beneath her clothes.
“I’m sorry,” she said, when I opened my door to invite her in. “I’m sure there are other people who deserve more of your time.”
I showed her to the chair by the window and poured her a glass of water. She seemed embarrassed by my small caretaking gestures. She sat on the very edge of her chair and held the water glass stiffly in front of her, as though to take a sip would be an imposition on my hospitality. “I don’t really need a whole hour. I just have a quick question.”
“Yes, honey. Tell me how I can be useful.”
She said she had been interested in something I’d said in my talk. I’d shared an old Hungarian saying I learned as a girl: Don’t inhale your anger to your chest. I had given an example of the self-imprisoning beliefs and feelings I had held on to in my life: my anger and my belief that I had to earn others’ approval, that nothing I did would be good enough to make me worthy of love. I’d invited the women in the audience to ask themselves, What feeling or belief am I holding on to? Am I willing to let it go? Agnes asked me now, “How do you know if there’s something you’re holding on to?”
“It’s a beautiful question. When we’re talking about freedom, there’s no one-size-fits-all. Do you have a guess? Does your gut tell you that there’s something inside that’s trying to get your attention?”
“It’s a dream.” She said that ever since her cancer diagnosis a few years ago, and even now that her disease was in remission, she’d been having a recurring dream. In it she is preparing to perform surgery. She puts on blue scrubs and a face mask. She tucks her long hair inside a disposable cap. She stands at a sink, scrubbing and scrubbing her hands.
“Who’s the patient?”
“I’m not sure. It’s different people. Sometimes it’s my son. Sometimes it’s my husband or my daughter, or someone from the past.”
“Why are you performing the surgery? What’s the patient’s diagnosis?”
“I don’t know. I think it changes.”
“How do you feel when you’re performing the operation?”
“Like my hands are on fire.”
“And how do you feel when you wake up? Do you feel energized, or tired?”
“It depends. Sometimes I want to go back to sleep so I can keep working, the surgery isn’t finished yet. Sometimes I feel sad and tired, like it’s a futile procedure.”
“What do you think this dream is about?”
“I used to want to go to medical school. I thought about applying after college. But we had to pay for my husband’s business degree, and then we had kids, and then the cancer. It was never the right time. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Do you think I’m having this dream because I should pursue medical school now, this late in my life? Or do you think I’m having this dream because it’s time to finally put the fantasy of becoming a doctor to rest?”
“What appeals to you about medicine?”
She thought before she answered. “Helping people. But also finding out what’s really going on. Finding out the truth. Finding what’s under the surface and fixing the problem.”
“There aren’t absolutes in life—or in medicine. As you know, diseases can be difficult to treat. Pain, surgery, treatments, physical changes, mood swings. And there’s no guarantee of recovery. What has helped you live with cancer? What truths or beliefs are you using to guide you through your illness?”
“Not to be a burden. I don’t want my pain to hurt anyone else.”
“How would you like to be remembered?”
Tears sprang into her light gray eyes. “As a good person.”
“What does ‘good’ mean to you?”
“Giving. Generous. Kind. Selfless. Doing what’s right.”
“Does a ‘good’ person ever get to complain? Or be angry?”
“Those aren’t my values.”
She reminded me of myself, before the paraplegic veteran had brought me to an encounter with my own rage. “Anger isn’t a value,” I told Agnes. “It’s a feeling. It doesn’t mean you’re bad. It just means you’re alive.”
She looked skeptical.
“I’d like you to try something. An exercise. You’re going to turn yourself inside out. Whatever you usually hold in, you’re going to get out, and whatever you usually get rid of, you’re going to put back in.” I took the pad of hotel stationery off the desk and handed it to her with a pen. “Each person in your immediate family gets one sentence. I want you to write down something you haven’t told that person. It might be a desire or a secret or a regret—it might be something small, like, ‘I wish you’d put your dirty socks in the laundry.’ The only rule is it has to be something you’ve never said out loud.”
She smiled faintly, nervously. “Are you going to make me actually say these?”
“What you do with them is entirely up to you. You can tear them up like confetti and flush them down the toilet, or set them on fire. I just want you to get them out of your body by writing them down.”
She sat in silence for a few minutes and then began to write. Several times she crossed something out. Finally she looked up.
“How do you feel?”
“A little dizzy.”
“Topsy-turvy?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s time to fill yourself back up again. But with the things you usually give to other people. You’re going to put all that love and protection and nurturing back inside.” I asked her to picture herself getting very small, so tiny that she could climb inside her own ear. I told her to crawl down the canal, and down her throat and esophagus, all the way to her stomach. As she journeyed within, I asked her to put her tiny loving hands on each part of her body that she passed. On her lungs, her heart. On her spine, along the inside of each leg and arm. I coached her to lay her compassionate hands on each organ, muscle, bone, vein. “Bring love everywhere. Be your own unique, one-of-a-kind nurturer,” I said.
It took awhile for her to settle in, to let her attention move away from the surface experience. She kept shifting in her chair, brushing a stray hair away from her forehead, clearing her throat. But then her breathing deepened and slowed, her body became still. She grew deeply relaxed as she ventured within, her face looked untroubled. Before I guided her back out through her ear canal, I asked if there was anything she wanted to tell me about what she had felt or discovered inside.
“I thought it would be so dark in here,” she said. “But there’s so much light.”
A few months later she called with devastating news: Her breast cancer was no longer in remission. It had returned and was spreading rapidly. She said, “I don’t know how long I have.” She told me she planned to do the inside-out exercise every day so that she could empty herself of the inevitable anger and fear she felt, and fill herself back up with love and light. She said that, paradoxically, the more honest she was with her family about her more negative feelings, the more grateful she became. She told her husband how resentful she had been that his career had taken priority. Telling him openly made it easy to see that holding on to the resentment served nobody, and she found she could see more vividly all the ways he had supported her throughout their marriage. She found she could forgive him. With her teenage son, she didn’t mask her fears about death, she didn’t give him the reassurances that left no room for doubt. She talked openly about her uncertainties. She told him that sometimes we just don’t know. To her daughter, who was younger, in middle school, she expressed how angry sh
e was about the moments she would miss—hearing about her first dates, seeing her open her college acceptance letters, helping her put on her wedding dress. She didn’t repress her rage as an unacceptable emotion. She found her way to what was beneath it—the depth and urgency of her love.
When her husband called to tell me Agnes had died, he said he would never get over the grief, but that her passing was peaceful. The quality of love in their family relationships had deepened in her last months of life. She had taught them a truer way of relating to one another. After I hung up the phone, I wept. Through no one’s fault, a beautiful person was gone too soon. It was unfair. It was cruel. And it made me wonder about my own mortality. If I died tomorrow, would I die at peace? Had I really learned for myself what Agnes had discovered? Within my own darkness, had I found the light?
* * *
Emma helped me question how I was relating to my past. Agnes helped me confront how I was relating to my present. And Jason Fuller, the catatonic army captain who came to my office for the first time one hot afternoon in 1980, who sat silent and frozen for long minutes on the white couch, who obeyed the order I finally gave him to come to the park with me to take my dog for a walk, taught me how to face a decision that would determine my future. What I learned from him that day would affect the quality of my life in all of my remaining years, and the quality of the legacy I have chosen to pass on to my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
As we walked around the park, Jason’s gait loosened. So did his face, every step bringing more color and softness. He looked younger all of a sudden, less hollowed out. Still, he didn’t talk. I didn’t plan ahead for what would happen when we returned to my office. I just kept us moving, breathing, every minute that Jason stayed with me an indication that if he felt safe enough, he might be reached.
After one slow loop around the park, I led us back to my office. I poured us some water. Whatever lay ahead, I knew it couldn’t be rushed. I had to provide a place of absolute trust, where Jason could tell me anything, any feeling, where he knew he was safe, where he knew he wouldn’t be judged. He sat on the couch again, facing me, and I leaned forward. How could I keep him here with me? Not just physically in my office. But ready for openness, for discovery? Together, we had to find a way to move toward insight and healing, a way for Jason to flow with whatever emotions and situations were overwhelming him into catatonia. And if I was to guide him toward wellness, I couldn’t force him to talk. I had to flow with his current state of mind, his current choices and conditions, and stay open to opportunities for revelation and change.
“I wonder if you can help me,” I finally said. This is an approach I sometimes take with a reluctant patient, a tough customer. I take the attention away from the patient’s problem. I become the one with the problem. I appeal to the patient’s sympathy. I wanted Jason to feel like he was the one with strength and solutions, and I was just a person, curious and somewhat desperate, asking to be helped. “I really want to know how you want to spend your time here with me. You’re a young man, a soldier. I’m just a grandmother. Could you help me out?”
He started to speak, but then his throat clotted up with emotion and he shook his head. How could I help him to stay with whatever external or internal turmoil existed without running away or shutting down?
“I wonder if you could help me understand a little better how I could be useful to you. I’d like to be your sounding board. Would you please help me a little?”
His eyes cinched up as though he was reacting to a bright light. Or clenching back tears. “My wife,” he finally said, his throat closing down again around the words.
I didn’t ask in what way his wife was troubling him. I didn’t ask for the facts. I went straight for the feeling under his words. I wanted him to take me directly, deeply, to the truth in his heart. I wanted him to be the person I trusted he was capable of being—a person who could unfreeze and feel. You can’t heal what you can’t feel. I had learned this the hard way, after decades of choosing to be frozen and numb. Like Jason, I had bottled my feelings, I had put on a mask.
What was under Jason’s mask, his frozenness? Loss? Fear?
“It looks like you’re sad about something,” I said. I was guessing, suggesting. Either I was right, or he would correct me.
“I’m not sad,” he muttered. “I’m mad. I’m mad as hell. I could kill her!”
“Your wife.”
“That bitch is cheating on me!” There. The truth was out. It was a beginning.
“Tell me more,” I said.
His wife was having an affair, he told me. His best friend had tipped him off. He couldn’t believe he had missed the signs.
“Oh God,” he said. “Oh God, oh God.”
He stood. He paced. He kicked at the couch. He had broken through his rigidity and was now becoming manic, aggressive. He pounded the wall until he winced in pain. It was as though a switch had been hit, the full strength of his emotion surging on like floodlights. He was no longer sealed off and contained. He was explosive. Volcanic. And now that he was thrashing around unprotected in all that hurt, my role had changed. I had guided him back into his feelings. Now I had to help him experience them without drowning in them, without totally losing himself in the intensity. Before I could say a word, he stiffened in the middle of the room and yelled, “I can’t take it! I’m going to kill her. I’ll kill both of them.”
“You’re so mad you could kill her.”
“Yes! I’m going to kill that bitch. I’m going to do it right now. Look what I’ve got.” He wasn’t speaking hyperbolically. He meant it quite literally. From under his belt he pulled a handgun. “I’m going to kill her right now.”
I should have called the police. The warning sirens I had felt in my gut when Jason first walked through the door had not rung false. And now it might be too late. I didn’t know if Jason and his wife had children, but what I pictured as Jason brandished the gun was the children crying at their mother’s funeral, Jason behind bars, the children losing both of their parents in the heat of one moment’s impulse for revenge.
But I didn’t call the police. I didn’t even call my assistant to let her know I might need help. There wasn’t time.
I wouldn’t shut him down. I would ride the wave of his intention to its consequence. “What if you kill her right now?” I said.
“I’m going to do it!”
“What will happen?”
“She deserves it. She’s got it coming. She’s going to regret every lie she ever told me.”
“What will happen to you if you kill your wife?”
“I don’t care!” He was pointing the gun at me, right at my chest, gripping it with both hands, his finger frozen near the trigger.
Was I a target? Could he take his rage out on me? Pull the trigger by mistake, send a bullet flying? There wasn’t time to be afraid.
“Do your children care?” I was acting on instinct.
“Don’t mention my children,” Jason hissed. He lowered the gun a fraction. If he pulled the trigger now he would shoot my arm, my chair, not my heart.
“Do you love your children?” I asked. Anger, however consuming, is never the most important emotion. It is only the very outer edge, the thinly exposed top layer of a much deeper feeling. And the real feeling that’s disguised by the mask of anger is usually fear. And you can’t feel love and fear at the same time. If I could appeal to Jason’s heart, if I could get him to feel love for even a second, it might be long enough to interrupt the signal of fear that was about to become violence. Already his fury was on pause. “Do you love your children?” I asked again.
Jason wouldn’t answer. It was as though he was stuck in the cross-hairs of his own competing feelings.
“I have three kids,” I said. “Two daughters, one son. What about you?”
“Both,” he said.
“A daughter and a son?”
He nodded.
“Tell me about your son,” I said.
Something broke loose in Jason. A new feeling. I saw it pass over his face.
“He looks like me,” Jason said.
“Like father, like son.”
His eyes were no longer focused on me or the gun, his vision was someplace else. I couldn’t tell what the new feeling was yet, but I could sense that something had shifted. I followed the thread.
“Do you want your son to be like you?” I asked.
“No!” he said. “God, no.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. He wasn’t willing to go where I was leading him.
“What do you want?” I said it quietly. It was a question that can be terrifying to answer, a question that can change your life.
“I can’t take this! I don’t want to feel like this!”
“You want to be free from pain.”
“I want that bitch to pay! I’m not going to let her make a fool of me.” He raised the gun.
“You’ll get your life back in control.”
“Damn right I will.”
I was sweating now. It was up to me to help him drop the gun. There was no script to follow. “She did you wrong.”
“Not anymore! It ends now.”
“You’ll protect yourself.”
“That’s right.”
“You’ll show your son how to handle things. How to be a man.”
“I’ll show him how to not let other people hurt him!”
“By killing his mom.”
Jason froze.
“If you kill his mother, won’t you be hurting your son?”
Jason stared at the gun in his hand. In visits to come, he would tell me what filled his mind at this moment. He would tell me about his father, a violent man who beat into Jason, sometimes with his words, sometimes with his fists, that this is what a man does: A man is invulnerable; a man doesn’t cry; a man is in control; a man calls the shots. He would tell me that he had always intended to be a better father than his father had been. But he didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to teach and guide his children without intimidation. When I asked him to consider how his choice to seek revenge would affect his son, he was suddenly compelled to search for a possibility that, up until then, he hadn’t been able to summon. A way to live that didn’t perpetuate violence and insecurity, that would bring him—and his son—not to the imprisoning seduction of revenge but to the wide open sky of his promise and potential.
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