Marrow (14 page)

HOME FROM THE HARVEST. STILL
foggy-brained and tired from the procedure, but I am told I will feel entirely better within a couple of weeks as my cells replenish themselves. Eleven million healthy cells are now in their well-labeled baggie, in a subzero freezer. They will stay there until Maggie is ready to receive them.

I am frozen too—unable to enter back into normal life. Maybe I feel frozen in solidarity with my cells, or maybe it's hard to feel lively as Maggie is preparing for transplant, receiving just enough chemo to kill off her bone marrow but not too much to kill her outright. For these reasons, I am suspended in time, waiting for the green light, for the moment when Maggie's tests come back clear of cancer and the transplant can happen.

I try to describe the stem cell harvest to a couple of friends, but the vampire nature of the procedure makes them queasy. And describing the therapy session is even harder. When I talk about it, people hear it as a challenge. “So you're saying I should confront my father, right?” one friend says after I explain what happened in that room with Maggie and the therapist. A colleague at work shakes his head. “That may have been appropriate for your situation,” he says, “but if we have to go deep all the time at work, meetings will last
forever
. Shoot me first!” And another friend says, “I could never do that with my sister. She would bite my head off. Aren't some people just too nasty to tangle with?”

So I stop talking about the therapy session until I can figure out how to do so without kindling defensiveness. I don't want to guilt-trip people into doing what Maggie and I did. Nor am I suggesting the exact methodology for everyone. Something else might work better for you: a walk in the woods, a chat over coffee, a spontaneous phone call. And I don't want to insinuate that it's safe or smart to jump into the deep end with all people. Some folks are, in fact, too nasty to tangle with. And others are just not ready, or they don't have the patience, or the interest, or the courage. Or maybe you don't. Sometimes we have to do our own healing before mixing it up with another person. Sometimes we have to wait for the ripening—the right time, the right place, the right chemistry. This is on my mind now because ever since Maggie and I aired our truth-aches, I sense truth-aches everywhere, waving their hands like impatient kids in a classroom. I especially feel this when I am with my other sisters. Maybe I'm oversensitive at the moment. Or maybe I'm taking things too personally. This wouldn't be the first time. Even though I know that, nine times out of ten, I should take nothing personally—with my sisters or with anyone else for that matter—still, there are things rising up between the sisters that need to be dealt with. We should probably get in a boat and go down the truth-ache rapids, aiming for the wide-open, calm waters that Maggie and I reached.

I ponder this as I wait for my brain to unfog and my energy to unfreeze. I am interested in the truth-ache questions not only as they apply to me and my sisters, but also for all of us humans in all our relationships. What issues should be addressed, and what is better left unsaid? Who is safe to invite on a river ride? Are some relationships just too wounded to heal? When is the right time to have conversations about hurts and forgiveness, about what we need from each other and what we mean to each other? I don't
want to wait for a life-or-death situation with my other sisters to reveal and heal what is in our hearts. But I also don't want to be a drama queen or an oversharer. I don't want to force depth on anyone, I don't want to pick at a scab that would heal on its own, and I don't want to set myself up to be hurt.

But I do want to have what the poet Adrienne Rich calls “honorable human relationships.” She writes:

An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

My whole body relaxes when I read that last line: “It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.” This tells me to carefully choose the people I invite into the field, to practice with those closest and dearest to me: those with whom I feel safe, those to whom I can reveal my complexity, those with whom I can take responsibility for my past transgressions because I trust they will do the same with me. And by doing the deep, hard work with just a few people, I can grow my capacity to bring all different shades and levels of honor to my other connections as well.

Sometimes bringing a little more honor to a relationship is less
complicated, time-consuming, or dangerous than you may think. Having a simple and direct conversation in real time, as opposed to years down the road, can prevent a misunderstanding from becoming a wedge between two people. Just asking “Why did you say that? What did you mean by that?” can change the course of a relationship. Sometimes a few words sincerely spoken—
I am sorry, I love you, I see you, I was wrong, you were wrong, we both blew it,
etc.—are all it takes. I think people forgo having difficult conversations because they fear they will get trapped into endless quagmires of psychobabble, or that they will discover dramatic wrongs to be righted, or will be blamed for things they didn't do or didn't mean to do.

But I swear to you, most of the time, you don't need an advanced degree in mediation to make inroads into honorable human relationships. When Maggie was treated for lymphoma the first time, I met Dr. Ira Byock while standing on line buying a muffin at the hospital's coffee shop. I shook his hand and thanked him for helping Maggie deal with her pain and anxiety during her monthlong stay in isolation in the cancer wing. Dr. Byock was a professor at Dartmouth Medical School at the time, and the director of palliative medicine at the hospital. I recognized him from the photograph on the jacket of his book,
The Four Things That Matter Most
—a book that had helped me tremendously when Maggie first became ill. After years of helping family members deal with terminal illness, Dr. Byock believed there were only four things people need to say to each other to heal and restore relationships: (1) “Thank you.” (2) “I love you.” (3) “Forgive me.” (4) “I forgive you.” Without trying to implement Dr. Byock's plan, Maggie and I had ended up doing just that in the therapy session: we thanked each other and expressed our love; we asked for and granted forgiveness. And that was enough to transform years of missteps and misunderstandings.

I believe in daring to err in the direction of connection—expressing love, naming the elephant in the room, and asking for and giving forgiveness. Someone has to start the ball rolling because we are all so shy when it comes to emotional intimacy—afraid of being rejected or blamed or exposed. And yet we crave connection; we stand around waiting for it—like awkward teenagers at a dance. It can take the most modest invitation to make magic. In most cases, it's worth a try.

But not always. Sometimes, the process of becoming closer and more truthful is as hard and dangerous as Adrienne Rich says it is. Sometimes it takes courage, as much, if not more, than what we normally consider brave behavior: rushing into a burning building, marching for justice, going to war. I've met many courageous people—activists, elected officials, first responders—who have risked their lives, or stood for justice, or spoken truth to power in war-torn corners of the world, but in their personal relationships, they have run from seemingly smaller confrontations with their mates or kids or colleagues. Big strong guys afraid of marital conflict; powerful women who don't say no to anyone out of fear of not being liked; leaders who have no problem standing up in front of thousands but who are scared to bare their hearts one-on-one.

For many reasons, being vulnerable with our fellow humans—telling the truth about the messy lives we have cocreated—is profoundly challenging and difficult. And therefore, we should not undertake the kind of soul river ride I took with Maggie with everyone. I have learned this the hard way. And I mean the hard way, because I have a very hard head, and it was clonked over and over until I realized that some people are not going to take that ride with me, and in fact should not be brought into my boat unless I want someone to drown (and that someone could be me). Some people aren't safe to
air your truth-aches with because they aren't strong enough in their own sense of self. An invitation to travel deep, to meet in the paradoxical middle of a shared human experience, will feel intimidating, confusing, foreign. With these people it is best to go slowly and lightly—to meet them where they are as opposed to overwhelming them with your need for profundity. It won't ring true. Or it will feel like a judgment or a threat. Meeting another person at his own level of readiness is a form of kindness and respect.

Some people are not safe to invite on a soul river ride because they will push you overboard. They will not take care of your soul because they will meet you with their ego, with their defenses, with their fighter's gloves. They may say they want to meet soul to soul, but what they really want is to go at it mano a mano. When you bare your soul self to someone who is locked in the ego self, you are asking for trouble; you are being naïve; you will create more ache, not more truth. Some people are just too shut down, or angry, or wounded to be trustworthy. Not everyone in life wants to try to go beyond ego for the soul. You cannot force loving, responsible, honest connection on anyone, but you can determine whose heart is trustworthy, and whose isn't.

In determining whose heart is trustworthy, you can use Maya Angelou's naked-person metaphor. “I do not trust people who don't love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you,'” Maya Angelou said. “There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” You can ask yourself, does this person have enough love of himself to know how to love me? Does he suffer from excessively low self-esteem or narcissistic self-regard (two sides of the same coin) to be able to really see me for who I am beyond the roles, the wounds, the past? Will this person be patient enough to hear me out, brave enough to confront me, and
game enough to travel with me to the field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing? Has she demonstrated that kind of self-awareness in other relationships and situations? If the answer is no, then be careful. He or she may be a naked person offering you a shirt. A person cannot give you what he doesn't have.

Another heart you must investigate is your very own; you must test your own trustworthiness. Sometimes we think we're more genuine in our motivation than we really are. Sometimes we're manipulating others as opposed to truly wanting to grow a new kind of relationship. I am taking a vow after my experience with Maggie in the therapy session: I vow to apply Maya Angelou's metaphor to myself first and foremost before venturing into the field with another person. Am I ready to do this? Do I really plan to take responsibility for my side of the story? Or am I pushing an agenda? Am I too hurt, too impatient, too needy, too reactive, too confused to listen well and speak the truth? If so, then it's better to say nothing, to wait, to do my own inner work before inviting this kind of exchange with someone else.

And at the same time, I remember what Maggie said in the therapy session: “You don't have to be perfect to be a perfect match.” None of us does. We don't have to achieve sainthood before meeting in the field. We don't have to wait for someone else to magically transform before inviting him on the journey. Even if the invitation is met with a big fat “no,” it will have been better to err in the direction of connection. Then you can make an informed decision about the relationship. You know how far you can go, what you can give and receive.

Bottom line: Err in the direction of connection, but be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

I DON'T MEAN TO SAY
that every conversation we have must be deep and meaningful. God forbid. I'm all for harmless gossip and funny repartee, debate and argument. I engage in my fair share of unrehearsed confrontations, rants, jokes, and off-the-cuff running of the mouth. These kinds of communication are part of the repertoire; they make us human. But if they are the only ways we reach out to each other, we betray the power of language, which has the capacity to connect us soul to soul. We would be wise to remember the deeper language, because without it, we make such a mess of our shared lives, telling old, worn-out stories or using words as weapons or as ways to hide. How you use your words matters.

Human beings began talking to each other fifty thousand years ago. I like to imagine those early conversations—a small band of people motioning and grunting around a fire, or pointing at the stars, or laughing at an early attempt at a joke. Giving names to things, alerting each other to danger, expressing pleasure, teaching, complaining, arguing, and evolving the species into Planet Earth's great communicators—masters of poetry and polemics, oratory and talk shows.

But still, we barely know how to say what we really mean. I sit across the table from my husband, this man I have lived with for almost thirty years. Inside my head a cauldron of thoughts bubble and brew. My heart is alive with changing feelings, at one moment
loving, at the next petty. I try to find words to carry the thoughts and feelings out of myself on a boat of language, and sail them into my husband's harbor, where we can commune and experience our differences and our oneness. The words form, they come out of me, they float across the dinner table, and they land at my husband's port of call. Sometimes they come close to expressing what I want to say, sometimes he hears them as I meant them, but quite often the words I wrap around my innards might as well be the grunts of the first humans.

How is it that fifty thousand years later humans are still learning to talk to each other? The problem isn't just our clunky way with words or our lack of listening. The bigger problem is that we are speaking from the surface of our self to the surface of the other person's self. From one reptile brain to another. From one ego to another ego. Reptiles and egos defend or attack. When language is sourced from the surface, our words add to the general confusion of the world. How could they not? Our shallow thoughts and feelings are a jumble of desire and love and need, mixed with fear and defense and reactivity. No wonder monks and nuns of all wisdom traditions take vows of silence. One of the first Indian gurus I met was an old man who had not spoken a word since he was twenty. He used a small chalkboard to communicate in blunt, pithy sentences. Someone asked him once why he didn't speak, and he printed carefully on the little board, “To stay out of trouble.”

But humans long to communicate. It's as strong a pull as gravity, this need to find each other through words. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks writes in his foreword to Susan Schaller's book,
A Man Without Words
, “language is an extraordinary coming-together of two people on either side of a great divide.” Prisoners in solitary confinement create their own form of Morse code on
the walls of their cells, sending out an SOS to anyone who will listen and connect. In
A Man Without Words
, Susan Schaller writes about her experience working as a sign language interpreter in Mexico. In a rural town she encountered a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican-Indian man who was born profoundly deaf and had never been taught even the most basic language. Schaller felt compelled to teach him what Oliver Sacks calls “the essentially human birthright of language.” In an interview Schaller described the moment the deaf man suddenly grasped the meaning of his first sign: “He just went crazy for a few seconds, pointing to everything in the room and signing whatever I signed,” Schaller recounted. “Then he collapsed and started crying, and I don't mean just a few tears. He cradled his head in his arms on the table . . . sobbing.” She writes about that moment in the book: “He had entered the universe of humanity, discovered the communion of minds . . . He could see the prison where he had existed alone, shut out of the human race for twenty-seven years.”

Given how much we crave communication, you'd think we'd put a premium on studying, practicing, and teaching ever more soulful ways of talking and listening to each other. Talking about love and hate, about fears and needs, about thorny and tricky and touchy things. Giving words to both the darkness and the light in our hearts; hearing the other's point of view; telling each other our deeper feelings before they turn into intractable divisions; praising and pleading and asking and explaining so that we can make our way together through the labyrinth of our lives. It always amazes me that there are colleges for war and not colleges for the opposite of war, which I believe isn't a kumbaya kind of peace but rather a mature and studied capacity to talk wisely and listen openly to each
other, to use the human birthright of language to reach across the divide. It seems like such a lapse in rationality that society would study how to fight with weapons but not how to put them down and pick up “the word.”

“In the beginning was the Word.” Biblical scholars interpret that line in a variety of ways. I understand it to mean that there is a deeper word within all of us. A deeper language, the soul's language, the language of love and clarity. “In the beginning was the Word”: discerning, fearless, luminous, kind, wise. The light of consciousness dawned in human life with the language of the soul. Without that kind of language we are in darkness; we are trapped in our egos, unable to truly know ourselves and each other.