STUCK ON YOUR PATH?
ONE OF THE GREAT GIFTS OF WRITING a column is receiving responses from readers that
move me or even push me to think harder or feel more deeply—especially notes like one that arrived after my May/June column on getting stuck was published. The reader wrote to me about becoming stuck in grief. “People talk about losing a parent or a spouse, but not very often about the loss of a sibling,” she wrote. “My brother and I were both caregivers for our 90-year-old housebound mother. My brother recently fell down the stairs, broke his neck, and never regained consciousness. I have trouble accepting the reality of this and how God could let this happen since we really needed the help to care for our mom.”
Her story stuck with me. Imagine you’re in partnership with your brother, dutifully caring for your fading mother. Then your brother/care partner falls dead. There’s your mom’s grief from losing a child on top of your own grief and shock from losing a brother. On top of all that are the now doubled duties of caregiving and presumably additional financial pressures as well. How to answer such a letter? How not to recoil—in part I think because it’s the sort of scenario that can happen to any of us at any moment in time. For me, the note was a reminder that life is always a blink of an eye away from the kind of sudden and irrevocable change that could leave me wondering, How could God let this happen?
I have lost many people over the years. The first was my best friend Jackie, killed at age 19 by a drunk driver who ran a stoplight. To this day I can tear up easily thinking about how much our friendship and all we shared meant to me. Looking back over the decades, I can add up many additional losses as if the equation leads to a certain expertise. And I think it has for me. I have also sat in hospice meetings and read articles and books on dealing with grief and loss. All of that has helped me see the reality of death as unchangeable and permanent, a truth we can take refuge in because we know it’s not personal, it’s universal. We do not know when we will die; we do know, however, that the present moment is precious.
What I’m most grateful for is that I have not developed emotional callouses from my experience with death. I still feel on occasion like the wind has been ripped out of my lung — eliminating any joy or hope and muting any comfort my years of mental mantras normally provide. I still at times sit in the deep sadness of grief. I still experience the intensity or subtle sad feelings as they move through me. My life remains full, and those sad feelings always move through. But in the sadness, I can imagine a time when they don’t.
When my dad was dying of cancer, he would tell me candidly about his pain and his worries about leaving his six kids fatherless, with a widow to raise all of them. He would end by saying, “Paul, please do not tell your mother or others about our conversations. They will be having a hard time with all of this.” I was 25 at the time and I felt lucky that he trusted me, as well as gratitude that I could help my big, strong, always-there father feel less guilt about his pending death. I also felt his love and compassion for others, and that made me strong. Late at night, after the nurses had reminded me many times that visiting hours had ended, I would leave the hospital and walk out into the crisp night air and cry.
“We do not know when we will die; we do know, however, that the present moment is precious.”
When Dad died, my mom kept herself together by making sure her six kids were okay. “I loved your father,” she told me. “But I have no time for grief. I have to go work and hold things together for your siblings.” Her constant doings were a great help to me. Around the same time, I also read Siddhartha, which changed my thinking. Siddhartha concluded that there is little difference between a monk using ascetism to escape the outer-world self and an ox cart driver drinking rice wine. He thought it better to accept the reality of our lives by savoring each moment without judging it as good or bad—to move beyond pain to acceptance. People die, we get sick, suffering happens.
Musing on it now, it reminds me that life is always at the edge of a sudden and irrevocable plunge into what happens. In the scriptures of nearly every religion, it says we attain enlightenment, heaven, and basic well-being through the practice of compassion. Not by receiving compassion, but by taking the suffering and pain of others and giving back love and compassion. Simple. Of course, practicing compassion also means being loving and compassionate toward ourselves as well. It calls us to own our power to transform a moment through listening or action—to make loving choices that express compassion. We can recognize that our actions are loving and honorable because we then feel a warm inner sense of joy, happiness, contentment, and ease. But we can also be practicing compassion and feel completely stuck—like when your brother falls and dies and leaves you to care for your mother alone.
There are of course myriad practical things to do when you feel stuck: write a columnist for help, find a grief counselor, check in with a financial advisor, join a support group, walk with friends, practice yoga, breathe. Plenty of lists exist that share these suggestions and more, and such doings often prove helpful. What may also help is the realization beyond good and bad that you’re not stuck on your spiritual path. Stuck is a path—of compassion.
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