CHAPTER 1
QUESTION ONE:CAN I SAY, "LIFE SUCKS"?
"THAT SUCKS." CAN YOU EVEN GET THOSE WORDSout of your mouth? A lot of us can't. There was a time when Icouldn't.
The language isn't the issue, of course. It's the struggle tobe honest about just how hard and ugly life can be.
When Dave was diagnosed with brain cancer, he was operatingon 120 patients a month. One of Nashville's go-to guysfor hand surgery, he had just finished a long day of work in theoperating room, and, as he was washing his hands, he experiencedwhat his physicians later described as a "visual seizure."
Suddenly, all he could see were images from earlier in theday and the surgeries he had just completed. He couldn't seehis hands, the washbasin, the water, or the soap dispenser.
The experience didn't last long that first time, so he didn'tthink much of it. It had been a long day. He was operating on alot of people. The surgeries were visually demanding, requiringthe use of lasers and microscopes. There was every reasonto chalk the experience up to eyestrain, and he was going onvacation the next day anyway.
But he was less sure that was the case when, in the middleof the following week, the same thing happened again. Hewas halfway through a run down the beach one morning ofhis vacation, and all he could see were images from earlier inthe day. He couldn't see his feet, his hands, or the sand beneathhim. Worse yet, this time the episode lasted longer.
So, on his return home he contacted a friend of his who is aneurosurgeon. "Bob, I think I need an MRI." Bob obliged, andshortly after the test was completed he had the results in hand.
"Dave, I think that I've discovered the problem. There isa mass pressing against the occipital lobe of your brain, andbecause it's the sight center, the mass is frustrating your brain'sefforts to process images from the optic nerve. So you are gettingthe neural equivalent of delayed feedback."
In that moment Dave's medical career came to end. Heknew that he could no longer safely operate or practice medicine.He informed the chief of surgery, and he hasn't been ableto work a day since. Then he made plans to have his head cutopen.
Call it what you will, that sucks. It sucks for Dave. It sucksfor his family. It sucks for the people he might have helpedwith his knowledge and skills.
But there were a limited number of people in Dave's circleof friends who were willing to acknowledge that things werethat bad. Most of his friends and particularly his friends atchurch said things like, "It's a blessing in disguise, Dave," or,"God's got something bigger for you out there."
Not surprising, Dave doesn't find that kind of languagehelpful at all. In fact, it drove him away from church and pareddown his friendships to a handful of intimate relationships.
The impulse to say comforting things when someone weknow gets a terrible diagnosis is understandable. We want tofind some way of supporting people and making them feel betterwhen they receive gut-wrenching and life-changing news.But there are better ways of doing that than uttering banal,even false, platitudes.
What did Dave need that he wasn't getting from his church?Or, put more positively, what can we do for one another undersuch circumstances?
We can demonstrate our love for others in the painfulplace that life has put them. When we can't bring ourselvesto say, "That sucks," when life really does suck, we fail to loveothers where they are and as they are. Instead we force thosewho are suffering to amend their understanding of what hashappened to them as a precondition of being loved.
"Cheer up."
"Look on the bright side."
"It could have been worse."
"Don't be so negative."
When we say those false, cheery things to suffering people,they run. They tell us as little as possible about their struggles,or they tell us what they think we want to hear. How manytimes have you heard this exchange when it can't possibly betrue?
Question directed to someone who is plainly suffering:"How are you?"
Response from the person who is suffering (and whoknows the person asking the question is not going to be able tosay, "That sucks"): "Oh, I'm fine." (Unspoken thought: "FINE,which is an acronym for Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic, andEmotional, but I don't trust you enough to tell you.")
I've been there. I've used that response. Anyone whobelongs to the fellowship of the suffering has used it.
"Oh, I'm fine."
I reserve the word fine for people who don't really care,for people who don't really want to know how things are, forpeople who are clueless, for people who are going to dispenseHallmark wisdom, and especially for people who want me tochange as a precondition of love.
To be sure, there are times when we need to change theway that we think about a tragedy or loss. Even irreparablelosses require more reflection than is possible at first—if lifegives us enough time to reflect, that is.
When we first receive tragic news, we often panic. Weallow fear to overwhelm us, and we lose perspective. We canbe obsessed with choices that might have yielded a differentresult. We can be strangled by what lies ahead. Or we can beparalyzed by a combination of both fear of the past and dreadof the future. Rightly, I had a spiritual director years ago whopointed out, "If you have one foot in the past and another inthe future, you shit on the present."
But in a lot of cases—and certainly in Dave's case—there isno "other way" to think about loss, not in any way that changesthe fact that he is dying. And even if there were changes hecould make, he can't start there, and neither could we.
You were a surgeon. Now you are not.
You were a contributor. Now you are not.
You were on a journey. Now you are at a dead end.
You weren't going to live forever. Now you aren't
going to live long at all.
You were going to watch your children grow up. Now
you aren't.
You were going to have grandchildren. Now you will
never see them.
When you think about it, frankly, it's stunning how muchloss people are prepared to sweep aside for their own emotionalsecurity with the words, "It's a blessing in disguise."
When life has gone to hell, we need to feel the loss. Weneed to register it. We need to test the weight of the experienceif we are going to get an accurate assessment of what we'velost or where we are. And, eventually, we need to "re-learn theworld"—if we have time (we don't always).
We can't begin to re-learn the world until we've been lovedwhere we are and have been given the space to feel the loss.Most of us can't do that adequately without people who arewilling to say to us, "Man, this is bad. It's really bad. Let me sithere among the ashes with you. Let me survey the destructionwith you"—not as resident experts or know-it-alls who haveall the answers, but as people who love us enough to admitthat this is hard.
To have that space—to feel loved and heard in that space—weneed others to acknowledge that we are truly in a placewhere life sucks.
In that space where we know that we are loved and heardwe can rehearse what has happened. We can examine ourwounds and we can evaluate what the losses really are. Nophysician would try to treat a patient's wounds without anexamination and no one who grieves can re-learn the worldwithout first unpacking the implications of the losses one hassuffered.
When Dave went to medical school, he was not just preparingfor a career in medicine. He was on a journey ofself-discovery.
My father dominated our home, and—thanks to his owninsecurities—he dominated everyone around him. He hadconvictions about what was and was not worth doing in life.He had plans for us. To make matters worse, when we weren'tappreciative in the way he expected or when we deviated fromhis plan, he showed it in ways that were loud and violent.
As a result, when Dave went off to medical school, hewasn't looking just for a place to make a living; he was lookingfor a world that he could call his own—a place where he couldachieve his own goals and chart his own course.
The cancer his physicians discovered was the presentingcause of his grief. But the deeper losses were the thingsthat disappeared in the wake of his illness: the world he hadcrafted, the ways in which he had helped others, his sense ofpersonal worth, and his identity as a physician.
Behind every loss is not just the trauma of the event alone—divorce,unemployment, a fatal diagnosis—there are also whatgrief counselors call the inevitable "secondary" losses. Theproblem, of course, is that the word secondary is completelymisleading. The consequences of a tragedy may be "secondary"in time, but these are the deeper losses, and they are notalways evident at first glance:
• Divorce is difficult, but it may rob us of the certaintythat we are loved. It certainly robs us of our dreams forthe future.
• Unemployment is hard. What is hardest is the wayit deprives us of a sense of security, control, andindependence.
• Illness may rob us of hope or of a means of activelyconnecting with life around us.
• Sexual assault may rob us of that ineffable quality wecall "innocence" and the ability to trust that the worldis not always a malevolent place.
• In Dave's case, illness robbed him of a life that was allhis own. It robbed him of the life he had created.
What you offer a suffering friend when you honestly say,"That sucks," is the space in which your friend can name herlosses. Dave needed months to name what he had lost, and inthe absence of a place to explore those losses, it would havetaken longer. But he had a few friends who gave him the spaceto do that. In a word, we need people who can love us whenwe suffer and can give us space where we can register andexplore our loss.
We also need witnesses to our pain, loss, and grief.Therein lies the difference between love that demands wechange first and "get past" all that grief stuff and love thatbegins by accepting us where we are. The notion of witnessingto someone else's loss, pain, or grief may seem pretty abstractand even unnecessary. The most familiar associations most ofus have with "witnesses," "witnessing," and "testimony" aretied to the courtroom or the church. We talk about witnessingor giving testimony for the benefit of a jury regarding eventsthat others may not have seen, or we talk about the religiousobligation to tell people what God has been doing in our lives.
But witnessing can have an even more primal place in ourlives: witnessing on behalf of someone whose life is in the pitis saying out loud that you have seen that person struggle. It issaying that what that person is experiencing is hard or unfair.It is also witnessing to that which is otherwise unseen—sometimeseven to the one who suffers.
To talk about suffering as "unseen" may sound like nonsense,since we are all surrounded by people who "see" usstruggle on a daily basis. There are doctors, nurses, fellowemployees, relatives, friends, neighbors, and others who aresimply around at the time. Of course they see what is happening—orso we think.
But witnessing to the suffering of another is not that simple,and there is a lot that is missed in that kind of seeing. Forone thing, the experience of suffering is itself isolating andhides a great deal from us as witnesses. Dave spends countlesshours in relative isolation, taking intravenous chemotherapydrugs. Every month he lays in a long, coffinlike tube for a regularMRI. He is essentially alone when he does these things.
Even the people who administer those tests and drugs donot experience what Dave goes through. They probe his bodywith a needle, looking for a place to administer his drugs, butthey have no idea what it is like to be subjected to that experience.Much of what they "see" is seen at arm's length, emotionallyand physically.
The effect that both the cancer and the treatments have hadon Dave's sight visually separates him from the world outside.He can only see half of what is in front of him, and he constantlyscans his surroundings by turning his head. Half ofthe world is always missing thanks to the damage done to thesight center of his brain.
Seizures, too, cut him off from his surroundings, making itimpossible for him to connect with the world around him in anatural, fluid fashion. "Chemo-brain"—the fog-inducing effectthat chemotherapy drugs have on the cognitive process—deepensthat effect, giving him the sense that he is "swimmingin cotton."
Some of that suffering is not "seen" at all, and there is afeeling of "aloneness" when those who love you cannot sharethose experiences. Navigate the world without hearing orwithout seeing everything around you—hammer your brainin ways that rob you of speed and acuity—and you begin toexperience the world in ways that are forever changed.
That is not just true of cancer victims. It is true for thedivorced, the unemployed, and the physically impaired. It istrue for people whose children become addicted to drugs. It istrue for women who suffer domestic abuse. It is true for manypeople in prison.
Even if all of that suffering were "seen," there is still ahuge difference between having someone see you struggleand having someone say that he or she has seen you struggle.When we are "isolated," as the Latin origin of the word suggests,we are "an island." We are cut off and surrounded bybarriers that make contact with others impossible.
To suffer is to be isolated. In fact, there is even physiologicalevidence to suggest that isolation changes the white matterof our brains, disrupting normal brain function. So, the isolatingnature of suffering is not just a metaphor for a spiritual andemotional experience. It is not just about a loss of relationshipswith other people and with the world around us. It has physicaldimensions as well.
To say, "That sucks," is to register or recognize just howbad things are for someone else. To witness to suffering—tosay that we have seen it—is to reach into the isolation, whetherwe share in it or not.
When that happens, whether the unseen struggle is theaftermath of divorce, the loss of employment, a life-destroyingillness, or a crippling injury, that kind of witness has an unexpectedpower to liberate someone who is isolated.
• It eases the loneliness.
• It has the power to break the isolation that the one whosuffers feels.
• It has the power to name kinds of isolation and lossthat the one who suffers may labor with but not yetrecognize.
• It has the power to encourage, whether the sufferinghas a solution or not.
• It has the power to free someone to claim the dignitythat rightly belongs to that person in the middle of astruggle that may be unrelenting.
Just how a lived witness to pain and loss can make thatkind of difference is difficult to describe. There are the inevitablyhuman dimensions of witnessing, I suppose: our needfor companionship, the need to be touched (both literally andfiguratively), and our need to know that someone is payingattention. I am struck by the way the conversations that Davehas with family and friends seem to lift his sense of isolationand despair, even when things have been difficult.
But I think that there is also something fundamentallyspiritual about that kind of witness as well. We Christians arefond of talking about how Jesus understands our struggles.That conviction is based on what we describe as the doctrine ofthe incarnation, and it is all about God taking on human flesh.
As far as Jesus is concerned, that's a one-of-a-kind event.But I'm convinced that in a very real sense, when we are preparedto sit alongside someone else and say, "That sucks,"there is a sense in which we lend our own voice and presenceto the work of incarnation. We are Jesus-with-flesh-on, someonewho says without equivocation, "I understand that this ishard and overwhelming."
Although I understand that dynamic in distinctivelyChristian terms, I don't think for a moment that Christiansare the only ones who can provide that witness to the sufferingof others. Singer-songwriter Marc Cohn, who is Jewish,was sitting in a van with his band after a concert in Denver in2005. An armed gunman stepped in front of the van, evidentlyintending to steal it, and shot Cohn in the head. A battle withpost-traumatic stress and the effect that Hurricane Katrina hadon New Orleans three weeks later, where his wife was servingas a reporter, prompted Cohn to write these words, which heset to music:
When your longest night is coming down
When pieces of you hit the ground
When every word they say about you is a lie
When they put your soul up for review
When they're set on turning every screw
Call on me and I will testify
Let me be your witness.
These words suggest what we can all do for one another when"night is coming down": ease the loneliness, break the powerof isolation, name the loss, encourage someone in a time ofdiscouragement, and free someone to claim the dignity that ishis or hers. That is a lot to give in the middle of an experiencethat may or may not have a solution.
