Kevin

–for my friend, who is in pain

I wrote a little at the beginning of the year and didn’t care for it and put it in a drawer. Last week, after speaking to a dear friend of mine who has been in a great deal of pain–really going through it–I turned that bit of writing into a letter to her, and it felt better.

It’s not much, but it’s my love, to her and now to you.

He said, "It didn’t hurt. It was just the truth."

Kevin is an oncology nurse who has been a patient of mine for a couple years. He threw his back out before the pandemic, but stayed on for all the reasons people do. He is a genuinely sweet but fragile man whom I love and root for, with a timid tremble in his voice. He's married and they are happy, but there is still a deep loneliness in him that we all know marriage doesn’t actually cure.

He came in right after he got back from three days with his family for the holidays. At 42, after decades of therapy, medication, meditation, acupuncture, Peloton–healing–he knows better than to stay for three days; the family dynamic isn't good for him and breaks him down after a day or so. Three days is way too long.

He was never particularly close to his dad but it's worse now; his dad barely asks Kevin anything and just dominates "family time" with the smatterings of topics he is most comfortable. And more than that: he drinks, and is filled with rage, which he directs at Kevin’s mother, who has her own anger, and they bicker the whole time. They scream. 

His brothers say nothing, and then they scream, too. Kevin doesn’t say the fighting turns physical but he doesn’t have to. Dishes break. Things are said that can’t be unheard. Tears, and then, vast silence. This is Christmas.

This is old patterns, old ghosts. This is why Kevin’s voice trembles, why he feels like he's made of glass when I talk to him.  These are dynamics that have existed for decades, generations, lifetimes.   

When he was younger he felt like it was his responsibility to make it better; the all-too-familiar story. Now he just goes numb.

As he describes it, he rubs the front of his chest, indicating the numbness is here: across his heart, his solar plexus, his belly.  He leaves himself. He knows better now. This is years of his work–his healing: he can't fix any of it. It's not his job to try.  

On the third morning, Kevin drifted into his annual ritual of regret. He hadn’t unpacked; it was quick to leave. He would rather wait at the airport hours early.

Before he left, he sat down with his mother in the front porch of their home.  They listened to the rain beat down on the metal roof, and watched the lightning that was almost scary. She’s a sweet lady–but dim; unreachable, and ultimately, still a stranger to him.

She said something she never has, in all these years. She should have left her husband, and she regrets it.  She should have left decades ago; she hasn’t loved him in so long she can barely remember what it felt like. She said if she were being totally honest, she should have left them all. She told Kevin she’s filled with anger at herself for not having had the strength back then, and now she’s just too old to do it. 

I know this exchange must have been awful to hear.  For all the years, all the abuse, he still loves his parents so much. I can only imagine how that kind of confession must pick and tear at the scars he has worked so hard to build.

But Kevin said the opposite happened. "It didn’t hurt. It was just the truth. It actually made the pain better." He said it was healing. It made the numbness go away. He felt something delicate open inside him. 

For that split second, electric with lightning, he felt his fraught relationship with his family completely wash away. Sitting there with this woman, in her painful honesty, shifted the alignment of his existence: after all these years, she was no longer "embattled wife and mother" and he was no longer "terrified and overprotective son."  

They were just two regular people, bound together by the spectacular truth of their whole lives. They were just two strangers, trying to make sense of it all, attuned to the awareness of the other’s pain, listening to rain. 

Tears, and then, vast silence.

I dont know what healing is. I hope I never do.

I know the whole world is balancing on the thinnest, most delicate string. We are all dancing so close to the edge of the cliff, mostly forgetting everyone else is, too. We are all hungry for healing that is miraculous. Some pill or diagnosis; some radical transformation and immediate leap; some spectacular truth flashing before us like lightning scorching through the clouds to strike a seed. Sometimes that does happen; more often not.

I think better advice is this: step to the edge of the cliff and look over.

There is a Secret World.

In between the cracks of the real world–nearly invisible; tucked away under all the busy-ness and deadlines and all our idiot, human, quotidian productivity and drama–there is a hidden world that you visit when you slow down; you pay attention; you attend to what is delicate and hurts; and you make space to listen for the spectacular truth of your life. The world of awe. Just listen.

There are lots of ways to get to the Secret World. A poem will take you there, or music, or wind, or loving gaze from a dog–without warning, you are yanked from your regular day, and trip though into the Secret World, into tenderness, and stillness. You are suddenly and entirely in the presence of beauty itself, something true. All self-preoccupation and vanity supplanted by gentleness and precarity. The air is different; your cells transform; you soften, like you have no skin at all.

The Secret World cradles us in its spectacular truth: that life goes too fast, too soon, and there is no rough draft. Every inch of existence is soaked in suffering but it is also soaked in joy, and hope. And every beast that's walked the Earth was a baby whose mother once murmured its name while it slept silently.

When life is unbearable–the violence too great, the grief, the pain, the loss–our memory of the Secret World is what inspires us to keep saying the great yes to all of this. It is the place we say yes from. It is the only world that matters.

My dear friend, I know you’re in it. I know it hurts. I hope that, just for today, you can stand in the world softly, and be undone by awe, by radiance, by praise. I hope you can take a short walk and lose yourself in the inseparable kinship and shared fate with every living thing. I hope you can be with your pain like it is your mother who is also a stranger; sit with it on the porch, listen for its spectacular truth. Wait for it in the rain. I hope you can go to the Secret World.

Just for today, go inward instead of forward. Turn your awareness toward entering instead of fleeing. Turn to beauty: to something fragile, something that doesn’t last.

Let your small self vanish; feel your cells become delicate, permeable and then scatter like vapor in mid-air. And in your unselfing, recognize that you are standing in the tide toward which everything flows, and then flows away, just as everyone who ever lived once did. This life is both entirely yours, and not at all.

Just for today, allow your life to be measured against the weight of a feather instead of stone.