The Book I Cannot Write

The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe. –Joanna Macy

I spoke last fall at a fundraiser for an organization that serves adults with developmental disabilities. Adults like my two sons who live in one of the organization’s group homes and work at one of their sheltered work sites. I spoke about trying so hard for so many years to find a cure for my son's autism...and failing. I spoke about becoming a foster parent to James’s classmate Dan when Dan’s parents died and there was no foster family qualified to take him because of his autism. I spoke about being a single mother with two autistic teenagers, knowing that like Dan’s parents, I, too, would be gone one day, and how terrified I was about what would happen to them.

I spoke about sleeping easier these days knowing that they have a good life in the care of an organization that provides more than I ever could by myself. They work and go out with friends and do everything that anyone else does, with the help of caring and trained staff. I see them most every week, unless they are too busy and ask me not to come. I see that they are thriving.

I spoke about hope. I hope I have done the best I can. I hope that Dan’s mother looks down from heaven and believes that I have honored my promise to her to care for her son. I hope they are going to be all right when I’m gone.

It was a speech of joy and triumph, and immense gratitude. And yet when I spoke, my throat choked up and my eyes filled with tears. My voice quavered as I told my story, and more than once I had to pause and take a deep breath. The sadness is never very far away.

I’ve learned that denying my sadness over the years, being afraid of the enormity and intensity of my feelings, not only deadened the pain, but also deadened the joy. The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering. Our natural instinct is to avoid suffering, to run from it, to escape from it. But we can’t. The four noble truths do not offer a way out, but rather a way through. When my pain eventually broke through, when I got too soul sick to fight it anymore, I discovered that the released pain brought with it into the light the exquisite joy of life, here for us in unlimited abundance, always.

I write about James and Dan sometimes in my blog, little snippets of the story that began 24 years ago and will continue all my life, and theirs. People tell me I should write a book, that it would help other parents. Perhaps it would. But it is a book I cannot write. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because writing little pieces of the story here and there, as I do, does not ask me to leave the present to revisit those dark and deadened times for the extended periods which a book would require. Perhaps it is a story that has already been told, in ways more meaningful and eloquent than my writing skills permit. Perhaps the time for my writing that story is simply not yet. Or perhaps the time has passed. I don’t know.

But I know this. I’ve made my peace with sorrow. It doesn’t go away, but it isn’t scary anymore. I recognize it as the key to unlocking compassion. And compassion is the key to sweet, sweet happiness. Touching that raw place breaks my heart wide open, every time. And in that broken open place, is a deep, deep well, a bottomless well...of love.

Today is the last day of July, so this ends our focus on Step 7–Practice compassion. I hope that you have touched some tender places of joy as well as sadness, places that allow compassion to well up and spill over into your own lives and into the lives of those around you. Some posts this month have prompted comments and emails in which you have honored me and other readers by sharing some of your challenges, so I hope that you will be abundantly generous with compassion towards yourselves.

Namaste.

related posts: Mad/Sad/Glad Game, Game Change