What am I searching for? Where are these moments of paradise?
I am breathing. I look at my hands on the computer keyboard, wrinkled and veiny, the skin losing its elasticity. A memory—of my mother and her grandchildren lifting up the skin on the back of her hand and watching it slowly fall back into place. Over and over again, they would play their game and laugh, and she would laugh with them. Did she think about how fast the years were passing, and did her memory take her back to a time when her skin was smooth and beautiful? Did it pain her to watch her grandchildren playing with her wrinkled old skin? I remember her telling me of looking in the mirror, only to be shocked and saying out loud, “Who is that?” I’ve had the same experience. We look in the same mirror.
The dog stops barking. The wind is moving through the pine trees, the branches lifting up and settling down. I lean closer to the window, craning my neck to look at the crabapple tree, which has lost all of its pink blooms. In the fall, the crabapples fall to the ground and line the walkway by the rose garden, filling the soles of my sneakers with squishy red mush. You would think the birds would eat all the crabapples in the winter, but I think the fruit must be sour. Besides, the birds much prefer the birdseed we put out for them.
A big branch of a tree fell in the yard, and we didn’t even hear it, but it filled a third of our large front yard. After two hours of chain sawing, chopping, lifting, and loading, the branch was gone. The grass is yellow where the tree branch fell and lay dead for several days.
A friend emails to say she misses me and asks to meet sometime soon for coffee.
Murphy, almost twelve years old, sleeps quietly downstairs on her blanket on the back of the sofa. I think I will go hug her, wake her up, look into her sleepy bewildered eyes, and tell her how much I love her and how she can never die because I cannot live without her. She will nestle her head in the crook of my shoulder, and I will lean my cheek against her. We will rest like that, breathing in synchrony, thinking our own thoughts. Then she will wonder if we are going outside and, after we go for a little walk, if she will get a treat.
She has bad breath. I don’t mind. She lifts her back leg so I can scratch her stomach. Her head is warm against my neck.
It is time for a snuggle and lunch and then the gym, where I will meet Pat, and we will talk about our mornings. My back will ache after the workout, and my knee, too. But it feels so good to move that I don’t even register the pain as pain. It just is.
Then back to work and my window that looks out on the world.
So, yes, to these moments of paradise. The day offers them up to me, and I can choose to see them or be blind to them, hold them or let them go, take them for granted or experience gratitude.
A choice. Always, in this life, a choice.
16
coming home
2017
It is mid-November, the wind is strong, and the rain is gathering in thick dark clouds to the west. I look out the window at my rose garden, surprised to see three roses, all on the same bush, perfect, just about to bloom. I put on my coat and pick up my garden shears from the bench on the front porch, just as Pat is walking around from the side yard.
“A little sparrow hawk just hit the window. A kestrel.”
“Is it dead?” I ask, fearing the answer.
“It’s alive, but I think its wing might be broken.”
We walk slowly, hesitantly, to the rose garden. In the far corner of the garden, the kestrel looks at us and flaps one of its wings, moving just a few inches. Then it looks away. Maybe it is gathering its strength, waiting for the moment when it can fly again. But the rain is coming and then the night, and the bird is vulnerable out here in the open, with the owls perched up high in the trees. The bird blinks and stares at the lawn and the sky beyond, not moving.
Maybe—and I know this is a stretch, but still I wonder—maybe the hawk is thinking about “this dying part.” Like Johnny, in a different season, wrapped up in a blanket in the chair next to me, gazing at the light filtering through the greening birch leaves, whispering “beautiful.”
After a moment, I lean down to the rose bush and slowly, gently cut three roses, leaving long stems. I hold them and take a step toward the bird. I get close—close enough to hold out a rose to its beak.
The kestrel is watching me, but I don’t see fear in its eyes. I see connection.
For a few seconds, the bird drinks the fragrance of the rose. Birds, in general, are not known for their sense of smell. They have keen eyesight, but up close, what do they see? What did the little hawk see in the rose? What colors of the rose did it detect—the pink, the yellow, the red? Why did it not move? Why was it not scared? What was it thinking and feeling?
No, no, no, I correct myself. Not an “it.” A “thou.” I am anthropomorphizing, I know. But when I held out a rose to a wounded bird, it turned to the flower, looked in my eyes, and did not show fear. It was an encounter, as Martin Buber would say.
We keep checking on the little hawk, watching it hop to a bush. Just as the light grows dim and darkness descends, we watch it fly unsteadily to the safety of a copse of pine trees. The next morning, the bird is gone. We look for feathers, searching in the pine needles and underneath the bushes, but there is no sign of an attack or a struggle.
“The bird is alive!” I say, with great relief at the thought of the hawk circling high in the sky once again. “Things didn’t look so good, did they? But somehow it lived. What do you think happened?”
“Maybe,” Pat says, “the hawk sensed your kindness.” What an extraordinarily loving thing to say, I think as we walk back to the house. I smile to myself, because I know all too well the other side of kindness that lies within me—the stubborn, quick-tempered, controlling, impulsive, and tactless aspects of my paradoxical personality.
“And maybe,” Pat adds, seeing my smile and perhaps reading my thoughts, “the bird didn’t hit its head as hard as we thought.”
Later that day, I find myself wondering if a bird can sense kindness. If that is possible, if it is true, what does it say for the way we humans interact with each other? When we pass a stranger and smile, what emotions does our expression trigger? When we look into another person’s eyes and hold their gaze, what signals are processed through our brains? When we touch each other, laugh together, cry together, what miraculous chain of events occurs within our minds, our hearts, our souls?
Certain words grab me and won’t let me go. The word soul holds on especially tight. Many people, I know, struggle with the concept of a soul because it’s not something we can prove. We can’t hold it in our hands, cut it out of our bodies, mend it, stitch it, mold or shape it, weigh or measure it, create or destroy it. The soul is beyond our power and control, beyond even our powers to describe it.
A few days before his great friend Dag died, Ben sent him this email.
I’m sitting here with Cali, my boxer, looking out the window and listening to the crows that congregate around my apartment. Sometimes I feel like I lose sight of the little moments in life, the fact that each second we have on this earth is infinitely meaningful. But even though I sometimes forget, I still know in my heart of hearts that if you pause to reflect about life for even an instant, you can see how precious it all is and how lucky we are to have it.
I think the meaning of life is to be broken, to pick up the pieces, and to start living again, as if for the first time. I’m convinced that there is such a thing as “the soul.” It resides in all of us. There’s this movie 21 Grams that I watched when I was new in sobriety and it made a huge impact on my life. There’s a quote about the soul that captures exactly what I believe:
How many lives do we live? How many times do we die? They say we all lose 21 grams . . . at the exact moment of our death. Everyone. And how much fits into 21 grams? How much is lost? When do we lose 21 grams? How much goes with them? How much is gained? How much is gained? Twenty-one grams. The weight of a stack of five nickels. The weight of a hummingbird. A chocolate b
ar. How much did 21 grams weigh?
Your influence on me has weighed a hell of a lot, Dag. How much is gained? Everything. All of the good stuff. Everything I have now has been gained from the fact that you never gave up on me.
It feels like I won’t be okay after you leave, but I think I’ll be okay if I just make sure that I remember everything you taught me. It’s a lot to ask, remembering all of those life lessons. But they’re filed away in the most important part of me, the part that won’t allow me to forget—my soul. And I’ll be able to carry those lessons (and the amazing stories you told) with me, wherever I go. I’ll have the privilege to impart the wisdom and retell the stories to my loved ones, my kids, and their kids.
The soul—the intangible, untouchable, immeasurable, invisible part of us that won’t allow us to forget. I like that. What the soul can’t forget is different from what the mind fails to recall. Like Ben, I believe the soul is the repository of our stories, past, present, and future. The soul remembers not dates or names or facts but who we are and where we belong. When we have gone astray, it is the soul that calls us back to ourselves. When we are lost in grief, in sorrow, in loneliness, or in shame, the soul cries out to us in ways that feel like homesickness or, as William James so memorably phrased it, “torn-to-pieces-hood.” Responding to the soul’s cry, we experience a deep, even desperate, longing for home, for the place where we fit and belong.
I think the meaning of life is to be broken, to pick up the pieces, and to start living again, as if for the first time.
In the detention center, not so very long ago, we were talking about the meaning of life. We rarely talk about the damage that drugs do to the brain, the liver, or any of the body organ systems, because these kids have all heard the facts and statistics many times before. They shrug off those conversations, almost as if to say, “So what? Everyone gets sick, everyone has to die, and if it’s my turn, that’s just the way it is, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Sometimes they add, “And what’s the point of it all anyway? What’s so great about life?” It’s almost as if I am watching them construct a wall to protect themselves.
But when we talk about how their drug use has affected their brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents, the facade slips away. They hang their heads and stare at the floor. They sigh. Some wipe away tears. For a few moments, they are quiet; then, one by one, they willingly, openly tell their stories about how drugs have changed their relationships with the people they love most in the world. It is a relief to tell these stories, and they are the same story, told in a hundred different ways.
One day in group, fifteen-year-old Laura says she doesn’t want to say anything, but she is willing to write down her thoughts. I hand her a piece of paper and pencil, and while the other members of the group talk, she keeps her head down and never once looks up. After group, she hands me what she has written. As I read the words scrawled across the page, I can’t stop myself from tearing up. Her words, a stream of desperate consciousness, contain the deepest imaginable pain; they cry out for understanding, for connection.
I loved my friends. I loved my father. Me and my mom were closer than anything. My brother and I loved each other. No matter how much we got in each other’s hair, he loved hanging out with me. I used to know who I was and at the beginning of all this shit, I still thought I knew who I was. Now I’ve come to realize that I don’t know who I am. I know how I feel and I know what I want. I know where I need to be, but I don’t know who I am. I’ve lost almost everyone in my life. I have no family. I have no friends. I’ve lost everything I had. I don’t blame this on drugs and I’m tired of everyone else blaming it on drugs. I’m tired of making excuses for myself. I know what I have done and I knew what I was doing while I was doing it. I fucked up. And I can’t change that. But everyone fucks up. So if you’re a real fucking person then take me as I am. Accept my fuck-ups because they’re not any worse than yours.
I am in awe of those words, written by a fifteen-year-old. If we distill her statements down to their essence, isn’t this what life is all about? I think Laura would like Ben’s thought that “the meaning of life is to be broken, to pick up the pieces, and to start living again, as if for the first time.” We all make mistakes. We’re human, after all, and if we’re going to be real human beings, we need to accept each other, accept ourselves as we are, and find a way to forgiveness.
Acceptance. We can’t change the past. Sure, we mess up, maybe we screw up big time, maybe we even lose everything that matters to us. But do we give up on ourselves? Do we give up on each other? Or do we stop making excuses for ourselves, stop judging others, and start realizing that we’re all in this together? That’s where the soul leads—to the realization that we are all connected. We need each other. We can’t make it without each other.
It’s the oldest story in the world. Someone stumbles and falls; someone else reaches out to help. In that moment, a spark is created. Between us—in the giving and acceptance of love and commitment—we discover what is beyond us. The South African term ubuntu encompasses this sacred way of life. In Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s words:
[Ubuntu] speaks of the very essence of being human. . . . It is to say, “My humanity is inextricably bound up in yours.” We belong in a bundle of life.
We are all of a piece, no matter the distance between us, no matter the color of our skin, the country of our origin, or the experiences of our past. We are all connected. Ubuntu. I/Thou. We stand in relation, and the longing to find that place where we fit and belong exists before us and will extend after us. We can only find it in each other, in community, in caring for each other, and in the knowledge that others care about us.
What am I seeking? This is Ben’s question, but it is mine, too. I used to be filled with an intense, almost fanatical desire to change the world for people struggling with addictions and for their loved ones. When my first book was published, I believed, with all the arrogance of my youth, that perhaps now, finally, we had a call to arms, a manifesto that would alter the way our country approached addiction and its victims. When that revolution failed to happen—when life, in fact, seemed to get even worse for people living with addiction—I kept writing, book after book after book. Then, when I was exhausted by words, I jumped into the trenches to see if and how I might be able to help.
Then the battle came to me, engulfing my family in an agony of helplessness and fear, threatening to take everything good and strong and kind from the son I love more than life itself. In those ditches, in the muck and the mud and the horror of it all, I learned the most important lessons of all about honesty, humility, hope, faith, gratitude, and forgiveness.
And miracles. I’ve witnessed them, time and time again. I’ve watched as people given up for dead come back to life. I’ve seen men and women, young and old, who could not put one foot in front of the other, stand up and start walking, heart heavy but head high. I’ve witnessed how others, often strangers, step in unbidden to help when we stumble and fall.
Ben is walking in his shoes; it is time for me to walk in my own. For forty years, I stepped into the shoes of my words—shoes that belonged to the world of memory, empathy, chronic pain, alternative medicine, storytelling, and spirituality—but I always circled back to the addiction shoes. They fit me; they fit my life. In some ways—in so many ways—I think the shoes I wore directed my pathway in life.
But now, in this moment in this life of mine, I am ready to walk a different pathway. I don’t know where it will take me or what adventures, grief, sorrow, and joy lie ahead of me. Every journey is a pilgrimage. With each day, there is a night; with each dawn, a twilight; and, gift of gifts, on the darkest nights of all, the stars shine through.
Good and evil exist out there in the world, and they reside also inside me. I do the best I can. I lean toward the good. When I make mistakes, I do the next right thing. I do not expect perfection, for then who would guide my next steps? And why would I want to keep moving if I have achieved all there
is to accomplish in this life?
I seek out gratitude, for gratitude will not find me if I do not go looking for it. I cultivate forgiveness, for forgiveness is a garden that requires a gardener. When life seems meaningless, I turn my head, fighting my fear, and look into the abyss, where I see beauty and the fragrance of a rose staring back at me. When help is offered, I accept it, and when someone, friend or stranger, needs support, I try to be there to extend a hand. I seek to live by grace, which Dag, that wise old soul, defined as “waking up every morning and making the commitment not to judge anyone.”
We are all of a piece. We cannot get through this life alone. To be whole—to be wholly human—we need others to join with us, to tell us their stories, to listen to our stories, to help us, to allow us to help them.
It is all of a piece, this joy and this sorrow, this loss and this gain.
acknowledgments
With gratitude abounding, I thank:
Robyn, Alison, and Ben, my moon, sun, and stars . . . and Pat, who keeps everything in orbit.
Mike, Billy, and Debbie, my brother, sisters, and best friends; and Mom, Dad, and Johnny, who left us all too soon.
Ernie Kurtz, who showed me “a” way but taught me there is no “one” way, and to his wife, Linda, who so lovingly shared Ernie with me all these years.
The staff at the Walla Walla Juvenile Justice Center, especially Mike Bates, Julie Elmenhurst, Norrie Gregoire, Debbie Kelley, and Vance Norsworthy, who gave me a chance and changed my life.
The youth in detention and on probation who are my greatest teachers.
Colleen, who became a friend for life.
The Only Life I Could Save Page 23