The Story that I Didn’t Want to Tell
I recently took part in a class that challenged us to write a version of our life story that could be read in seven minutes. We were encouraged to tell our story from the inside out, or in other words, how you see yourself versus how you might want the world to see you. The goal was to help us see what we gifts we might have to offer the world. I struggled with this exercise because the story I that I wanted to write was not the story that wanted to be written. I didn’t want to admit that this was my story and I wanted to paint a rosier portrait than what my life has actually been. After weeks of excruciating wrangling with myself, I eventually surrendered and allowed the story to tell itself while I transcribed it. It is arguably the most truthful story I can tell about who I am from the inside out. Here it is…
The card reads, “Don’t be a sourpuss! It’s your birthday.” My hope was that my grandmother meant to make me laugh when she gave me this, but the truth was that it was meant to make everyone else laugh. My unwillingness to smile for photos was legendary. I remember the moment I sat for my kindergarten photo in my favorite pale blue velvet dress, which I wore a lot when I was 4. The photographer gave up trying to make me smile and took the photo that made me infamous. But really, it began two months earlier when my father killed himself. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that he died of grief, grief over the loss of his own mother when he was just 6 years old and then placed in an orphanage by his father. And, then grief over his separation from my mother, the second time in his young life that he lost his family in one fell swoop. This is also the moment that I took on my father’s grief, although I didn’t know that at the time. It is just what children do.
Unlike my older siblings, I wasn’t planned. I came into this world at the worst possible moment for my family, so I felt relieved when my mother finally acknowledged what I already knew, that I wasn’t wanted. Before my birth, a diabetes diagnosis pushed my father into a downward spiral from which he never recovered. Even before his death, my mom hit the bars while we waited in the car, drawing pictures on the foggy windows to pass the time. Those were the good times because the rivers of alcohol and rage hadn’t yet converged in her.
I fled my family at the first opportunity to pursue many things but, above all, love. At the end of that road, I found myself face down on the pavement, picking up the pieces of my heart after I abandoned myself to love for the first time. I felt shattered, as I sat across a Buddhist monk dressed as a therapist. With some kind of magic that was not apparent to me, he asked: “tell me something you like about your mother.” As I groped desperately for just one kind word to say, I saw my own, disfigured image in the mirror that he held up for me; a face ravaged by the anger I felt over the neglect and abuses of our childhood. And, if I am being honest, a face ravaged more by the knowing that I was unwanted and unloved. That was the moment I began my journey home.
For decades, I sought answers to questions that were not yet well formed. I spent countless hours in Mexican caves and pyramids and on cushions in Buddhist and Yoga centers, all in search for the God within and without and of the parts of me that I had lost or left behind. I came to know what parts of me I could surrender and what parts I couldn’t without losing myself in the process. As a hospice worker, I sat beside the dying to learn about Love, the immensity of my own heart, the power of compassion and the bonds of love that are possible between two human beings in such moments. I saw into my own innate, unending goodness. But I couldn’t quite reach the part of me that lived in constant, abject fear and dread of what lurked behind every corner, the enemy I couldn’t see.
That is, until I found myself lying on the floor of a barn in Berkeley, looking up at my teacher, a woman who doesn’t call herself a Shaman. In this sacred, ceremonial space, she tells me to let go of the energy of others that I hold in my body. I do my best to name every person whose energy I sense but it doesn’t occur to me to include my father. He has been a ghost for so long that he isn’t even real to me, if he ever was. Then, two months later around 2am on my parents’ wedding anniversary, I am hurled from a deep sleep into an unbearable agony so disorienting that I cannot fathom its source. My body heaves in uncontrollable spasms, tears storm my eyes for two long hours. Somewhere in the middle of this I realize it was my father’s grief that my body was finally releasing.
A few nights later, I am again awoken around 2am by an old and familiar knowing that only ever arises in the space between my dreams: I have done something so horrible that I won’t allow myself to remember it. So, I sit with the question, what could I have done? Soon, I hear my grandmother’s voice, “It’s your fault he’s dead.” “Is this true?”, I ask myself and I sit with the question. Then, very furtively, my four-year-old self emerges from the shadows, disfigured by the weight of my father’s grief and my guilt over his death. I rush to meet and gather her. And again, I hear my grandmother’s voice, “who could ever love you.” And as I sit there with my 4yo self in my arms, I know, I can.
Today, I find myself sitting across from a young man, the son from my first hospice patient. His sadness is palpable, almost unbearable. He is such a sweet, sensitive soul and so, he uses drugs to escape. I feel both his sorrow and my own. Perhaps someday he will invite me to look at his pain with him and if he does, I will bring my 4yo self.