I tell you about how present and involved my dad was in my life growing up because when he was eight, his uncle picked him up at his house to take him somewhere. His cousin was in the backseat of the car, and when my dad asked his cousin where they were going, his cousin said, To the funeral home—don’t you know? Your dad died.
That’s how he found out his dad had died: from his cousin in the backseat of a car on the way to the funeral home. His dad, whom he hadn’t known very well because his dad was gone during the war, had cancer and died at age thirty-four.
When my dad was fifteen, his mother became very sick, and he and his brother thought she was going to die. He once told me that while his mother was in the hospital, his brother clung to him through the night, repeating over and over with terror in his voice, Are we going to be all alone in the world?
She eventually recovered, but then a year later my dad’s brother, who was his best friend and constant companion, died unexpectedly in an accident.
How does a person bear that kind of pain?
How does a heart ever recover?
How does a young man make his way in the world when he’s experienced that much suffering?
Somewhere in the midst of all that pain and loss, my dad decided that someday he would have a family and he would be the father that he had always wished he had. And so that’s what he did.
How we respond to what happens to us—especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over—is a creative act.
Who starts cancer foundations? Usually people who have lost a loved one to cancer.
Who organizes recovery groups? Mostly people who have struggled with addiction.
Who stands up for the rights of the oppressed? Often people who have experienced oppression themselves.
We have power, more power than we realize, power to decide that we are going to make something good out of even this …
There’s a question that you can ask about the things that have come your way that you didn’t want. It’s a question rooted in a proper understanding of the world, a question we have to ask ourselves continually throughout our lives:
What new and good thing is going to come out of even this?
When you ask this question, you have taken something that was out of your control and reframed it as another opportunity to take part in the ongoing creation of the world.
Death. Disease. Disaster. Whatever it is, you will have to grieve it. And maybe be angry about it. Or be in shock. Or shake your fists at the heavens for the injustice of it.
That’s normal and healthy and often needed.
But then, as you move through it, as time does its healing work, you begin to look for how even this has potential. Even this is a blinking line.
I once watched a doctor hold my newborn son upside down by the ankles and give him a shake.
I was shocked.
What? You can do that to a baby?
Because up until that moment I was under the impression that babies were incredibly fragile, like a high-grade combination of porcelain and glass. But the doctor handled him when he first entered the world like he was made of rubber. He did this, I quickly learned, for a very specific reason: He was trying to help my son take his first breath. Because if you don’t take a breath in those first few seconds when you arrive, you have a very serious problem.
And so my boy in all his shiny pink glory hung there, upside down, with strange liquids exiting his various orifices, and then he coughed and gasped and took his first breath.
Remembering that day takes me to another day, this one a decade later. It was a Friday night, August 22, 2008, and my family and I were visiting my grandma Eileen. My grandma and I had been great friends since I was young. When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, she and I had lunch together every Friday for a decade. We, as they say, rolled deep.
But when we went to visit her that evening in August, everything was different. She was in her mid-eighties and her health had been declining over the past year and she’d been moved to a different part of the nursing home where she lived. We knew we were getting close to the end, but I still wasn’t expecting what we experienced when we entered her room. She was lying in bed, her eyes closed, taking long, slow breaths, but something about her was absent.
It was like she was in the room, but not in the room. Here, but already gone.
If you’ve ever been in the room with someone who is dying, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a physical body right there in front of you, but something’s missing. Spirit, soul, presence, essence—whatever words you use for it, there’s a startling vacancy you feel in being with someone you’ve been with so many times before and yet that person isn’t there anymore.
I froze in the doorway, watching her lying on the bed, as it began to sink in that she was at the end of her life. You know someone is going to die because you know we’re all going to die—you know it in your brain. But then there’s a moment when that truth drops from your brain to your heart, like an elevator in free fall, and lands with a thud.
My wife Kristen, however, walked right over to the bed, sat down next to Grandma, took Grandma’s hands in her own, and leaned in over her heart and began to speak to her:
Grandma, we’re here with you now. We see that you’re going to be leaving us soon. We love you and we have loved being with you all these years and now we’re letting you go …
It was so moving.
We spent a few hours with Grandma that evening, and then we left and within a few hours she died.
There is a moment when you arrive and you take your first breath, and then there is a moment when you take your last breath and you leave.
For thousands of years humans have been aware that our lives intimately and ultimately depend on our breath, which is a physical reflection of a deeper, unseen reality. It isn’t just breath we’re each given—it’s life itself.
Before anything else can be said about you, you have received a gift. God / the universe / ultimate reality / being itself—whatever word you want to use for source—has given you life.
Are you breathing?
Are you here?
Did you just take a breath?
Are you about to take another?
Do you have a habit of regularly doing this?
Gift.
Gift.
Gift.
Whatever else has happened in your life—failure, pain, heartache, abuse, loss—the first thing that can be said about you is that you have received a gift.
Often you’ll meet people who have long lists of ways they’ve been slighted, reasons the universe has been unfair to them, times they got the short end of the stick or were dealt a bad hand of cards.
While we grieve and feel and lament and express whatever it is that is brewing within us, a truth courses through the veins of all our bumps and