Hearts are meant to be broken

Your pain

is the breaking of the shell

that encloses your understanding. ~K. Gibran

When I came out of my house the other day, my neighbor and his two little girls approached me. Dad was carrying a bird’s nest and I commented on it. Julia, who is 4 and precocious, piped right up “We are going to have a funeral.” Dad filled in that they had been watching a nesting Mourning Dove pair for a few weeks and were anxiously awaiting the baby birds. “It fell and the eggs got squished!” announced Julia’s older sister Tamara. “Oh no!” I said and immediately my mind went to who knocked it down, who do we need to talk to about, it etc. Julia brought me back though. “Yeah, we are going to go later and scoop the eggs up. They are all bloody.” At that she winced, and then teared up a little, “it’s sad” she said. Her older sister had moved away and dad was ready to talk about the ‘whodunits’ with me, but thank goodness for Julia. Her little heart was broken for these little squished eggs and brought the two adults back to theirs. “I think it is sad too.” I said. Dad adds, “we are going to have a little ceremony later on.” I nod looking at this beautiful open-hearted girl work through her grief at lightening speed. “Maybe we can bury them in our back yard so that we can visit them and they won’t miss their mommy and daddy.” She was sad, feeling the loss of the little birds that she was waiting for and now would never see, making sense of the bloody eggs and what they meant, and sorting out how to deal with the separation that loss brings by burying them close to her. “Maybe we can leave a note for their mommy and daddy birds so they know where to find them?” With that dad and the girls moved into the house talking about why birds can’t read.

What I was reminded of from all of this is that hearts are meant to be broken. Put another way, hearts are never meant to become unbreakable. We are supposed to feel the ordinary losses of our day to day lives and have it deepen our compassion for ourselves and for others. The goal has never been to live unscathed by our pain, even though you would never guess that by what we see all around us these days. It seems like every where we look, especially in the media, we see messages telling us all the ways we can move away from discomfort - physical, emotional and spiritual. We have been conditioned to believe that pain is unnatural, sadness is a problem and that we are supposed to be happy all the time. Not only is that impossible, it would be horrible for our culture if it were possible. The Narcissist would reign, and empathy and mercy would leave our world. It is through our experience of our own pain that we find our way to our humanity, and to letting go of our delusion of perfection.

We all start out like little Julia, openhearted children, vulnerable to our feelings, impacted by the world around us. Then we meet the world of the adults that have gone before us. We are taught, through word or deed, the consequences of having an open heart. Sometimes it is a positive thing, but most of the time it isn’t. We learn to protect our hearts from the world and the other people in it, believing that if we don’t it would not survive the pain of it all. We cover it with layer upon layer of protective batting, or we find a safe place to keep it, away from the world of others hearts. A lot of the time we just find ways to numb our selves to our feelings, period, removing the risk of vulnerability to them. We learn to shift from heart-centered to head-centered and think our way through our relationships and our lives.

There is really no such place as safe when it comes to our hearts, there is only alone. The distance we maintain from our pain translates into our distance from those we love. By risking a broken-heart, or an unprotected one, we allow our hearts to cover the distance to each other that our minds have created trying to keep us safe from feeling. As Stephen Levine said, “The mind creates the abyss but the heart crosses it.”

When the going gets tough, the tough feel

Everyone who knows my friend Jane would say the same thing, she is an angel on earth. Jane is one of the last survivors of childhood polio, and at 60 something, has lived her life with hope, grace and a positive attitude even in the face of multiple surgeries, being wheelchair bound, eventually needing a respirator, developing breast cancer, bed sores, and horrible nerve pain. Not even being bed-bound on a trache for years at a time dented her ability to see the positive in her situation and never despair.

Several months ago Jane was diagnosed with kidney stones in both kidneys. She developed an infection that hospitalized her for over a month during which she found out that they are inoperable because of her physical situation and that she will have to be monitored closely to keep future infections from going septic. It was decided that Jane would need to be transferred to a sub-acute care facility instead of being released back home to home health care. Her family found her a wonderful place and she has gotten better, physically.

In the past 2 months this loving, cheerful, positive woman who had been able to live independently in her family home with her cats and her garden, lost everything but her life. One of her life long friends died. Her beloved cats went to live with family and bonded with them. She was informed that her kidneys were no longer working well and that eventually the stones would block them and they would fail. She was told that it wasn’t safe for her to live in her home even with care and that her care giver of 20 years was not going to be able to work for her any more. Through all of these losses Jane prevailed. Sick, sad, and frightened, but hopeful.

I saw Jane yesterday at her new home. I was impressed by its beauty and cleanliness. Lots of things going on, people awake and involved and the staff was available and pleasant. Jane looked healthier than I had seen her in a year while living at her home. This was great, I thought. Great place, she is in good shape, holding her own. They treated the recent infection quickly and well. All good in my mind.

Jane was sitting up and eating lunch when I came in and we chatted a bit . I mentioned to her that she looked sad and she started to cry. I asked her if she wanted to talk about it and she said ‘What’s the point.” And here it was, despair. I could have tried to sell the wonderful place she was in, or the great care she is receiving. I was tempted to remind her of how much safer she is here and I even may have for a second, but Jane didn’t need to hear any of that. Jane needed to be heard. Jane needed to know that if she wasn’t cheerful, if she wasn’t positive and good, that people would still want to visit. That if, as her lifetime experience of being dependent had taught her, she didn’t act pleasing, and make people like her, she wouldn’t get the care she needed to survive. At the same time, she was angry, and grieving the loss of her life as she knew it, and did not want to be cheerful. She wanted to be pissed off, unpleasant, protest, complain, bitch, moan and carry on for as long as she needed without fear of more loss, reprisal and/or abandonment.

Jane talked about not wanting to live. She said with her kidneys the way they are it is just a matter of time and that it would have been better if her family hadn’t intervened to keep her safe. In that moment I could feel my fear of the loss of her come up in me. I wanted her to live, selfishly maybe, and her despair was new to me and scared me a little. In that second or two I had to make a choice: avoid my feelings and distance from Jane, or feel my feelings and be there for Jane.

It would have been easy to avoid my fear of losing her by getting her to move away from her feelings of despair and anger. I could have pointed out that she was safer here, talk about the future, encourage her to be positive, etc. She would have shifted off her feelings and I would have left telling myself I had helped her , but in reality she just would have just stopped making me uncomfortable with her grief and loss. But that wouldn’t have been helping Jane. Helping Jane in this situation required that I set aside my need for her to make me less afraid of losing her, face that fear in the moment, and accept that it is there along with my love and deep respect for her and what she is going through. Jane needed me to be ok with her feelings and with her not being cheerful. She needed me to just be there, connected to her and letting her have her experience. She needed to know that even in her ‘uglies’, the feelings that she had suppressed all of her life, she would still be loved and cared for.

There are times in our lives when we are faced with our own Jane moments. We fear that if we aren’t pleasing, or accommodating, that we will lose love or the object of love in some form or another. I wish I could tell you that it wasn’t true, but, I don’t know that and neither do you. What I can tell you is that your need to know is important and that risking the displeasure of others to know the pleasure of being true to you is going to be worth it. Maybe not right away, but it will be worth it.

That evening I had dinner with Jane’s family and let them know what Jane and I had talked about that day. They were shocked to hear that she was afraid that if she wasn’t cheerful no one would visit. They all visited the next day and let Jane know in their own ways that she was free to be and feel and express herself to them without any fear of losing their love or attention. I heard from her niece today that Jane felt much better after our visit and able to share her feelings much more freely.

There are so many times in our lives that we run up against a situation that we feel we can neither survive nor change. By being present to the feelings of that place and meeting ourselves with kindness and compassion, we may find that a space opens up for change. Even if that change is just in how it feels to be in it. That by itself can mean the difference between peace and suffering.