Marrow (23 page)

She kept all the people in her life—husband and friends and kids and sisters and colleagues and customers—juggling in the air. If she dropped a ball, she'd recoil from the conflict, and run from the relationships, and confound the people she loved. And when she finally summoned the courage to tell her husband what had been brewing in her heart for years—the fear, the anger, the plans to leave—he was stunned and incensed. When the marriage ended, there was a whole family of shell-shocked people. And the truths she had repressed felt like a toxic substance in her body.

And with us, her sisters, she felt those same toxins eating at her. For years, she says, she would tell me one thing, and then something altogether different to another sister, throwing us both under the bus so as not to hurt anyone in the moment, so as not to be the bad guy, but now, as the bus neared the terminal, she saw how her terror of telling the truth was about to run everyone over.

“I've created a monster,” she says.

“Could you get more specific?” I ask.

“Oh, for instance, I was afraid to tell Jo not to visit me because I am sick of her trying to be my therapist, so I made you tell her for me, and then I told Jo you were bossy.”

I laugh. “I am bossy! And Jo's a therapist in real life and doesn't
know when to stop. None of us knows when to stop overdoing what we do! We can't see ourselves. We need help. It takes guts to point someone in a better direction, but it's one of the kindest things you can do.”

“I know,” Maggie says. “I know. I understand. I get it. But what do I do now? There is so much left to say. No time to say it. No energy either.”

“Like what? Say it to me.”

“Like clearly telling the kids and Oliver who I want to get what, who I want to take over my business. I'm afraid to do this. So I've said all sorts of different things. And like explaining myself to all the people I've told to stay away. I don't have the energy now. I don't want to care anymore. I'm too tired.”

“That's OK, Maggie,” I say. “You don't have to say anything to anyone. That's not the point.”

“Then what's the point?”

“The point is to let yourself off the hook. For once. To know you did your best, and it was pretty damn great. Can you forgive yourself for being a normal, screwed-up person? Just like the rest of us? We all have screwed up in our own special ways. But you have a lot more fantastic things to pay attention to now. Just look at your life! Your wild and beautiful life. Your generous life. Not a perfect life. Remember? Remember how you told me I didn't have to be a perfect person to be your perfect match? You don't have to be a perfect person to be our perfect Maggie.”

“Do you really believe that, Liz? Or are you just saying it to make me feel better?” Maggie asks.

“I really believe it. It may be the only thing I know for sure.”

Maggie stops talking. I hear her fluid-filled lungs working hard.
Then she says, in a gurgled whisper, “Tell me what else you know for sure, Liz.”

“OK,” I say, “but can you send me a sign from the other side and let me know if I was right?”

“No promises,” Maggie says. “Just talk. Just tell me what you know.”

“Well, I know your life may look like a mess to you, but it actually all adds up to exactly what it was supposed to be. To what you needed to learn this time, and what the people around you needed to learn. I know that. I know we're all in this together, for a reason, for a purpose. That we are all each other's perfect match. And that you will take your lessons with you as you head out into the light. And you will leave us with so many gifts, Maggie, even the ones you call the mess.”

“I want to believe that,” Maggie says. “But I don't know. And I don't know how to be with everyone in the meantime. I just want them to stay away. When it comes time for me to die, I want to be alone.”

“No, you don't,” I say. “That's another thing I know for sure.” She coughs and I hear a nurse talking to her. I wait.

“I feel like I'm drowning,” she says to me.

“Do you want me to come?” I ask.

“No,” Maggie says. “I need to be by myself now. But keep talking to me, Liz. Tell me what else you know. Tell me what to do. Teach me how to meditate again.”

I say what first comes to my mind. I talk about the four Lesser girls—her perfect matches, her sisters who love her unconditionally. “When you feel like you're drowning,” I say, “imagine us at the beach. Four little girls at the ocean's edge. Remember?”

“Mm-hmmm.”

“Sit there with us, with your toes in the water. Then, see if you can just let the waves drag all your anger and fear and regrets out to sea, and then let the new waters flow in. Let the bright next world come and get you. You don't have to know anything for sure, Maggie. Because, in the end, we can't really be sure about anything. But you can trust. You can relax. Just rest on the shore, with us. OK? Maggie?”

She doesn't answer. I hear the nurse talking to her, taking the phone, gently hanging it up.

I light a fire in the fireplace and I rest in my own not knowing. I think back to when I was a midwife and my laboring mothers would look at me with great expectation, grab my arm, and ask with an intense need to know: “WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER??” And I would assure them that indeed the labor would be over at some point, that there would be a baby at the end of the tunnel, but until then, the best way to speed the process would be to relax into the pain, to surrender to the fear, and to embrace the mystery of not knowing. In return, the laboring women would snarl at me until another contraction rolled in like a tsunami. Days later, the new mother would tell me that she had hung onto my advice to surrender to the unknown, that it was the only thing that helped.

“You sure didn't act like it helped,” I'd say. “You almost bit my head off!”

But the women assured me that the reminder to surrender—to the pain, to the fear, to the unknown—got them through. So I will continue to tell Maggie what I told my laboring mothers. Even when she loses the energy to snarl, even when she can no longer speak, I will tell her these few things I know for sure, and I will pray I am doing right by her—that when she wakes up on the other side, my words will have given her solace and strength.

IN ALL MY YEARS OF
spiritual study, I've come across a lot of practices: breathing practices, chanting practices, prayer practices, healing practices. But the practice I've benefitted from the most, and the one that consistently reminds me to surrender to the unknown, is the practice of meditation. A student asked the Buddha why he should meditate, and the Buddha answered, “Come and see.” That's the best advice, because meditation is an experience. But if you are like me, you need more than that; you like to know why; you enjoy some science with your spirituality.

Here's one “why.” It's a why that resonated with Maggie. Researchers at the National Science Foundation report that the human brain processes twelve thousand to sixty thousand thoughts per day and that a large percentage of those thoughts are negative and repetitive. We obsess about mistakes we've made in the past and worry about future worst-case scenarios. We run those thoughts through grooves in our brains all day long, and then again the next day, until they're so well-worn that we live in a negative story about the past or an anxious scenario of the future.

The brain studies into repetitive thinking are being done by psychoneuroimmunologists, medical researchers looking to help people strengthen their immune systems. They are finding that if you can interrupt the stream of repetitious thoughts in your head,
you are less likely to contract illness—from a cold to cancer—and more likely to increase levels of concentration, calmness, and happiness. This is why they are spending millions of research dollars looking into the very common and very boring content of our brains. And this is one of the reasons I cherish the practice of meditation. But there's another reason to meditate—another “why”—and it's not as easy to describe. Besides bringing peace to the mind and health to the body, meditation also opens a window to a whole other reality, one that our busy minds obscure.

Many philosophers and scientists believe that the brain does not generate consciousness; rather, it functions as a filter. Aldous Huxley called the brain a “reducing valve” for infinite consciousness. The contemporary British physicist and astronomer David Darling writes, “The major organs of the body are regulators. The lungs don't manufacture the air our bodies need; the stomach and intestines are not food-producers. So, if we manufacture neither the air we breathe nor the food we eat, why assume that we make, rather than regulate, what we think?”

In the stillness of meditation, we touch the realm of unregulated, unfiltered, infinite consciousness. And what a realm it is! Vast and free. By quieting the brain's repetitive and habitual patterns, we can stop believing and reacting to everything we think, which is really a reduced, compressed, and tense form of something way more enjoyable to experience: infinite consciousness. In meditation, we begin to experience life beyond the reducing valve, life on its own terms. We become an open-minded witness, as opposed to someone who is always scrambling for a sense of security.

The Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chödrön says, “Scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy.” She describes meditation as a way of stopping the scrambling, of
getting unstuck from the need for security. “The process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery,” she says, “because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality, like changing our DNA. We are undoing a pattern that is not just our pattern. It's the human pattern: we project onto the world a zillion possibilities of attaining resolution. We can have whiter teeth, a weed-free lawn, a strife-free life, a world without embarrassment. We can live happily ever after.”

But of course, we don't live happily after, because just as one problem resolves, another evolves, and there we are again, seeking resolution, thinking we deserve resolution. “We don't deserve resolution,” Pema Chödrön says. “We deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright—an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.” So this is the other “why” of meditation: to relax into the paradoxical, ambiguous, wide-open, unregulated, infinite consciousness that some call God and others do not name at all.

When Maggie asked me to teach her again how to meditate, I did the best I could to rid my instructions of cumbersome words like “paradoxical, ambiguous, wide-open, unregulated, infinite consciousness,” which betray the simple act of meditating. A few days later, I have to pare down my language even more.

Near to my town is a hospital-like facility that houses and treats people who have suffered traumatic injuries to the brain. Some are young—a twenty-year-old construction worker who fell headfirst from a ladder; an aspiring opera singer who wasn't wearing her seatbelt; a high school kid who flew into the side of a boat in a water-skiing accident. Others are older. They sustained brain damage through a stroke or disease or a simple tumble on the sidewalk. Some still can talk and move about unassisted. Their
thinking is foggy and circular, but perhaps they will recover with time and therapy. Others are strapped into chairs and stretchers, wheeled around the center, heads rolling from side to side, unable to communicate.

A friend who works at the center asked me many months ago if I would visit and teach a small group of residents how to meditate. We pick the week between Christmas and New Year's, because it's a slow time for the residents at the Brain Trauma Center, and normally for me too. Except for this year. In the intensity of taking care of Maggie, I neglect to look at my date book, and by the time I remember, it's the very day of my session—too late to cancel.

I have taught meditation hundreds of times to thousands of people—from elected officials in Washington, DC, to inmates in prison, and from rambunctious kindergarteners to AIDS patients close to death. And so I had said yes to the invitation to teach at the Brain Trauma Center without thinking about it too much. The practice of meditation has been a great friend to me—when I am anxious, it calms me; when I am confused, it clarifies; when I am small-minded, it stretches my perspective. I figured that people suffering from brain trauma were probably anxious and confused much of the time. Perhaps meditation could be their friend too. I've sat in retreats with master teachers and been stunned into quietude by their well-chosen words. But more than anything, it's their presence that has coaxed my anxious mind and fearful heart into stillness and peace. And so I would try to do the same for the residents at the center: strip down to my marrow and show up fully and fearlessly as a fellow human.

As I enter the Brain Trauma Center, though, I wonder what I've gotten myself into. Can you teach people to calm the habitual
workings of the brain—the incessant thoughts and unregulated impulses—if their brains have been injured? Meditation is a way of dipping into a deeper form of cognition than the mental gymnastics of everyday thinking. But we use the words and concepts of everyday thinking to teach it. What a conundrum!

At the center, I wait for my friend in the staff lounge and notice this quote from Lilla Watson on the bulletin board: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” That's a beautiful way of describing the best kind of teacher or caretaker. The quote reminds me of when I first began speaking and teaching. I was so nervous before each event I could barely think straight. I was in that jittery state of mind one evening, sitting backstage at a conference where I was to give a talk. A well-known psychiatrist was sitting with me; he was slated to present after I spoke.

“Are you OK?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “I'm terribly nervous.”

“Oh, I used to be nervous before I spoke. But now I'm not.”

“How did that happen?” I asked. “And how can it happen to me? And soon?”

“Well,” the man said, “a couple of years ago, I was sitting backstage, just like you, marinating in my own sweat, and there was a priest or a monk there—a little old guy in a brown robe. He must have noticed how panicky I was. He came over to me and said something I never forgot. It changed everything for me. You wanna hear it?”

I nodded.

“This is what he said. I memorized it. ‘They don't need you to
perform for them so they know how good you are. They need you to love them so they know how good they are.' You want me to write that down?”

I said yes, and I still have that piece of paper. I keep it in my purse and I come across it at the oddest times. Maybe I'll reach for my sunglasses when I'm driving my grandson to school, or I'll fish around for a pen at a meeting at work, and I'll find the scrap of paper and read it. And once again, it will encourage me to step out of my small self and into my big love.
They don't need you to perform for them so they know how good you are. They need you to love them so they know how good they are.

And that is the way I go into the room to work with the thirty people with brain damage who have shown up for my meditation class. In the front row are some of the more highly functioning folks. They sit in chairs and welcome me with smiles and hellos. Behind them, strapped into wheelchairs, are several other residents, some of whom acknowledge me as I walk around saying hello, while others look at the ground. In the back of the room is a man in a stretcher, his legs and one of his hands tightly bound to the stainless steel rails. He makes guttural noises when I speak to him, his free arm jerking around as I stand by his side.

My friend introduces me to the group. I start into my prepared remarks, and almost immediately, one of the residents in a wheelchair raises his hand. Before I can call on him, he begins speaking in a loud voice, complaining about his roommate, who has stolen his clock radio. With his hand still up in the air, he launches into a long story about his missing clock, and also his slippers, and a list of other items.

A young woman in the front row turns around and says, “Shut
up, Larry.” And then she turns back to me and tells me to ignore him. “He tells the same story over and over,” she says.

And sure enough, throughout the hour Larry raises his hand and complains bitterly about his belongings being stolen, followed by sharp “shhhhhhs” fired back at Larry from the other residents, and loud moaning from the man in the stretcher. Each time the ruckus calms down, a white-haired woman stands up and announces that she will be leaving the center to go back to her job in the city after lunch. The same person who told me to ignore Larry tells me to ignore the white-haired woman.

Pretty quickly I realize that the same thing going on in the room is going on in the brains of many of the residents: chaos, bewilderment, anger, sadness. I put aside my stated goal of trying to help these people, and instead come back to the quote on the bulletin board: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

The goal of meditation is liberation. Liberation from the stormy weather occurring between our skull bones. Liberation from the war within. We meditate to become comfortable with whatever is going on in any moment. To engage with reality on its own terms. The best gift I can give the people in the Brain Trauma Center is my own ability to be with them. To be comfortable with them. To be present. All I can do is meet them exactly where they are. And the way to do that is to love them. Which isn't that hard, but it also wasn't my first response. It's never my first response to difficulty. My first response is usually to get things under control. Well, that isn't going to happen here, teaching meditation at the Brain Trauma Center.

I come from behind the teaching podium and stand in front of the group. If my liberation is bound up with the liberation of these people, then the best thing to do is to be one with them, to be a wounded person among other wounded people—in all our splendor and all our brokenness. I stop teaching, and instead I tell the residents about my own life. I get specific. I tell them about Maggie and how I don't know how to help her these days. I don't know what will happen. I ask them for advice, and while some of the answers are unrelated to the questions, others are surprisingly useful and profound. And a couple of times during the conversation, I offer up some tips on calming the inner storm—my storm, their storm, a world of storms—through meditation. A few people in the front row follow the instructions.

At the end of the hour there are hugs and clapping and a few “Happy New Year”s. Then, class is over and everyone shuffles or is wheeled out of the room. On my way out, I stop to connect with the man strapped into the stretcher. I take his free hand and hold it. He stops moaning. We lock eyes.

“Hi,” I say. “Thanks for coming today.”

His eyes search my face, as if he's saying, “Please see me. Please see who I was before I got sick, before my brain went haywire, before I ended up here. I'm still that person; I just don't have the right words and thoughts to dress him up, to make him presentable. But please see him; please respect him; please love him.”

I nod yes to his silent request. I stand at his side, looking into his eyes, nodding my head. The man makes a noise and twists his mouth into what appears to be a smile. I don't know if it's really a smile. I don't know if my presence today has been helpful to him or to any of the residents. But I'll remember what I learned (for
the umpteenth time) at the Brain Trauma Center: that we are souls who have met for a purpose on this mysterious journey; that each of us is here for the other, and all that is required is to strip down to the marrow and to be present. To look into each other's eyes and to search beyond the identity of victim and helper, sick one and well one, weak one and strong one—to look deeper and to find the dignified soul of each being, and to stand in solidarity as a fellow human who is striving to be free.