Marrow (2 page)

IT STARTS ON AN AUGUST
day, above Flathead Lake in Montana, just a few moments before I head to a wedding I am to perform. Not that I have any right to marry people. “I'm a writer, not a minister,” I told my young friends when they asked me to officiate. But they didn't care. I have known them both since they were children. Our lives are linked through my kids, who are their close friends, and their parents, who are my close friends, and through a tribe of other friends with many years behind us. And now we are all here, in Montana, to celebrate another link in the chain.

I am standing in the driveway of the house my family is renting, looking out at the enormous lake bordered in the distance by the jagged peaks of the Northern Rockies. As I wait for my husband and sons to join me, I take it all in: the sun illuminating the snowfields across the lake in Glacier National Park, the big sky, the grand expanses. It's a dramatic, impersonal landscape—the kind of place that takes my New England breath away.

My cell phone rings. I think of turning it off. I'm on vacation. It's a special day. My children are here, my closest friends. Who would I need to talk to? I check to see. A Vermont number. My sister. And so it starts:

“Liz? It's Maggie.”

“Maggie?” I ask. Her voice is lower than usual. Dark. My heart jumps a beat. Maggie's voice is never dark. She is one of those people who seem to have descended from hummingbirds. She is tiny and light, and she never lands long enough for you to really
know what's going on in her head. Always moving. Always chipper. Here. There. Gone. Back again.

“What's the matter?” I ask.

“I'm sick.” That's all she says. A landscape bigger than Montana opens up between us. We both fall in.

“Sick? What kind of sick?”

“Cancer,” she whispers. “I'm very sick.”

Now it's her words that take my breath away. Finally I ask her what has happened and she tells me a jumbled tale of having weird symptoms, ignoring them, thinking they were one thing, and then finding out they were something quite different. Cancer. Lymphoma. The kind she will die from soon if she doesn't start treatment.

If anyone should not have to get cancer at this very moment, it is my little sister Maggie. After years of being married to the boy next door, the high school sweetheart, the man who has defined her, my sister is quite suddenly a single woman, unattached, on her own. A woman who created a storybook home is now homeless—house-sitting here for one friend, and there for another. Her college-age children are like planets cut loose from gravity. Is it better for Maggie that our mother died recently and our father a few years previously? That she doesn't have to face their worry about her illness, their judgment about her failed marriage?

I feel something pulling at me from across the country, but even more so from deep within. As if there is a buried magnet in my body, quivering to the pull of my sister. What is the deepest part of the body? Is it the blood? The bone? The marrow of the bone? I don't even know what that means: the marrow of the bone. I will find out later.

THIS BOOK IS A LOVE
story. It is primarily about the love between two sisters, but it is also about the kindness you must give to yourself if you are to truly love another. Love of self, love of other: two strands in the love braid. I have braided these strands together in all sorts of relationships, in varying degrees of grace and ineptitude. I've messed up in both directions: being self-centered, being a martyr; not knowing my own worth, not valuing the essential worth of the other. To love well is to get the balance right. It's the work of a lifetime. It's art. It's what this book is about.

When my sister's cancer recurred after seven years of remission; when we were told her only chance for survival was a bone marrow transplant; when test results confirmed I was a perfect marrow match; when we prepared ourselves, body and soul, to give and receive; when my marrow was harvested; when she received my stem cells that would become her blood cells; when we traveled together through the thickets of despair and hope; when she lived what she said was the best year of her life; when the cancer returned; when she faced the end; when she died; when all of this happened, I took up the strands of myself and braided them together with my sister's strands, and I finally got it right. Although “getting it right” sounds more tidy and final than love ever is. There is no ten-ways-to-get-it-right list when it comes to love. No exact formulas for when to be vulnerable and when to be strong, when to wait and when to pursue, when to relent and when to be a relentless love warrior. Rather, love is a mess, love is a dance, love is a miracle. Love is also stronger than death, but I'm only learning that now.

I must add here that there was another strand that my incredibly brave sister added to complete the love braid and, in doing so, inspired me to do the same. It is the secret strand, the one the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called “amor fati”—love of fate. Nietzsche described amor fati as the ability not to merely bear our fate but to love it. That's a tall order. To be human is to have the kind of fate that doles out all sorts of wondrous and horrible things. No one gets through life without big doses of confusion and angst, pain and loss. What's to love about that? And yet if you say yes to amor fati, if you practice loving the fullness of your fate, if you pick up the third strand of the love braid, you will thread ribbons of faith and gratitude and meaning through your life. Some will reject the idea of loving your fate as capitulation or naïveté; I say it's the way to wisdom and the key to love.

When I talk about love, I am not talking about romance. Romance is good. I like it a lot. It's fiery and fun. But it is merely one sliver of the love story. It's a mistake to reduce the whole ocean of love to a little flame of romance and then spend all of one's energy trying to keep that flame from burning out. In doing so, we give short shrift to the vast majority of our love relationships: parents, siblings, children, friends, colleagues, and, of course, mates after the initial passion has mellowed. Trying to sustain fairy-tale romance is a foolish quest. But you can sustain a different kind of love across a lifetime with a whole motley crew of people. It takes guts to love well, and it takes work to sustain important relationships, but I promise you, it is possible, and it's what our hearts are really longing for.

You may be thinking of dulled or bruised or ruined relationships in your life as you read this. You may be thinking, she doesn't know
my
sister, my brother, my ex, my kid, boss, friend, mate. And you may be right—it is not possible to heal or sustain every
relationship. Sometimes we have to end things, or do the work of healing on our own. But I propose that most of our significant relationships can be mended, sweetened, enlarged. And I propose that deepening one relationship can unlock all sorts of goodness in your life—with other people, with your work, with your fate.

I propose this to you because my sister and I had a relationship comparable to most human relationships. We were imperfect people, with qualities that both supported and eroded our abilities to love. We were similar in some ways, yet also different enough to misunderstand each other, to judge each other, to reject each other. Sometimes we were close, and sometimes we were strangers. And like most people—and certainly like most siblings—we carted around with us bags of old stories and resentments and regrets. We dragged those bags from childhood into adulthood, into other relationships, into our work, into our families. We believed the stories in the bags—the tales we had heard about ourselves and told about each other. We had never unpacked those bags and showed each other what was in them.

Until we had to.

IN THE YEARS
between my sister's first cancer diagnosis and her last recurrence, she lived a remarkably full life. She re-created a home for herself and her new man; she rededicated her life to her children and her work and her art; she overcame several serious health crises; and she learned to manage the fear and pain that come with being a cancer survivor. Her life stabilized, as did our relationship and my own life. During that time I did what many writers spend their time doing: I started several books, but never finished them. With my first two published books, I had used my own life as the story line. But I was sick of talking about myself. So
I decided to write a novel. That way, I could hide my story (and the stories of the poor people who have the misfortune of being related to me) behind created characters. But fiction is a different beast, and I couldn't wrestle a novel to completion. I started a fable and then a collection of essays, but nothing gelled.

The book I most wanted to write was about authenticity—the idea that beneath the chatter of the mind and the storms of the heart is a truer self, an essential self, a core, a soul. Call it what you like, but life has brought me to the point where I know that the striving and insecure ego is not the whole truth of who I am, or who you are. More and more, in glimpses caught through meditation and prayer, through acts of kindness and courage, and sometimes just by having a cup of coffee in the morning or a sip of wine with friends, I find myself quite suddenly in touch with a fullness of being that wakes me out of slumber. It's as if God is calling roll and I shoot up my hand, saying “Here!” This can happen at the oddest times. I'll be wheeling my cart through the grocery store or driving home after a long day at the office when grace descends and I am relieved of the illusion that I am merely a cranky, imperfect, overextended person. Instead, I sense a more dignified being hiding behind the assumed roles—a noble soul, riding faithfully through the human experience, related to everyone and everything, aware of the splendor at the heart of creation.

I wanted to write a book about
that
self—the soul self, the authentic self, the true self. I wanted to explore why we forget who we are, and how we can remember. I'd been thinking about this book for a long time, at least for as long as I have worked at Omega Institute, the retreat and conference center I cofounded in 1977, when I was still in my twenties. Through my work I have been exposed to a wide array of people—hundreds of thousands of workshop par
ticipants from all over the world, and the noted authors and artists, doctors and scientists, philosophers and spiritual teachers who come to Omega to help people heal and grow. It's been a good place for me to work because I'm an unapologetic voyeur. I've never doubted my purpose in life: It's to watch people. It's to ponder what the hell works here on Planet Earth and why it's so hard to put seemingly simple instructions for living into everyday actions—instructions like the Bible's “Love your neighbor as yourself” or Shakespeare's “This above all: to thine own self be true.”

When you get down to it, the most widely accepted adages that have guided human beings across the ages all focus on the same ideas: to love the self, to give of the self, to be true to the self. But there's a problem with these guidelines: They presuppose you know what that self is. Someone forgot to mention the long process of uncovering the shining seed at the center of your identity. Being true to that self involves sifting through the layers of bad advice and unreasonable expectations of others. It requires seeing through your own delusions of grandeur or your fear of failure or your impostor syndrome or your conviction that there is something uniquely and obviously screwed up about your particular self.

My first job in life was being a midwife. I delivered enough babies to know that every one of us comes into this world in possession of a radiant, pure, good-to-the-core self. I witnessed this each time I touched the skin and looked into the eyes of a brand-new baby. I saw his self. I saw her soul. I sensed in each baby an essential self like no other self before it—a matchless, meaningful mash-up of biology, lineage, culture, and cosmic influences we can barely fathom.

And then we grow up, we become adults, and we spend so much of our time uncomfortable in our own skin—almost embarrassed at being human. We devalue and cover the original self, layer by
layer, as we make our way through life. I wanted my next book to be a travel guide through the great journey of uncovering. “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself,” the civil rights leader Howard Thurman wrote. “That is the only true guide you will ever have.” What better thing to write about than the act of listening for and then following
the only true guide you will ever have
?

But something was stopping me as I put fingertips to keyboard. Perhaps it was my ambivalence about much of the literature of “authenticity.” There's a nagging narcissism to it. A book about being true to the self can read like a manual for joining a cult of one. Try to write about it and you're smack-dab in the middle of a perennial paradox: how knowledge of self, and love of self, and esteem of self go awry if they don't lead ultimately to understanding and respect and love of others.

And then there's the sticky question of “What is the self?” Is it merely a bundle of neural impulses held together by flesh and gravity for a tiny flash of time? And when the flash burns out, does our body turn to dust and our personal ego dissolve into the cosmic soup? Or is each one of us more substantial than that? Are we spiritual beings having a human experience? Does our soul continue once released from the confines of body and ego? And when, as human beings, we listen for guidance from our authentic core, is it really the eternal soul whose song we hear?

Even though I knew I would never definitively answer these questions (since no one ever has), I wanted to dive as deeply as I could into the mystery. The questions may have no firm answers, but the search for them brings us closer to the kind of life each of us yearns for. I may not be able to answer the big questions, but I do know a few things for sure: I know that people who have
tasted the dignity and goodness of their own true nature are more likely to see and respect the dignity of others. I know that if I have an authentic self that is noble and sacred, then you have one too. This may sound like a no-brainer, but it's one of humanity's biggest stumbling blocks—this sense of me against the other. Instead of traveling side by side, helping each other as we fall and being inspired by each other as we rise, we defend ourselves; we attack; we try to go it alone. Instead of reveling in one another's shining authenticity, we compete, as if there is a limited amount of shine in the world, as if the only way to see the shining self is against the backdrop of a diminished other.

This became my most compelling reason to write about authenticity. To link up the liberation of the genuine self with the healing of our relationships and the mending of our human family. For all of the marvelous technological ways of connecting to each other, there's still so much loneliness, misunderstanding, and disconnection in the world. Connection is a basic human need. We want to be understood, seen, accepted, loved. We want to matter to each other. We want to relate, soul to soul.

And so I fumbled around, trying to craft a book that could shine a light on the path that leads to the authentic self, a self that defies description yet begs to be revealed. “One can't write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf lamented in her diaries. “Looked at, it vanishes.” Still, I wanted to look.

WHEN I WON
the cosmic lottery and tested as a perfect match for my sister's bone marrow transplant, I did what I often do when I'm scared: I became an amateur researcher. I do not like to bury my head in the sand. Rather, I like to arm myself with knowledge, even if in the end the knowledge can become its own form of sand
in which I bury myself. But in this case, the research I did into bone marrow, stem cells, and the miracle of transplant went way beyond the acquisition of knowledge. And what my sister and I experienced was much more than a medical procedure.

My research revealed to me that bone marrow transplants are fraught with danger for the recipient. For months after the procedure my sister would face two life-threatening situations. First, her body might reject the stem cells that would be extracted from my bone marrow and transplanted into her bloodstream. And, second, my stem cells, once in my sister's body, might attack their new host. Rejection and attack. Both could kill her. The medical professionals were doing everything they could to ensure neither would happen. What if Maggie and I could help them? What if we left the clear sailing of the bone marrow transplant up to the doctors, and conducted a different kind of transplant? What if we met in the marrow of our souls and moved beyond our lifelong tendency to reject and attack each other?

People have said I was brave to undergo the bone marrow extraction. But I don't really think so—you'd have to be a miserable, crappy person to refuse the opportunity to save your sibling. But getting emotionally naked with my sister . . .
this
felt risky. To dig deep into never-expressed grievances, secret shame, behind-the-back stories, blame, and judgment wasn't something we had done before. But my sister's life hung in the balance. And so, over the course of a year, sometimes with the help of a guide but mostly on walks and over coffee, just the two of us, and sometimes with our other sisters, we opened our hearts, we left the past behind, and we walked together into a field of love.