Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life

by Edith Eger

  Hope really is a matter of life and death. I knew a young woman in Auschwitz who became certain that the camp would be liberated by Christmas. She’d seen the new arrivals dwindle, heard rumors that the Germans were facing major military losses, and convinced herself that it was only a matter of weeks before we’d be free. But then Christmas came and went. No one arrived to liberate the camp. The day after Christmas my friend was dead. Hope had kept her going. When her hope died, she did, too.

  I was reminded of this more than seventy years later, in a hospital in La Jolla, a few months after the release of my first book, The Choice. For decades, it had been my dream to finally put my story of healing on the page, to encourage as many people as possible all over the world to embark on and continue the journey toward freedom. Lots of amazing and affirming things were happening—every day I received moving letters from readers, invitations to speak at conferences and special events and interviews with international media.

  One exciting day, Deepak Chopra invited me to participate in a Facebook Live event he would be hosting at the Chopra Center in Carlsbad. I was thrilled. And because physical maintenance takes time at my age, I immediately went to work. I scheduled hair and makeup appointments so I’d look and feel my best; I pressed my favorite designer suit; and I tried to ignore the painful flares I kept feeling in my stomach, burning cramps that cried out for attention, like the jabs of hunger I’d experienced in Auschwitz. “Leave me alone,” I told my tummy as I fixed my makeup. “I’m busy right now!”

  I got up early the morning of the event and dressed carefully. As I adjusted my suit jacket in the mirror, I imagined my father watching me. “Look at me now!” I told him, smiling.

  But when a friend came to pick me up to drive me to the Chopra Center, she found me hunched over, trying to ride another wave of terrible cramps. “I’m not taking you to the event,” she said. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  I wouldn’t hear of it. “It took me two days to get ready!” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m going to the Chopra Center.” She drove there as fast as she could, and when we arrived, I hurried in, barely managing to greet Deepak and his wife before falling to my knees in the bathroom. I clutched the edge of the bowl, terrified I’d embarrass myself by making a mess on the floor, and then passed out from the pain. The next thing I knew, Deepak was holding my arms, guiding me back into the car, and I went straight to the hospital, where the doctors found that a part of my small intestine was twisted and needed to be resected. I would need surgery immediately. “If you’d waited an hour longer,” the surgeon said, “you’d be dead.”

  When I woke up from the operation hours later, groggy and numb, the nurses told me I was the most elegant patient they’d ever seen coming out of the operating room. Apparently, my makeup was still perfect.

  I didn’t feel elegant. I felt like a helpless infant—delirious with medications, unable to make sense of my surroundings, and unable to move without assistance. I had to push a button for someone to take me to the bathroom and then would wait in fear that a nurse or medical assistant wouldn’t arrive in time. I didn’t feel fully human. I felt reduced to a collection of basic needs—hunger, thirst, elimination—and was incapable of meeting them myself.

  Worst of all, I was intubated and couldn’t speak. To be helpless and voiceless brought back too many horrible memories. I grabbed at the tube, tried to pull it out. The nurses were worried I’d suffocate myself and tied my hands down. Now I was truly terrified. My automatic physical reactions—PTSD symptoms—brought on by the trauma of my past meant that I couldn’t stand being confined. Tight spaces, anything holding me down sent me into panic. My heart raced dangerously fast, contracting before it could fill with blood. Tied down and mute in the hospital, I felt that to continue living was too steep a feat.

  My three beautiful children—Marianne, Audrey, and John—had been by my side since the surgery and tirelessly advocating on my behalf, ensuring my medications were adjusted to keep me as lucid as possible, rubbing my favorite Chanel lotion into my parched skin. My grandchildren visited. Rachel and Audrey brought me a soft robe. They were all taking such good care of me, doing all they could to offer dignity and comfort. But I was hooked up to so many machines. Would I ever be able to function again without them? I didn’t want to be kept breathing if I couldn’t fully live. Once my hands were free, I gestured for Marianne to bring me a piece of paper and a pen. I want to die—happy, I scrawled.

  They reassured me that they’d let me go when it was time, and Marianne pocketed my note. They didn’t seem to understand that I was ready to go now. Later that day Dr. McCaul, my lung doctor, came through on his rounds and said I was looking good. He’d take the tube out the next day, he promised. My children smiled and kissed me. “See, Mom,” they said. “You’re going to be fine.” As the long hours of the afternoon ticked by, and all my monitors and support machines beeped and clicked around me, I tried to convince myself. It’s temporary, I told myself. I can survive this. I dozed and woke up more times than I can count, and then passed a restless, endless night staring out the little square window of the hospital room, sleeping and waking again. The sun rose. I’d made it after all. The tube would come out that day.

  It’s temporary, I repeated, waiting for Dr. McCaul to come and remove the tube. It’s temporary. But when the doctor arrived, he paused, double-checked his notes, and then sighed. “I think we need to give it another day.”

  I wasn’t able to speak to tell him that I didn’t have another day in me. Not understanding how close I was to giving up, he gave me a reassuring smile and went about his rounds.

  I woke up deep in the middle of that night. My whole body was curled inward, shutting out the world. I wondered if this was what it felt like to finally let go. Then I heard an inner voice: “You did it in Auschwitz. You can do it again now.” I had a choice. I could give in and give up. Or I could choose hope. A new feeling washed through my body. I felt three generations—my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—gathering to buoy me up. I thought of Marianne jumping for joy when she visited me in the hospital after Audrey was born, shouting, “I got my sister! I got my sister!” John, whose childhood difficulties taught me that no matter what happens, we never give up. Lindsey’s glowing face when she became a mom. My great-grandson Hale’s sweet voice calling me Gi-Gi Baby. David as a toddler lifting up his shirt so I could kiss his belly button, crying, “Do me! Do me!” Jordan as a teenager acting tough with his friends, then asking for warm milk and honey at bedtime. Rachel’s beautiful eyes gazing at me just that morning as she massaged my feet. I had to live, because I never wanted to stop looking into those eyes! I felt the gift of all of them, the gift of life. The pain and fatigue weren’t gone, but my limbs and heart felt alive, thrumming with the call of possibility and purpose, with the realization that I wasn’t done helping others, that there was more here on this planet that I wanted to do.

  When it’s our time, it’s our time. We can’t choose when we die. But I no longer wanted to. I wanted to live.

  The next day, the doctor came back, the tube came out, and Audrey helped me walk down the hall, pulling all the medication drips and machines along with us. Nurses lined the hallway, cheering me on, clapping, amazed to see me out of bed, determined to walk no matter how much equipment I had to drag with me. Within a week, I was home. When I was strapped in the hospital bed and chose hope, I didn’t know that in a year I’d get an email from Oprah saying that she’d read my book and wanted to interview me on SuperSoul Sunday.

  We never know what’s ahead. Hope isn’t the white paint we use to mask our suffering. It’s an investment in curiosity. A recognition that if we give up now, we’ll never get to see what happens next.

  I thought nothing in my life would surpass the happiness I felt when I found out I was pregnant with my first child. My doctor cautioned me against continuing the pregnancy, afraid I wasn’t physically strong enough to grow a healthy baby or endure childbirth,
but I skipped through the streets after the appointment, barely able to contain my joy that after so much suffering and senseless death I would carry life into the world. I celebrated by eating as much rye bread and raw potato spaetzle as I could hold. I grinned at my reflection in shop windows. I put on fifty pounds.

  In the decades since Marianne’s birth, there’s much I’ve gained and lost and almost lost. All of it has taught me how much I have, and how to celebrate each precious moment, without waiting for someone else’s permission or approval. I am reminded again and again: to choose hope is to choose life.

  Hope does not guarantee anything about what will happen in the future. The scoliosis I’ve had since the war has stayed with me. It affects my lung, pushing it closer and closer to my heart. I don’t know if I’ll have a heart attack, or when I might wake up unable to breathe.

  But choosing hope affects what gets my attention every day. I can think young. I can choose what I do to fill my day with passion—to dance and do the high kick as long as I’m able; to reread books that are meaningful to me, and go to movies and the opera and theater; to savor good food and high fashion; to spend time with people who are kind and have integrity; to remember that loss and trauma don’t mean you have to stop living fully.

  “You’ve seen firsthand the greatest evils of the world,” people say. “How can you hold hope when there’s still genocide in the world, when there’s so much evidence to the contrary?”

  To ask how hope is possible in the face of dire realities is to confuse hope with idealism. Idealism is when you expect that everything in life is going to be fair or good or easy. It’s a defense mechanism, just like denial or delusion.

  Honey, don’t cover garlic with chocolate. It doesn’t taste good. Likewise, there’s no freedom in denying reality, or trying to cloak it in something sweet. Hope isn’t a distraction from darkness. It’s a confrontation with darkness.

  Shortly after I began writing this book, I happened upon a TV interview with Ben Ferencz, who at ninety-nine years old is the last living person to have prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg, essentially the biggest murder trial the world has ever known.

  Ferencz was only twenty-seven at the time. The son of Jewish Romanian immigrant parents, he served in the US Army during World War II, fighting in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. Then, as the concentration camps were being liberated, he was sent in to gather evidence. Traumatized by what he saw, he vowed never to return to Germany.

  He went home to New York and was just preparing to begin practicing law when he was recruited to go to Berlin to investigate Nazi offices and archives for evidence to aid the prosecution of the Nuremberg war crimes trials. As he catalogued Nazi documents, he discovered reports written by the Einsatzgruppen, SS units deployed as killing squads. The reports listed numbers of men, women, and children shot in cold blood in towns and villages all over Nazi-occupied Europe. Ferencz added up the number of dead: more than one million, slaughtered at home, buried in mass graves.

  “Seventy-one years later,” Ferencz said, “and I’m still churning.”

  This is where hope comes in. If he’d clung to idealism, he would have tried to forget the excruciating truth, or buried it in wishful thinking—the war’s over, the world is better now, it won’t happen again. If he’d lost himself to hopelessness, he would have said, “Humanity is ugly. Nothing can be done.” But Ferencz reached for hope. He determined to do everything in his power to affirm the rule of law, to deter similar crimes from ever being committed again, and was appointed chief prosecutor for the United States in the Einsatzgruppen case. He was only twenty-seven. It was his first trial.

  He’s been alive for close to a century, and he continues to advocate for peace and social justice.

  “It takes courage not to be discouraged,” he said. But never give up, he reminds us. There’s progress and change all around us—and nothing new ever happened before.

  I remembered his words when I spoke recently in Rancho Santa Fe, a formerly segregated community north of San Diego where, not that long ago, Jews weren’t allowed to live. Now the community is celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of welcoming Rancho Santa Fe’s first Chabad rabbi.

  If we decide something’s hopeless or impossible, it will be. If we take action, who knows what we might manifest? Hope is curiosity writ large. A willingness to cultivate within yourself whatever kindles light, and to shine that light into the darkest places.

  Hope is the boldest act of imagination I know.

  Seeds of despair abound.

  I survived Auschwitz and Communist Europe and came to America, land of the free, and discovered that the bathrooms and drinking fountains in the factory where I worked in Baltimore were segregated. I’d fled hate and prejudice, only to find more prejudice and hate.

  A few months after I started working on this book, on the last day of Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrating liberation, an armed man walked into an Orthodox synagogue near San Diego, where I live, and opened fire, killing one congregant. He said, “I’m just trying to defend my nation from the Jewish people.” A few months later, in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, my former home, another young white man shot and killed twenty-two people in a murderous act of anti-immigrant, white-supremacist hate. Did my parents die so the past could be repeated?

  I’ll never forget the lurch in my gut when I finished a lecture for a university class in El Paso many years ago, and the professor asked, “How many of you know about Auschwitz?” There were at least two hundred people in that auditorium. Only five students raised their hands.

  Ignorance is the enemy of hope.

  And it’s the catalyst for hope.

  I had the privilege of meeting one of the survivors of the San Diego synagogue shooting a few weeks before he started his first year of college. Born in Israel, he had immigrated to the United States with his family when he was nine. His parents weren’t strongly religious, but he and his father had recently started attending synagogue every Saturday, a practice he found helpful “to think, reboot, refresh, sort of reflect on what I did wrong and right during the week.” The morning of the shooting he was also trying to decide which college to attend, weighing his options. While his father stayed in the sanctuary to hear the reading of the Torah, he sat in the front foyer of the synagogue, his favorite spot to pray and reflect. He was gazing out the window, when out of the corner of his eye he saw a man enter the building, then the tip of a gun, bullets flying, a woman falling to the ground. “Run!” he told himself. He jumped up to flee, but the gunman noticed and ran after him, yelling, “You’d better run, motherfucker!” He found an empty room, dove under a desk, pressed himself to the wood. The gunman’s footsteps reached the doorway. My young friend held his breath. The footsteps retreated. My friend didn’t dare move. He was still pressed against the desk, trying not to breathe, when his father found him. The gunman had fled the building, his father reassured him. But he remained frozen under the desk.

  “I’m going to speak to you, survivor to survivor,” I told him. “This experience is always going to be with you.” I told him the flashbacks and panic usually don’t go away. But what we call post-traumatic stress disorder is not a disorder—it’s a very normal reaction to loss, violence, and tragedy. Though he’ll never overcome what he witnessed that day, he can come to terms with it. Even use it, as we can use everything in life, to fuel our growth and purpose.

  That’s the hope I offer you.

  You could have died, too, somehow. Perhaps there’ve been times when you’ve wanted to. But you didn’t. Hope is the conviction that you survived all that you survived so that you can be a good role model. An ambassador for freedom. A person who focuses not on what you’ve lost, but on what’s still here for you, on the work you’re called to do.

  There’s always something to do.

  My aunt Matilda, who lived to be one hundred, woke up every morning and said, “It could be worse, and it could be better.” That’s how she started each day.
I’m ninety-two, and most days I wake up and feel some kind of pain. That’s reality. It’s part of aging, part of living with scoliosis and damaged lungs. The day I feel no pain is the day I’m dead.

  Hope doesn’t obscure or whitewash reality. Hope tells us that life is full of darkness and suffering—and yet if we survive today, tomorrow we’ll be free.

  KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM HOPELESSNESS

  Don’t cover garlic with chocolate. It’s tempting to confuse hope with idealism, but idealism is just another form of denial, a way of evading a true confrontation with suffering. Resiliency and freedom don’t come from pretending away our pain. Listen to the way you talk about a hard or hurtful situation. It’s okay. It’s not that bad. Others have it so much worse. I don’t have anything to complain about. Everything will work out in the end. No pain, no glory! The next time you hear yourself using the language of minimization, delusion, or denial, try replacing the words with: “It hurts. And it’s temporary.” Remind yourself, “I’ve survived pain before.”

  It takes courage not to be discouraged. There’s progress and change all around us; nothing new ever happened before. Set a timer for ten minutes and make a list of as many things as you can think of that are better now than they were five years ago. Think on the global scale—human rights advances, technological innovations, new works of art. And think on the personal level—things you’ve made, achieved, or changed for the better. Let the work that still needs doing be a catalyst for hope, not despair.